The Archaeological Impulse, Black Feminism, and But Some of Us Are Brave

Abstract:This article places the 1982 anthology But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies within the Black feminist tradition of recovering "lost" literary works by Black women. I introduce the concept of the "archaeological impulse," as a way of theorizing the affective charge that animates this project to search out, re-discover, and share Black women's writing. I then situate the bibliographies, bibliographic essays, and syllabi published in the anthology within this larger project of Black feminism during the 1970s and 1980s and reveal how But Some of Us Are Brave marks the shift of Black feminist criticism from recovery work to original scholarly research and the subsequent flowering of Black feminist literary criticism in the 1980s.