Black Archive Research Articles

Monster in the Archive

“Monster in the Archive” asks what the presence of a figure with a massive archival presence like James Baldwin does to our understanding of the presumed “absence” or “lack” of Black subjects in American archives. Paying careful attention to Michel Foucault’s observations about archives in “Lives of Infamous Men” as well as Baldwin’s correspondence with his friend, Mary Painter, this article argues that Baldwin’s “exceptionality” forces scholars and archivists to treat his archival presence as monstrous. Moreover, it argues that we need to develop new methods to approach Black archives. Again, following Foucault, the article proposes that we imagine approaching archives through the lens of friendship suggested by Foucault shortly before his death.

The Many Voices of Sissieretta Jones: Opera and the Sonic Necromancy of the Black Phonographic Archive

Abstract: Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933) is perhaps best remembered as one of the first Black opera singers, despite having never performed on the operatic stage. Exploring race and phonography as interlinking technologies of perception underlying and structuring the ability of audiences to perceive black performers, this essay analyzes the multiple Joneses produced through her archive—in reviews, promotional photographs and illustrations, and the absence of her phonographically recorded voice. Through this exploration, I argue that we must resist the drive to embalm the remains of performance in order to move toward a more multiple analysis of Black archives.

The Early Black Printmaker(s) in Ilanga Lase Natal, 1903–1905

Art historians trace the history of printmaking as a creative endeavour among Black people in South Africa to the mid-twentieth century. While these genealogies are valuable, they exclude and are silent on the deep history of printmaking as both an artistic and trade skill within the black press. Using a polyphonic art-historical framing, I tap into the Black archive to demonstrate how printmaking was cultivated as both a creative and a visual communications strategy by Black artists during the early 1900s. By examining printed images published in the Ilanga Lase Natal newspaper from 1903 to 1905, I propose a revised chronology of printmaking as a creative endeavour among Black people. The formative Black printmaking tradition I discuss was enabled by colonial-era multinational pharmaceutical enterprises that commissioned many of the etchings and engravings that appeared. A speculative art-historical approach is used to analyse and interpret the various visualisations of New Africans created by these early Black printmakers.

‘These are large ideals that we hope for’: heritagising the past and present of anti-racist activism in the Black Archives

ABSTRACT This article focuses on The Black Archives (TBA) in Amsterdam, a cultural organisation that is establishing itself as an alternative centre of knowledge production about the legacies of colonialism. It situates TBA’s efforts to recover and produce a lineage of Black Dutch anti-racist activism in the period before and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations. This moment marks a stage where a particular way of doing activism – one that employs practices of memorialisation and heritage-making – begins to gain legitimacy within mainstream public discourse. By critically assessing how TBA is bringing previous campaigns into dialogue with the 2020 protests, this article aims to explore the tensions and contradictions that arise when memories that are not fully sedimented are used as a resource to produce stable, cohesive identities. What kind of politics is made possible by the heritagisation of activism in the present?

Reconsidering the Black Archive: It’s About Time and Black Dance in Canada

It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 serves as an expository reflection on the history of Black dance and performance in Canada. As a scholar, writer, educator, and professional modern and postmodern dance artist, Seika Boye features the Black archive as a central component for understanding the experiences of Black populations in Canada. The exhibition rejects assumptions about Black invisibility and instead offers a way to view Black presence in plain sight. As such, It’s About Time brilliantly features the Black archive through images, artifacts, and public viewings of Black dancers across Canada to highlight the multiplicity of their experiences and contributions to the nation.

“A Meditation Among Drums”: A Black Archive of Wandering at the Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency Exhibit

“A Meditation Among Drums”: A Black Archive of Wandering at the <i>Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency</i> Exhibit

Snapshots as History: The Black Archives Project

Snapshots as History: The Black Archives Project

“The Ballroom is an archive of black people living an Aids epidemic”: narratives about the black archive of prevention

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar as narrativas da Comunidade Ballroom de São Paulo, para situar como as práticas de prevenção combinada ao HIV se dão em pessoas negras LGBTQIAPN+, identificando como as estratégias se conformam, com que elementos e influências, ausências e restrições. Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa no campo da Saúde Coletiva que utiliza entrevistas semiestruturadas com lideranças dessa comunidade para reconstruir as narrativas sobre HIV, abrindo um arquivo negro sobre prevenção. Tal perspectiva, alinhado ao trabalho de Saidiya Hartman pela perspectiva do pensamento negro radical, debruça-se sobre as histórias que não foram e ainda serão contadas: uma forma de imaginar radicalmente o futuro da negridade. Enquanto força analítica, o arquivo negro da prevenção tem a função de reparação, ampliando narrativas pela ótica racial, ocluindo uma história única da epidemia de HIV/Aids.

