Afro-Asian Archives: Preserving and Digitizing Gujarati Sources for Indian Ocean African History.

Historians of Africa have turned to varied and often innovative sources to reconstruct and analyze the continent’s complex pasts. Yet while there has been a veritable renaissance in studies of African documents in the Arabic script in recent years, little attention has been paid to the many South Asian language sources for African history. The Zanzibar National Archives (ZNA) is home to a vast collection of Gujarati contracts, wills, letters, accounts, and newspapers that are yet to be sufficiently cataloged, translated, or analyzed and are increasingly endangered by climate and ink corrosion. The Afro-Asian Archives Project has two main goals: firstly, in collaboration with the ZNA, to catalog, preserve, and digitize this collection; and secondly, to promote knowledge about and access to these and other neglected South-Asian language sources for African history through an online searchable database and informational website. Students involved in the Afro-Asian Archives Project will explore both the practicalities and politics of digitizing endangered archives. How can scholars work to make rare and endangered historical resources more accessible while respecting local ownership? What are the collaborative potentials and pitfalls for digital humanities projects across historically uneven institutional and epistemological landscapes?