First-Year Research Sem: Special Collections: Politics, Pleasures and Precarities of Black…

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to certain concepts and contexts surrounding the practice of archiving, and of conducting archival research in the field of Black Studies. We begin with a deceptively simple question—What is an archive?—before delving into the issues of politics and power, ethics and erotics that attend the answer. Given the history of black archiving, its slant relationship to institutions and official narratives, we will take a special interest in archiving as informal and vernacular practice—case studies here include black women’s community archives, Alexander Gumby’s scrapbooks, Questlove’s massive record collection, Marion Stokes’s obsessive recording of news programs, and West Indian grandmothers’ carefully stuffed living rooms. Ever mindful of current thinking in Black Studies around cultural practices of silence, recovery and refusal, we sharpen our awareness of the degree to which the impulse to collect and preserve is often grounded in a profound sense of loss and precarity. In what ways are archives monuments and memorials? What is the relationship of archiving to grief and mourning? Who decided what goes in or out of an archive? Is hoarding a method? What are the affects that attend our archival practice and research? What kinds of worlds are we dreaming inside and outside of the archives we consult and create? Engagements with the work of Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, Marisa Fuentes, Arthur Jafa, Marisa Solomon, M. Nourbese Philip, Tina Campt, Jane Bennett, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, among others, shape our reflections on stuff and feed our collective theorizing about the mattering of black life.