Collecting race: the archival impulse in twentieth-century black literature and culture
Creators: name: Castroman Soto, Margarita
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: Collecting Race argues that Black writers in the twentieth century theorized Black archives as new ways of being, understanding, and recording the human. Anticipating the archival turn of the 1980s and 1990s, their work addresses the fundamental incompatibility of archival evidence and racial belonging. It suggests that the pressure exerted by the “ideal subject” on race archives overdetermines the archival impulse, which, ultimately, benefits white supremacy. Collecting Race thus troubles the assumption that the absence of a legible archive is necessarily oppressive, and that the presence—or even abundance—of archival knowledge is necessarily resistant. By emphasizing the affective networks in which archives and their subjects traffic, it expands the postcolonial legacy of reading for archival gaps and silences. Likewise, it challenges Derrida’s notion of an archive fever that is universally felt. In conversation with critical race studies, affect theory, and the work of Black feminist scholars like Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, the project argues that archives largely work by and for the overrepresentation of the human as “Man.” And yet, as the legacy of seminal Black archivists and the preponderance of archival representation in the canon of Black literature affirm, Black archives do a different sort of work for a different kind of future.To highlight Black archives in theory and practice, the dissertation’s first two chapters are structured around pairs of writer-archivists. It begins by juxtaposing Arthur A. Schomburg’s 1925 rallying cry to dig up the past with Invisible Man’s burning briefcase archive. Together they elucidate one of the project’s central questions: How do Black subjects negotiate the expectation to collect evidence for their own exclusion? The answer, the project contends, can be found in Black feminist archives, which it explores in more detail in the second chapter that pairs Zora Neale Hurston’s work on folklore and Erna Brodber’s novel inspired by Hurston, Louisiana (1994). Signaling the shift from the pre-archival turn to its post-archival reckoning, Hurston and Brodber theorize Black flesh as a radical repository. Because fleshly knowledge is not the only way to subvert Humanism’s epistemological pressures, the project moves in the third chapter to consider David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Bradley’s novel demonstrates how speculation works as another way to imagine new sites of collective memory. Elaborating on the tropes of flesh and speculation and finding new genres for archival representation, the project concludes by way of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), which marks the transition between Black archives of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Zong! announces that the battle for evidence will not be won on land but rather in the waters of a more fluid understanding of blackness and its subjects. Collecting Race’s coda “Unmanning the Archive,” examines Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M-Archive (2018), which disposes of the ideal subject and leaves “Man” to rot in the archives of the apocalypse.