The Archive on Its Own: Black Politics, Independent Publishing, andThe Negotiations:

Abstract

A couple of decades have passed since the heyday of African American literature’s canon formation—that period from the 1970s to the 1990s when primary sources were scoured for material that could be excerpted in anthologies, forgotten texts were given a new lease on life through reprints and scholarly editions, and mislaid or previously unknown works were excavated from dusty archives and made public for the first time. These efforts not only established the fact of a long-standing African American literary tradition but also legitimated the professional study of that tradition. It was a time of literary recovery and constitution, a time when demanding academic recognition was the name of the game. Today, several years removed from institutionalization, African American literary studies is witnessing a return to the kind of empirical research that made canon-building possible. The field’s “archival turn” reflects broader shifts in the discipline, including a certain exhaustion with rote or careless theoretical criticism, but it also marks a specific crossroads in how scholars engage with the African American canon. On the one hand are those whose field orientation “no longer requires an immediate political concern or social movement to authorize its lines of critical inquiry.” Such scholars feel encouraged to “return to the archive for the sake of returning to the archive” (Wilson 34)—that is, to treat the repository as an object of study unto itself, not the means to an end. On the other hand are those whose archival practice is positioned to legitimate the field’s extant body of knowledge. While undertaking the laudable effort of bringing new literary works to light, these scholars tend to play the hoary game of recognition—that is, to address the significance of whatever they find in the archive to a satellite of predetermined, canon-conserving interests. Doing so yields immediate legitimation for the archival discovery, but it also limits their understanding of what makes that discovery proper to the archive. Since the archival turn, the field’s most publicized discoveries have been framed in the narrow terms of canonical legitimation. In September 2012, for example, an article in the New York Times announced the discovery