In this week’s readings, both Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s Shadow Archives: the lifecycles of African American literature and Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne’s The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book aim to define and clarify the purpose of an archive. In Bode and Osborne’s exploration of an archive, they define qualitative and quantitative methods of approaching archives to help with research in book history. In a qualitative approach, one is parsing through “the many other archival records associated with print culture” and seeing how correspondence, publishers’ records and booksellers’ and library records fit into a book’s history. A quantitative method looks at  “countable quantities: reams of paper, tons of type, print runs, and percentage returns on capital” (225) and things like “print runs, wages, shipments and sales” (226) in order to get a feel for what readership and publishing looked like. Both methods are useful in their contributions to book history, but as with most things have their setbacks, like having to rely on an archive to have all the correspondence of a book or for bias not to be included in the documents read. 

In Cloutier’s exploration of the archive, he writes that “the word archival bespeaks an underlying notion that documents have an afterlife, that they can be put to new, unpredictable uses and form the basis for new interpretive and narrative acts” (Cloutier, 2). Cloutier puts this idea in conversation with African-American literature and studies, saying that, “in part because many African American authors lived with a constant threat of annihilation and in part because of a forced self-reliance, they deliberately developed an archival sensibility whose stakes were tied to both politics and aesthetics, to both group survival and individual legacy” (Cloutier, 9). In this, he points out that African-American authors have had to do the work of preserving their art for future generations and to keep the culture alive. Cloutier then brings in the idea of counter-archiving, which is a method many African-American scholars use to preserve the culture and significant figures who history has or might overlook. This brought back the idea of who gets to dictate what’s significant and why. Throughout history, Black history and culture have been sidelined, yet are arguably the biggest contributors to America’s culture. From music, language, and even humor, Black culture has been prevalent yet underappreciated and not acknowledged to the extent it should be due to America’s want to erase its history of slavery and other atrocities. But, this is changing slowly with the accessibility of the internet and people’s interest in archiving all sorts of information in their own way and sharing that information. As time continues, I hope that archiving minority cultures’ literature becomes less counter-archiving and part of archiving and history.