Towards a Method of Black Feminist Archival Bricolage: Memory-Keeping within, beneath and beyond the Archive

Abstract

This essay considers the erasure and visceral laceration of Black women’s herstories from white, masculinized archives, timelines, and cartographies of the past. It simultaneously centers the identity-oriented and historically anchored ways everyday Black women collect, curate, and pass down personal archives for the purpose of intergenerational survival and uplift. In centering the life writings and oral narratives of three Black women in the author’s immediate family, this essay disrupts archival silences around the movements, mobilities, and resistance strategies of everyday Black women; rather, it reveals how Black grandmothers, mothers, and othermothers continue to sustain Black women’s viability and visibility through their work as memory-keepers and family historians. By centering the life herstories of her grandmother, mother, and aunt, the author engages in a process of Black feminist archival bricolage, weaving together fragmented pieces of distinct yet overlapping life narratives that—when put together—tell a more complete and complex story of Black women’s movements, resistances, and archival pedagogies. In doing so, archival fissures are collaboratively challenged in order to reclaim, recover, and recenter the invisible cartographies of everyday Black women.