Black Archival Theory and Praxis

Historically, archives have often served purposes of social control and territorial dominance through constructing normative accounts that assert authority about whose and which pasts are collectively significant. But Black people and Black communities have long documented their own histories , pointing to the possibility for archives to create “new histories of who we are (self-representation), who we were (identity construction), and who we want to be in this space (empowerment)” (Burgum, 2020, p. 9). Engaging historically displaced and disenfranchised communities as interpreters and investigators disrupts what counts as real knowledge and allows for a larger reading of archival data into alternative historical narratives – imagining not only what happened in the past, but also what could have been. What, then, are Black archives? What possibilities might they bring to assembling histories and experiences od Black life that are not reducible to presumed and documented experiences of racialized inequality and dispossession? How might we imagine, as Saidiya Hartman (2008) writes, “what cannot be verified…to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance”?This course seeks to answer these and other questions as students navigate claims to authority inherent to archives, and the potential for archives to transcend their role in preserving a normative past and serve as a site of imaginative politics for those whose pasts are not always deemed collectively significant. Our readings and conversations will be organized around several themes, including care, home, refusal, fugitivity, and repair. Through our study of everyday individuals participating in archival acts of observing, recording, collecting, framing, we will build understanding of how social, political, and economic processes and practices of the past continue to shape our lives.