Archives against the Police

Abstract

L iterary scholars work at the mercy of the print archive, and for centuries, the coloniality of this archive has shaped both our reading practices and the parameters of our received knowledge. Critical scholars of race have particularly had to learn to read archives against the grain, attending to and imagining beyond their limits to fashion new kinds of knowledge and narratives.1 In the present day, in digital space, we are able to accesswhat feels like a boundless stream of textual evidence that, while still mediated by power and capital, falls outside the grasp of immediate state control. Three recent articles address the urgent question of how to read and archive the explicitly oppositional, grassroots body of online communications protesting racist police violence. How do we read and analyze these texts? How might we collect, preserve, and frame them for the future? In “Black Lives and Justicewith the Archive: ACall to Action,”Angela J. Aguayo, Danette Pugh Patton, and Molly Bandonis address “the possibilities and challenges of archiving the abundance of public communication about police violence in an ephemeral, digitally networked world” by reflecting on their experience of gathering videos into a research collection that they’ve named the Sandra Bland Digital Archive.2 In 2015 the tragedy of Sandra Bland’s death in police custody was widely publicized through the circulation on social media of police videos and photographs of her unjust arrest and detainment as well as videos that Bland herself had previously recorded and circulated documenting her criticisms of racist policing practices. The public outcry and call for justice in response to her death included a “tremendous social media response including hashtags, side-by-side photographic analysis, looped video, and other digital discourses.”3 Crucially, Aguayo, Patton, and Bandonis note, the public accessibility of social-media websites enables the “grassroots archiving” of such materials, including, for example, videos created by Black women that present “performances and iterations of words like ‘if I die in police custody’ or #SayHerName.”4Aguayo, Patton, andBandonis argue that these texts “create ‘critical interruptions’ in the normative discourse around police brutality: an apathetic resignation of a white supremacist status quo.”5 As such, the Sandra Bland Digital Archive and other similar projects document an invaluable “stream of resistance to official police reports.”6