Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-first Century: An Introduction

Abstract

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-first Century:An Introduction Laura E. Helton (bio) and Rafia Zafar (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Arturo Schomburg, c. 1896. (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-8851-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99) Who was Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg and why, as we approach the sesquicentennial of his birth, do his life and work still draw us in?1 In the 1980s, coeditor Rafia Zafar, then a graduate student, read for the first time Schomburg's canonical essay, "The Negro Digs Up His Past," a text that has long served as a touchstone statement for scholars in Black studies. His often quoted imperative from that essay, that "the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future" (231), has rallied generations of subsequent researchers and creators. For Zafar, Schomburg was a theorist of the African diasporic archive, an intellectual whose vision made possible her own academic career. Coming to Schomburg in the early 2000s and in the wake of the archival turn, coeditor Laura E. Helton, herself an archivist, saw him as part of a cadre of bibliophiles and librarians who laid the groundwork in the early twentieth century for nearly every [End Page 1] major repository in the United States devoted to Black collections. Schomburg was not the only collector of his era, but through his famous manifesto and his namesake institution, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, his story has become synonymous with the project of Black historical recovery. Schomburg's biography, which traverses Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, New York, and Europe, intrigues scholars from many fields who claim him for overlapping but distinct intellectual pantheons. He has become an icon of the diasporic turn in African American studies and a highly visible figure in Puerto Rican studies. In recent years, he has also been the subject of a children's book, works in the popular press, a play, and a new series of US postage stamps, "Voices of the Harlem Renaissance."2 With this increased attention comes an opportunity to think more expansively about his practices. Beyond his clarion call to act "more collectively, more retrospectively" in "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (231), what was the texture of Schomburg's thought and how did his ideas shift over time? What exactly did he want a Black archive to comprise? And what does his work mean today? In this special issue of African American Review, scholars of the literary, visual, and historiographic archive take up these questions, resituating Schomburg and his legacy for the twenty-first century. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Studio portrait of Arthur Alfonso Schomburg as a young child, c. 1878. (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3588a080-e2fe-0133-9629-00505686a51c) [End Page 2] Born in 1874 in San Juan to a mother from St. Croix, Schomburg grew up with his maternal family in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas and was likely estranged from his father, a Puerto Rican with European roots.3 The educational milieu of his early life reflected a broad tradition of popular and working-class education in the Caribbean that included informal libraries, tabaquero-led study groups, and instructional societies, often started by and for formerly enslaved and free Blacks (Ferrer 116; Hoffnung-Garskof 14–15). Before his migration as a teenager to the US, some of Schomburg's schooling took place in youth clubs and under the guidance of Puerto Rican nationalist historian José Julian Acosta, who was an important influence on Schomburg's thinking.4 In one version of the mutable stories Schomburg conjured when asked why he became such an incurable bibliophile, he told the Pittsburgh Courier that, among the members of these clubs, there was a tendency among the whites and near-whites to point with more pride to the achievements of their white ancestors, than the blacks seemed able to do of their ancestors. Mr. Schomburg noted this and made it a point to study up...