Diaspora communities reframe history, one Instagram post at a time


@uyghurcollective, image by Raul Gutierrez, Flickr. Via Rest of World.

Marwan Kaabour is collecting photographs, video clips, and other rare visual media on the Instagram account Takweer, a digital archive with 16,000 followers that maps the intersections of queerness and Arab history. Launched in September 2019, the account spotlights long-forgotten artifacts — a TV appearance of a 1970s Lebanese pop diva; sepia-tone portraits of cross-dressing Egyptian women in the 1920s; prints of the Buraq, an androgynous mythological creature in Islamic tradition.

[…]

[Kelly] Foster puts Instagram archivists in the same classification as Wikipedians editing the open-source encyclopedia and earlier generations of history-focused account creators on Tumblr and Twitter. “Very quickly, you realize that if you aren’t sharing this knowledge, then it simply isn’t represented online.”

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