Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2042767
P. Austin
These are the things of which men think, who live; of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War. To this thinking I have only to add a point of view; I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced them-selves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways. For this reason, and this alone, I venture to write again on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2042764
Holly A. V. Smith
I n this quote from Toni Cade Bambara’s novel, The Salt Eaters, Minnie Ransom, the “fabled healer of the district,” asks the novel’s protagonist, Velma, this critical question. This powerful scene echoes themes of individual healing connected to communal wholeness throughout the book, and these themes are also evident in the materials in Bambara’s archival collection. Considering this in the context of Bambara’s own life and work, Black women feminists and writers’ archives give insight into their ideological evolution, personal growth, community involvement, and overall involvement in varied freedom struggles. How do the papers of Black women feminist and writers illustrate individual and collective “wholeness”? How do these collections expand on concepts of care, celebration, and repair? This article explores these questions through a close reading of materials from the papers of Black feminist writers Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde, housed in the Spelman College Archives. It provides a brief overview of how Black feminists and writers have crafted archives of Black women’s lives. This article analyzes how Bambara and Lorde utilized their work to illuminate the experiences of Black people, Black women, and subsequently became archivists of their own experiences and by extension the diverse communities they inhabited. This piece also discusses how Bambara and Lorde’s archives engage the concepts of care, celebration, and repair. Engaging the concepts of care, celebration and repair, this article employs the theoretical framework of radical empathy in the archive and is informed by the author’s personal reflections and professional experience working with Black women’s archival collections.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2043722
Zakiya Collier, Tonia Sutherland
This special issue engages with the social and cultural structures that support and enable Black archival practices. It provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways that the construction and care of Black archives employ various configurations of time and space to imagine conditions of possibility for Black life and Black lives that are “still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.” This special issue imagines the possibilities for naming another archive, another mode through whichwemight view Black lived experiences and Black archival lives, and understand how Black lives have been “lived in spaces of impossibility.” The theme explores how the social meanings—past, present, and future—of Black archival practices get imagined, contested, and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black. To date, these spaces have too often been seen as mutually exclusive. Scholarly engagement with Black archival practice has started to address archival redress and recovery, reparative archives, the Black memory worker, descriptive practices, gaps and vagaries in institutional archives, and the development of alternative Black archival spaces. However, as Black archival practice is considered more carefully, new understandings have begun to emerge from refusal to embodiment. As the contributions in this issue will reveal, the potential and promise of Black archival practice has much more to offer. This issue asks us to consider questions such as: What are Black archives? What are our methods when we don’t have records that document the everyday? How have Black people existed in archives thus far? Aside from the notable revolutionaries and artists, what are other forms of resistance and artistic ways of life are present in the archive? Where will I or do I exist in the archive? And how have Black people been existing and preserving memories and histories outside of the archives? Pushing further into the present and looking to the future, we also ask what the work of Black archival studies will be now in defending those who are subject to overwhelming and gratuitous, narrative and actual, discursive and material death? What will it mean to do what Christina Sharpe calls the “wake work” that necessitates a turn away from political, juridical, philosophical, historical, or other disciplinary solutions to blackness’s “ongoing abjection” toward a project [that] looks instead to current quotidian archival practice “in order to ask what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion?” What does it mean to understand Black archival practice through and in the wake, as “Blackened consciousness?” What does it mean to archive, describe, collect while standing on the knowledge that we are in the afterlife of slavery and our lives are imperiled and devalued? How does it transform our archival
