Michelle Caswell’s Urgent Archives argues that community archives must move beyond representation and become instruments of liberatory memory work, actively disrupting white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, and other oppressive systems in the present. Her central claim is that archives should not merely recover minoritised histories for inclusion within dominant institutions; they should be activated for resistance, solidarity, and transformation. Grounded in critical archival studies and more than a decade of work with the South Asian American Digital Archive, Caswell contrasts mainstream archives, which often reproduce exclusion through claims of neutrality, with community archives, which openly embrace affect, activism, participation, and care. The Dhillonn home movies and Zain Alam’s remix Lavaan provide a powerful case study: footage of a South Asian American interracial family in 1950s Oklahoma becomes, through artistic activation, a meditation on racism, assimilation, post-9/11 anti-Sikh violence, and the cyclical temporality of oppression. This example shows that records do not simply represent the past; when activated, they can generate political feeling, collective recognition, and a call to action. Caswell therefore shifts archival value from possession to use, from preservation to mobilisation, from symbolic inclusion to structural change. In conclusion, Urgent Archives insists that archives are urgent because oppression is ongoing: memory work must not wait for a distant future, but must intervene now, enabling communities to imagine and enact more just worlds.