Inside the Wasafiri Archive: A Journey into the Future

Last year, Angelique Golding – a PhD student working on the Wasafiri archives – shared an essay examining the illustrious forty-year history of Wasafiri. For her second installment, she revisits the archive to focus on the changing nature of archival materials and what we might gain – or lose – in transitioning from physical to digital.

The small, yellow Post-it notes scattered throughout Wasafiri's archive boxes told me a story far beyond their ephemeral nature. As I discovered while cataloguing the magazine's extensive collection at the British Library, these seemingly insignificant scraps of paper captured the vibrant dialogue, editorial decisions, and intellectual evolution that shaped each issue. They revealed not just what was published, but how and why — offering invaluable insights into the magazine's role in amplifying marginalised literary voices.

For a ‘little magazine’, Wasafiri's physical archive is remarkably substantial: over 219 boxes of correspondence and documents covering issues from 1994−2016 (Issues 19−88), alongside hundreds of books and journals acquired through exchanges with other literary magazines. The collection further includes born-digital items and audiovisual materials, and it was these which prompted me to consider the future of archiving in our increasingly digital world. In my first blog, ‘Inside the Wasafiri Archive: A Little-Known History’, I explored the magazine's background and activist roots. Here, I want to focus on the changing nature of archival materials and what we might gain – or lose – in the digital transition. Those Post-it notes, for instance, revealed fascinating editorial conversations: ‘Is this timely?’, ‘Could this article be in dialogue with the piece on page 20?’ or ‘Perfect for the diaspora issue’. While I could not always identify the handwriting and know who was communicating with who, I could trace how pieces had evolved through multiple readings and revisions. The longer I searched and as my knowledge grew, I could also track how pieces spoke to one other across pages and even issues. This was enlightening, as if I was beginning to decipher some hidden code or language within the magazine.

Today's digital tools enable their own forms of editorial collaboration  — comments in Google Docs, tracked changes in Microsoft Word, and platforms like Notion and Slack, for example, create new possibilities for editorial dialogue. Yet something feels different about these digital exchanges. They're more efficient, certainly, but perhaps less intimate than the written hand, and less revealing of the human thought processes behind publication decisions. Paper Chains: The 40-Year Wasafiri Archive – an exhibition I curated with the support of Wasafiri and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) colleagues, on display in QMUL Mile End Library between September and December last year – worked to showcase Wasafiri’s compelling history and also act as a bridge between these two analogue and digital worlds. By exhibiting physical artefacts alongside digital materials, the show demonstrated how both formats can complement each other. It included digitised commentary and correspondence alongside modern editorial tools, showing how archival practices have evolved while maintaining their essential purpose: preserving the story of how literature and literary concerns published in Wasafiri came into being.

Digital archiving, which began around 2000, has transformed how we preserve and access historical materials. The UK Government's 2009 ‘Archives for the 21st Century’ initiative began the push for comprehensive online access across the country, making archives more accessible nationally and to researchers worldwide. Digital preservation has helped to protect fragile documents, enable full-text searching, and allow simultaneous access by multiple users. Modern collaboration tools can even capture editorial discussions in ways that parallel those old Post-it conversations. But digital archives present their own challenges. They require constant maintenance, risk format obsolescence, and can't always capture the serendipitous discoveries that come from physically handling materials. A Post-it note might catch your eye because of its placement or colour; a digital comment might get lost in a sea of tracked changes and notifications. Wasafiri’s production reflects this evolution. Today, most submissions and editorial discussions happen electronically. While this streamlines the publication process, it raises important questions for future researchers. How will they understand the nuanced decisions behind each issue? What traces will remain of the editorial conversations shaping contemporary literature?

Thinking beyond digitised documents, digital archiving still has some potential to capture the ‘human process’ of physical archiving, as highlighted by academic Rianna Walcott's discussion on non-traditional archival practices, and specifically the role of social media as a form of archiving. Walcott explores how social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook serve as unconventional archives, holding records and narratives that not only reflect the experiences of marginalised communities – especially the Black community – but also enable them to create and manage their own archives. Walcott describes X and Facebook sites such as ‘Black Hair Forum’ and ‘Intersections: All Black Everything’ as sites that function for community building and accountability, where users can engage in what she terms ‘collaborative Black-managed archives’. ‘Black Twitter’ is a prime example of a site where centrality and subjecthood is reclaimed — a site where collective memory and community histories are created, documented, and significantly ensure a place of permanence, often in contrast to traditional archival practices. This contrast often arises when those who make decisions about acquiring materials do not, in most cases, reflect the diversity and range of experiences of marginalised communities. As a consequence, bias can occur in decision-making – which may be as simple as choosing whether to accept or keep something in an institution – about what remains in a collection, how to preserve it, or what resources will be provided to ensure that an archive collection is maintained well.

Walcott argues that there’s no such thing as objectivity in the archive. To her, the documenting of community history (formally and informally) in digital spaces is about taking back control of the archive, in terms of exercising agency over what’s saved, as well as the narratives created around the artefacts and records that do exist. While some of this work is undertaken at a structural level, the digital space quickly and easily provides the opportunity to enable a greater range of voices to be heard and a greater range of materials to be preserved for the future. This form of digital activity might almost replicate the feelings and nuances found in physical archives. Delving through online posts, the way one might rifle through an archive box, and looking back at screenshots and comments that capture and freeze a moment in time could mirror those serendipitous discoveries that come from physically handling materials. That this is possible further highlights the need to preserve curated online communities.

My experiences with the Wasafiri archive suggest that the future of archiving lies not in choosing between physical and digital, but in understanding how each format serves different needs. Physical archives preserve the tactile history of literary production — the marginalia, the extraneous notes, the coffee-stained drafts, the hastily scribbled insights. Digital archives offer accessibility, searchability, and new forms of collaboration and community. As we continue to bridge these two worlds, perhaps the question is not what we lose in the transition to digital but how we can best preserve the human elements of, in Wasafiri’s case, magazine editorial work in whatever format we use. After all, whether it's a Post-it note or a digital comment, what matters most is capturing the conversations that shape our literary heritage as potential blueprints for future writers and editors.

Images from the Wasafiri archive courtesy of the author