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2042666
Zakiya Collier, Tonia Sutherland
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive at Northeastern University aims to “uncover and make accessible a literary history of the Caribbean written or related by black, enslaved, Creole, indigenous, and/ or colonized people.” Among the archive’s holdings is a seventeenth-century text penned by Richard Ligon, a British royalist exile who spent three years (1647–1650) in Barbados working as a plantation manager. Ligon’s work, a folio with maps and illustrations titled A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, was published in London in 1657. A survey of the natural, social, and economic phenomena Ligon observed during his three-year stay in Barbados, A True and Exact History is exactly as its title purports: it is a history. It is not, however, the history, and it is neither “true” nor “exact.” As a documentary record, Ligon’s work is a first-person narrative; it is a testimonial record of Ligon’s personal experiences, perspectives, and observations. As an archival record, Ligon’s text is more complicated. While it is an important narrative that offers an historical contextualization of British colonial systems in the pre-emancipation Caribbean, it is, at the same time, an act of historical suppression. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes simultaneously records Ligon’s first-person testimony and obfuscates the first-person testimony of others—enslaved Bajan whose own testimonial voices are recorded only through Ligon’s audition. When writing about Bajan funerary and mourning practices, for example, Ligon remarks, “When any of them dye, they dig a grave, and at evening they bury him, clapping and wringing their hands, and making a doleful sound with their voices.” That the “doleful sound” of Bajan mourning laments and death wails —the ritual, rending sounds of keening Black women—can only be heard in the archives through the cool observational analysis of Ligon’s British tongue is indicative of why acts of witnessing and testimony have, over time, become transformative components of Black archival practice. In her monograph, Dispossessed Lives, Marissa Fuentes offers an intimate example of how acts of witnessing transformed her own encounter with the archives. Fuentes recounts seeking complete archival records that would detail the lives of enslaved women. Instead, archival research led her only to fragments of and moments in those lives. Those moments, albeit fleeting, called to her, however, and engendered a desire for recovery. Fuentes sought to listen to the testimony in front of her, bearing witness and responding, in the spirit of call and response. She writes:
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2042762
Sasha Ann Panaram
Two years after Octavia E. Butler died in 2006 due to a stroke, The Huntington Library sent a truck to her home in Pasadena, California and proceeded to cart away her papers. Although Butler had been hesitant about donating her papers, after multiple conversations with Curator of Literary Manuscripts Sara S. “Sue” Hodson, who spotted her at a conference and boldly inquired, “Do you have plans for your papers? The Huntington would be interested,” she gradually embraced the idea of donating her writing to this institution. In 2008, Natalie Russell, then a library assistant at The Huntington and now the Assistant Curator of Literary Collections, was tasked with cataloging Butler’s files. The catch? When she assumed the job, Russell did not have any familiarity with Butler’s writing whatsoever. Russell reflects on her experience of arranging Butler’s manuscripts and miscellany movingly in “Meeting Octavia E. Butler in Her Papers.” In a conversation with Russell at the start of 2021, spurred by my own inability to access Butler’s papers due to the pandemic, she reiterated, as she does in her article, a personal connection—a friendship—that developed with Butler over time as she learned about her life throughout her files. What I findmost instructive about Russell’s reflections on working with Butler’s papers is how she details what factors archivists receive training in when cataloging a writer’s collection. Expected usage, for instance, is taken into account as is time and date of publication. With regards to the grammar of archives, archivists rely on what Russell calls “controlled vocabularies,” which are a “set of terms that ensure uniformity.” Most intriguingly, Russell provides an overview of respect des fonds or,
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2042763
P. L. Sinitiere
