“Writing the Impossible”: Black Studies and Critical Archival Praxis. 2020–2021
Reena N. Goldthree, Faculty Convener
This seminar explores approaches to archival research in the field of African American studies. Archives, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, are not passive repositories of historical materials. Rather, the archive as an institution authorizes particular narratives about the past, while simultaneously rendering other narratives as illegitimate or even “unthinkable”. Working at the intersection of African American studies and critical archival studies, we will interrogate the archive as a site of racialized knowledge production and consider how archival sources inform historical and contemporary understandings of Black life. We will wrestle with the limitations of the archive—the silences, excesses, and (mis)representations—while also engaging with recent scholarship that addresses the methodological, theoretical, and ethical challenges of archival research in innovative ways. In doing so, we will reckon with what Saidiya Hartman characterizes as the “task of writing the impossible,” the effort to reconstruct the stories of Black people from fragmentary traces in the official record. Invited presenters for this yearlong seminar include scholars and archivists working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, anthropology, history, political science, African American studies, and digital humanities.
Speakers
Jim Casey and P. Gabrielle Foreman
(This resource is related to the work-in-progress P. Gabrielle Foreman presented during the seminar.)
- Foreman, P. G. "Sankofa Imperatives: Black Women, Digital Methods, and the Archival Turn." Auto/biography Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2023, pp. 423-435.
(This resource is representative of Jim Casey and P. Gabrielle Foreman's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing In The Nineteenth Century by ISBN: 9781469654287Publication Date: 2021This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights.
Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres
(This resource is representative of Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Black British Migrants in Cuba by ISBN: 9781108423465Publication Date: 2018-10-25Black British Migrants in Cuba offers a comprehensive study of migration from the British Caribbean to Cuba in the pre-World War II era, spotlighting an important chapter of the larger trajectory of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Grounded in extensive and rigorous multi-sited research, this book examines the different migration experiences of Jamaican, Leeward, and Windward Islanders, along with the transnational processes of labor recruitment and the local control of workers in the plantation.
Annette Joseph-Gabriel
(This resource is representative of Annette Joseph-Gabriel's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K. "Beyond Tragedy: Black Girlhood in Marlon James’s the Book of Night Women and Evelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infâme." Meridians (Middletown, Conn.), vol. 21, no. 1, 2022, pp. 49-72.
Lorgia García Peña
(This resource is related to the work-in-progress Lorgia García Peña presented during the seminar.)
Translating Blackness by ISBN: 9781478018667Publication Date: 2022-09-23In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation--rather than solely a site of identity--through which we can understand both oppression and resistance.
Jessica Marie Johnson
(This resource is representative of Jessica Marie Johnson's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Wicked Flesh by ISBN: 9780812297249Publication Date: 2020-08-28Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.
Minkah Makalani
(This resource is representative of Minkah Makalani's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
In the Cause of Freedom by ISBN: 9780807835043Publication Date: 2011-11-28In this intellectual history, Minkah Makalani reveals how early-twentieth-century black radicals organized an international movement centered on ending racial oppression, colonialism, class exploitation, and global white supremacy. Focused primarily on two organizations, the Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood, whose members became the first black Communists in the United States, and the International African Service Bureau, the major black anticolonial group in 1930s London, In the Cause of Freedom examines the ideas, initiatives, and networks of interwar black radicals, as well as how they communicated across continents.
Shana L. Redmond
(This resource is related to the work-in-progress Shana L. Redmond presented during the seminar.)
- Redmond, Shana L., "Jubilee: The (Positive) Science of Black Music", in Anna Harwell Celenza (ed.), Music and Human Flourishing (New York, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Mar. 2023.) https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197646748.003.0003.
Matthew J. Smith
(This resource is representative of Matthew J. Smith's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Liberty, fraternity, exile: Haiti and Jamaica after emancipation by ISBN: 1469617994Publication Date: 2014In this moving microhistory of nineteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica, Matthew J. Smith details the intimate connections that illuminate the conjoined histories of both places after slavery. The frequent movement of people between Haiti and Jamaica in the decades following emancipation in the British Caribbean brought the countries into closer contact and influenced discourse about the postemancipation future of the region.
Quito Swan
(This resource is related to the scholarship Quito Swan presented during the seminar.)
Pauulu's Diaspora by ISBN: 9780813057507Publication Date: 2020-04-29Pauulu's Diaspora is a sweeping story of black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, told through the life and work of twentieth-century environmental activist Pauulu Kamarakafego. Challenging U.S.-centered views of Black Power, Quito Swan offers a radically broader perspective, showing how Kamarakafego helped connect liberation efforts of the African diaspora throughout the Global South.
Erica Williams
(This resource is representative of Erica Williams's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Sex Tourism in Bahia by ISBN: 9780252095191Publication Date: 2013-10-30For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. Erica Lorraine Williams explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness.
