Memories, legacies and inspiration: the Indian Youth Association and the mobile memories of activism

Geographical attention to social movements and political activism has argued for more expansive, relational and creative understandings of activism. Attention to these relationalities has encouraged a (re) conceptualizing of civic action, foregrounding formations such as networks, assemblages, archipelagos and entanglements. Whilst attending to the varied relations and flows of power, knowledge and material resources that are generative of political action, these conceptualizations have paid less attention to more affective relations, such as memory (and its associated practices) that may also be generative of these more expansive spatial formations. Drawing on empirical material from an archival co-curation project with the Indian Workers’ Association (Great Britain), this paper explores the productive work of memory in shaping the formation and activities of one branch of the association, the Indian Youth Association (IYA), showing how memories and legacies were generative of the organizing praxes, structures and grammars of the IYA, particularly in relation to collective identity and ideological cohesion. For the IYA memory operated as (political) inspiration for diasporic youth in their ‘everyday’ social and political struggles against racism, exclusion and marginalization in Britain, articulating the relevance of memory for conceptualizing the spatialities of civic action.