On September 19, 1961, Fisk University librarian Arna Bontemps wrote to Shirley Graham Du Bois and let her know the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection had arrived at campus safely and securely. “It will naturally take time to process this important material,” he observed. “But we look forward to it with excitement and pleasure.” The following day Bontemps got to work. He composed a three-page press release about the Du Bois archives describing the scope of the collection and plans for processing it. Bontemps wrote proudly that Fisk had scored an archival victory since at the time many institutions were attempting to obtain Du Bois’s papers. The new Du Bois archive accompanied other major collections at Fisk acquired under Bontemps’ tenure as librarian such as the Charles Chesnutt Papers and the Julius Rosenwald Fund Archives, among others. Bontemps’ press release described the physical presence of the collection as it arrived at Fisk. “The contents include at least six steel files of manuscript material,” containing correspondence and unpublished pieces along with “several large boxes of pamphlets and hard-to-find fugitive publications collected by the scholar over three-quarters of a century, perhaps two thousand books (many of them scarce), and scores of miscellaneous items.” The Du Bois Collection, concluded Bontemps, “forms an impressive basis for research.” Bontemps’ vivid descriptions of the Du Bois papers’ contents and the physical arrangement of the manuscripts themselves presents a captivating entry point to explore an archival history of the Du Bois Collection at Fisk. This article considers Du Bois’s own collecting practices over time in conjunction with historian Herbert Aptheker’s custodial oversight of the materials and writer (and Du Bois’s spouse) Shirley Graham Du Bois’s curatorial arrangement of the manuscripts. It traces the history of Bontemps’ archival labor in obtaining the Du Bois Collection by considering his larger efforts as Fisk’s librarian and as a memory keeper of Black history and culture. Bontemps’ literary luminosity as a Harlem Renaissance writer informed his librarianship as a historian-archivist, a descriptor adapted from literary scholar and Bontemps biographer Kirkland C. Jones. The documentary foundation of his creative writings rooted his work in history; the energy of his collecting efforts at Fisk created a record of his intellectual accomplishments as a librarian. Framing this article as archival history recognizes my disciplinary home as a historian while it names my intellectual indebtedness to archival turns in American historical and literary studies. Following Michelle Caswell, it seeks to both acknowledge archival studies and to converse with the field’s history and scholarship. Most specifically, this essay draws on recent work in Black
1961年9月19日，菲斯克大学图书管理员Arna Bontemps写信给Shirley Graham Du Bois，让她知道W.E.B.Du BoisCollection已经安全抵达校园。“处理这些重要材料自然需要时间，”他说。“但我们怀着激动和愉快的心情期待着它。”第二天，邦坦普斯开始工作。他撰写了一份关于杜波依斯档案的三页新闻稿，描述了藏品的范围和处理计划。邦坦普斯自豪地写道，菲斯克在档案方面取得了胜利，因为当时许多机构都试图获得杜波依s的文件。新的杜波依斯档案馆伴随着邦坦普斯担任图书管理员期间在菲斯克获得的其他主要藏品，如查尔斯·切斯纳特文件馆和朱利叶斯·罗森瓦尔德基金档案馆等。Bontemps的新闻稿描述了藏品到达Fisk时的实物。“内容包括至少六个手稿材料的钢制档案”，其中包含信件和未出版的作品，以及“学者在四分之三个世纪以来收集的几大盒小册子和难以找到的逃亡出版物，可能有两千本书（其中许多书很稀少），以及数十件杂项。”，Bontemps总结道，“为研究奠定了令人印象深刻的基础。”Bontemps对杜波依斯论文内容的生动描述和手稿本身的物理排列，为探索费斯克杜波依斯·收藏馆的档案历史提供了一个迷人的切入点。本文结合历史学家赫伯特·阿普特克对材料的保管监督以及作家（以及杜波依斯的配偶）雪莉·格雷厄姆·杜波依丝对手稿的策展安排，考虑了杜波依s自己长期以来的收藏实践。它追溯了邦坦普斯在获得杜波依斯收藏时的档案工作历史，考虑到他作为菲斯克的图书管理员和黑人历史和文化的记忆守护者所做的更大努力。作为哈莱姆文艺复兴时期的作家，邦坦普斯的文学才华为他作为历史学家档案管理员的图书馆生涯提供了素材，这是一个改编自文学学者和邦坦普斯传记作家柯克兰·C·琼斯的描述词。他创作的纪实基础植根于历史；他在Fisk的收集工作的能量创造了他作为一名图书管理员的智力成就记录。将这篇文章定义为档案史，承认了我作为历史学家的学科归属，同时也指出了我对美国历史和文学研究中档案转变的智力亏欠。继米歇尔·卡斯韦尔之后，它寻求承认档案研究，并与该领域的历史和学术交流。更具体地说，这篇文章借鉴了布莱克最近的作品
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2042765
A. P. Gumbs
I t had taken so long. And I was the first. I had called and emailed archivist Taronda Spencer and assistant archivist Kassandra Ware too many times, but finally the archival papers of the Black lesbian feminist socialist warrior poet mother Audre Lorde were processed and available for scholarly research at Spelman College. I went to Atlanta immediately. I was underwater during those 9am to 5pm days in the archives. Meaning I lost my breath. And I didn’t want to come up for air. I didn’t want to take a break to eat or to respond to any text messages or even to reconnect with my mentors and friends on campus. Under saltwater. I looked thirsty waiting by the door every morning as the staff arrived. I only left at the end of the day out of respect for the fact that the archives staff had other things to do. If not for my gratitude and respect, I would have barricaded myself inside . I ordered photocopies that are now soft, fraying from how many times I’ve touched them. I held Audre Lorde’s journals in my hands and made decisions about my life that I am still growing into. I kept notes that I can barely read now, garbled evidence of fast typing. I remember a lot about that sacred