The Consortium Institutional Archive: A Model for Preserving Memory at a Historically Black Seminary

Institutional archives remain largely a product of affluent, predominately white colleges and universities in the United States. Many schools with limited resources cannot support an archive. The historical structural inequities faced by many HBCUs only compound the difficulty of establishing and maintaining these repositories of institutional memory. The field of archival studies has largely told its history through the lens of white institutions; scholarship engaging historically black archives, especially at HBCUs, remains limited. This paper examines the history of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) and its archives and the ways in which institutional history has been preserved by the ITC over time. The ITC is a federally recognized HBCU consortium of seminaries in Atlanta established in the late 1950s as way to make accredited graduate theological education available to clergy in predominately black Protestant denominations. Informed by research at ITC’s archive, this paper considers the consortium model both as a means of attaining accreditation and a vehicle for facilitating the establishment of institutional archives. The ITC offers an example of collaborative archiving to preserve multiple voices and histories of historically underrepresented institutions and a model of institutional self-publication to preserve and share institutional memory.

Building Transnational Insurgent Black Archives

Building Transnational Insurgent Black Archives

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Black Archives Take Center Stage

Black Archives Take Center Stage

Schomburg's Black Archival Turn: "Racial Integrity" and "The Negro Digs Up His Past"

Schomburg's writing on the archive over the course of his career demonstrates his continued efforts to articulate the project to which he dedicated his life: Black archives. In the same spirit, this essay looks at two of his works on Black archival theory: "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (1925), which espouses a counterarchival imperative rooted in New Negro ideology, and "Racial Integrity" (1913), which introduces a more radical theory of Black archives that better reflects his own collecting philosophy and archival legacy. Reading his distinct theorizations closely, the essay considers how Black archives navigate the tension between material evidence, belonging, and race on their own terms and in their own "turn."

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

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...

Kiyan Williams

Abstract The following is an interview conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward with Kiyan Williams, multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. William's visual art—sculpture and video—on blackness and ecology, dirt and displacement, brings Black trans poetics, aesthetics, and politics to bear on questions of the afterlife of slavery and plantation geographies. Their work also engages Black trans archives and historicity. Here they discuss their work Reflections on Marlon Riggs, Jesse Harris, Black trans archives, their works Meditations on the Making of America and Trash and Treasure, and their engagement with various artistic mediums.

Khawuleza—An Instantiation of the Black Archive

South African history is such that Blackness/Indigeneity were excluded from institutions of knowledge production. Contemporarily, the traditional University is defined as an institution predicated on the abjection of Blackness. This reality neither predetermined the positions and responses, nor presupposed complete/successful erasure of Blackness/Indigeneity owing to exclusion. I contend and detail how theorising, thinking about and through the Fact of Blackness, continue(d)—using the artistic works of Mhlongo, Makeba, Mbulu, and contemporarily, Leomile as examples. Analysing the music of the abovementioned artists, a move rooted in intersectional feminist approaches, will reveal modes of theorising that characterised the artistic expressions that define(d) the country. Theory generation, so construed, necessitates a judicious philosophical consideration if we are to resurrect the Black Archive. I conclude with an introspective question aimed at inspiring similar projects in other traditions that constitute the Black Archive, i.e. African languages and literature, theatre, art practice and theory.

Resurrecting the “Black Archives”: Revisiting Benedict Wallet Vilakazi with a Focus on the Utility and Meaning of African Languages and Literatures in Higher Education

Although viewed (and dismissed) by many as primarily a tool for communication, language (and literature) cannot be understood only in relation to what it communicates. A study of how it is shaped uncovers the social forces that provide its broad and complex template in the acts of reading and writing. This article focuses on the utility and meaning of African languages and literatures in higher education, with Benedict Wallet Vilakazi’s (1906–1947) poetry at the centre. It argues how, by resurrecting “black archives”, in this article epitomised by revisiting the work of one iconic writer and scholar, Vilakazi, we could give further impetus to the prospect of intellectual efforts in African languages. In this context, the article upholds the value and meaning of this scholar while offering perspectives on the saliency of his work for inter alia the meanings and location of African languages and literatures with regard to epistemic diversity, the “transformation” of curricula, tradition versus modernity, gender, the meaning of identity, and the broader humanist project. In essence, therefore, the article suggests that in an academic context, African languages and literatures require a serious engagement with the “implied reader”, “the native subject” and consequently necessitates greater troubling, unsettling in the way we teach, the way we write, and the way we read. It suggests that acts of rereading (albeit preliminary) are an important intervention in the project of the intellectualisation of our discipline.

Resurrecting the Black Archive through the decolonisation of philosophy in South Africa

ABSTRACT While acknowledging the impact of colonial imposition and violence, in this paper, I challenge the notions of epistemicide and linguicide in South Africa as claimed by some decolonial scholars. Using the Black Archive by drawing from S.E.K. Mqhayi’s historical accounts, I argue that to claim linguicide and by extension epistemicide, only perpetuates the erasure of profound Indigenous thinkers such as S.E.K. Mqhayi and W.W. Gqoba. My second move is to showcase how the Black Archive can be used to substantively engage the ontologies of Blackness/Indigeneity in the contemporary university. This move resurrects the Black Archive while constituting the decolonial mission; teaching from a pedagogical predisposition that is locally responsive while simultaneously being globally relevant. I submit that this framework works towards epistemic restitution.

