Hauntings of Absence and Erasure: Black Archival Practices of Property Data

Abstract

This article analyses data at the intersection of digital geographies, critical data studies, and Black studies to bring clarity to relations, differences, and frictions between Black knowledge-making and common data practices. I highlight artist Tonika Lewis Johnson's project, Inequity for Sale, and detail a genealogy of the data she uses in this project to illustrate how she situates these data within the afterlives of slavery. Drawing from Avery Gordon's theorisation of haunting and ideas towards absences and erasures in Black archival practice, I argue that absences in data can lead to narratives that focus on violence as a singular historical event that is isolated from a larger history of violence. I suggest that bringing a curiosity to these absences, rather than dismissing them or framing them as oversights, can help re-situate data within a broader temporal-relational context that brings a sense of Black humanity to the fore.