Introduction: The Promise and Possibility of Black Archival Practice

Abstract

This special issue engages with the social and cultural structures that support and enable Black archival practices. It provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways that the construction and care of Black archives employ various configurations of time and space to imagine conditions of possibility for Black life and Black lives that are “still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.” This special issue imagines the possibilities for naming another archive, another mode through whichwemight view Black lived experiences and Black archival lives, and understand how Black lives have been “lived in spaces of impossibility.” The theme explores how the social meanings—past, present, and future—of Black archival practices get imagined, contested, and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black. To date, these spaces have too often been seen as mutually exclusive. Scholarly engagement with Black archival practice has started to address archival redress and recovery, reparative archives, the Black memory worker, descriptive practices, gaps and vagaries in institutional archives, and the development of alternative Black archival spaces. However, as Black archival practice is considered more carefully, new understandings have begun to emerge from refusal to embodiment. As the contributions in this issue will reveal, the potential and promise of Black archival practice has much more to offer. This issue asks us to consider questions such as: What are Black archives? What are our methods when we don’t have records that document the everyday? How have Black people existed in archives thus far? Aside from the notable revolutionaries and artists, what are other forms of resistance and artistic ways of life are present in the archive? Where will I or do I exist in the archive? And how have Black people been existing and preserving memories and histories outside of the archives? Pushing further into the present and looking to the future, we also ask what the work of Black archival studies will be now in defending those who are subject to overwhelming and gratuitous, narrative and actual, discursive and material death? What will it mean to do what Christina Sharpe calls the “wake work” that necessitates a turn away from political, juridical, philosophical, historical, or other disciplinary solutions to blackness’s “ongoing abjection” toward a project [that] looks instead to current quotidian archival practice “in order to ask what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion?” What does it mean to understand Black archival practice through and in the wake, as “Blackened consciousness?” What does it mean to archive, describe, collect while standing on the knowledge that we are in the afterlife of slavery and our lives are imperiled and devalued? How does it transform our archival