Curriculating from the Black Archive – Marginality as novelty

The Black Archive is constitutive of works of literato such as JT Jabavu, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, the artist Gerard Bhengu, and musicians like Busi Mhlongo. This collective resource, which should play a crucial role in curriculating, compels us to consider two questions when rethinking Philosophy curricula: First, pedagogically, how does the epistemic access that the Black Archive affords our context facilitate justice? Second, and importantly, how does it help up in achieving justice? I, here, answer these questions in three moves. First, I consider certain key propositions; namely that decolonisation facilitates epistemic access, and that epistemic access in turn facilitates justice (historical, epistemic, and social). Second, I demonstrate how these propositions require the Black Archive (in South Africa) in order to be held as valid. I demonstrate this claim in Philosophy using Dumile Feni’s African Guernica, and in Curriculum Studies, through analysing W. W. Gqoba’s Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo. I conclude by prescriptively outlining uses for/of the Black Archive, guarding against misappropriations that derail justice as I treat it, safeguarding this corpus from epistemic arrogance that maintains that knowledge is valid only insofar as it is developed by white scholars.

Black Intellectuals, Black Archives, and a Second American Founding

184 CLA JOURNAL Black Intellectuals, Black Archives, and a Second American Founding Greg Carr “To speak the unspeakable has become an important strategy of resistance. The unspeakable is always, whatever else it is, a political category, a form of censorship. The unspeakable is rendered mute in order to throw a polite silence over contradictions felt as socially unbearable. The voices of the repressed break a silence that respects the sacred, profanes the rituals that propel correct action, unravels the unspoken law of hierarchy, pollutes the codes of purity and threatens language with division. After it is spoken, the unspeakable may be assimilated, but not without new anxieties, new rigors demanded of polite discourse. Such was the case with the Black Aesthetic” (Taylor 5). The color-blind pandemic of COVID-19 has found common ground with America’s perpetual racial pandemic. The country’s natural anti-Black social antibodies, sufficient until now to fend off attempts to infect it with new life as a re-imagined experiment in plurality and equality, are threatened anew with a multiracial, intergenerational, and multi-class general strike against the existing order. This time these antibodies may not be enough to prevent the death of their host, the end of the mythology of the settler colonies-turned-settler state. More even than a Third Reconstruction, what may be emerging from the current viral attack is a Second Founding, this one bereft of the white nationalist anchors of the first. Desperate to hold on to the old ways, policymakers, cultural mythmakers, and corporate owners of the means to profit from it all are making cosmetic concessions—from hastily-arranged webinars on “anti-racism” to market interestdriven adjustments to product branding—hoping to rally their dying hosts for one last extension of their profitable lives before realities of demographics and dissent induce the new birth. Black American “thought leaders” fight to gather coins and fleeting celebrity as white-facing race interpreters in a Battle Royale of the mass commercial mediated public sphere. Everyone else inclined to speak publicly mounts electronic soapboxes, where speaking truth to power is instant and subject to instant surveillance and policing. Contemporary Black academics, more distant from African communities they have interpreted with swelling acuity than at any time in their long American sojourn, are poised to speak, once more, to themselves, their publishers, and their ever-shrinking readership of patrons and fellow-craft. CLA JOURNAL 185 There was a time when American Apartheid separated Africans from open enemies and natural allies in a fashion that required Black thinkers, teachers, organizers, and writers to work openly and more effectively on behalf of the race. The White Redemption followed the dismantling of de jure segregation during the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, this time including the mining of Black communities for serviceable talent in every area from athletics to academics. The twin effect of this siphoning of essential personnel was the weakening of Black institutions and mass movements and the transformation of Black insurgent academic work into white proximate rhetorical posturing. History provides every generation with opportunities to create realities and, in the wake, to narrate its successes and failures in penultimate acts of witness and testament. In the current moment, scholars of African descent can glimpse possibilities of structural transformation in some ways unprecedented in recent history. The capacity to see what might be accomplished must, however, be strengthened by a renewed memory of what was accomplished by previous generations facing even more dire forces and circumstances. During the second White Redemption,1 Black academic memory of previous generations’often heroic triumphs and sacrifices on our collective behalf was amputated in the operating rooms of white academia,the patient’s self-images sutured instead to contemporary popular culture, French poststructuralists and institutional desire for stone and ivy from Cambridge to Palo Alto. After a long season of studied contempt, some of these Black Frankensteins sought to warm themselves at the fires of the formal Black intellectual formations of the American Apartheid era, tended at the time by a shrinking contingent of wise elders and Negro College apprentices. The pages of the College Language Association Journal, like those of the Journal of Negro History and...