time in the archival sanctuary of gray boxes and book cradles. Off-white ropes, golf pencils and request slips. But there is no question about which was the most memorable moment in my first trip to the Audre Lorde collection. Audre Lorde had thought about her legacy. She knew that her life as one of the first and arguably the most visible and successful out Black lesbian poet ever was historic. Indeed, she had kept everything from her childhood poems to box after box of correspondence and a lifetime of journals. An ivy league trained librarian herself, Lorde had kept her drafts, her writings, other people’s writings, transcripts, syllabi, what people wrote about her, the research that informed her writing, flyers from events and correspondence with the writers and activists she collaborated with around the world. Spelman College had not been slow to collect the work of Audre Lorde. Quite the contrary. Spelman’s first Black woman president Johnetta Cole worked with Lorde very specifically during their years of friendship to make clear to Lorde that her collection was central to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s vision of creating a repository for Black women writers at the premiere college for Black women in the United States. In letters to Lorde and even in her memorial program she emphasized how much it meant to her to have Lorde’s sacred archive held within the reach of the current and future Spelman students she called her “surrogate daughters.” Beverly Guy-Sheftall, founder of the Women’s Research and Resource Center wrote the grant to the Arcus Foundation that allowed the papers to be processed offsite, organized multiple conferences and events celebrating the archive and co-edited a book with Johnetta Cole and Rudolph Byrd that included unpublished speeches by Lorde from the arc
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2007441
M. Kennedy
A multivocal, wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary project, Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals is a conversation that entwines the traditions and discourse of Black abolition and Native decolonization, confronting the genocide and dispossession endemic to European epistemologies and ontologies that continue to subtend academic study writ large and every facet of the West’s socio-economic infrastructure. Both a methodology and a metaphorical neologism playing off of the polysemic nature of the word, the shoal for King, “interrupts and slows themomentum of long-standing...modes and itineraries for theorizing New World violence, social relations, Indigeneity, and Blackness in the Western hemisphere” (2). The shoal acts as a verb and a noun to obstruct the inertia of European epistemology (noun) and reroute (verb) the flows of thought (posthumanism, new materialism, neo-Marxism) currently having a moment across academia and “the studies” (Black studies, queer studies, disability studies, women’s and gender studies). Geologically, the shoal is defined as a naturally forming and partially submerged sandbar near the shores of any other body of water. It is, as King describes, “an accumulation of granular materials (sand, rock, and other materials) that through sedimentation create a... barrier that is difficult to pass” (2). It has also historically been understood, dating back to the eighteenth century, as a verb to “describe how a ship or vessel slows down to navigate a rocky or rough seabed” (3). King’s thesis is that Black and Indigenous thought function as the shoals to “disrupt the movement of modern thought” (11) premised on Enlightenment ideology. She argues that the Western intellectual tradition was constituted by and constitutive of slavery and genocide, and in order to “enable something else to form” (11), that is, divergent ways of being, moving, and speaking that make visible European theory and grammar’s disavowal of its genocidal origin, a transversal re-engagement with Black and Indigenous thought is necessary. In particular, she places Black and Indigenous literary traditions next to each other, noting where novel, disruptive discursive spaces open up—spaces that not only interrupt but reinvent the mytho-poetics of the Enlightenment. Across an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, King puts the works of Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, C. L. R. James, Leslie Silko, and many others into conversation to argue that “conquistador humanism”—the name King gives to the system of thought coming out of Christopher Columbus’ massacre of Indigenous peoples and the inception of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—established the “white, European male” as the human par excellence and all remaining bodies as “Other” and “animalistic.” Such conceptions of the human still influence contemporary modes of thinking, to the detriment of both Black studies and
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