Reading this excerpt of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier was very interesting, and had me thinking deeper about both the politics of archiving and the general public’s perception of archiving. Personally, I would define an archive as a collection of preserved items. While I do think this definition is pretty accurate, it says more about the archiver rather than the people who might use the archive. Cloutier writes “The archive is never an end in itself— otherwise we might as well call it a dumpster— but rather a speculative means to possible futures, including unknowable teleologies guided by unborn hands.” This sentence is extremely heavy, and the strong word choice here shows exactly what an archive is and isn’t.

With the first half of the quote, Clouteir is writing about the physical archive itself. Although ‘dumpster’ is being used negatively, it means that it doesn’t matter where an archive is or who runs it if nobody uses it. A pile of books sitting unused is akin to a dump. If somebody wanted it, it would be read. A preserved, polished piece of trash is still a piece of trash. The goal of writing and bookmaking shouldn’t just be to sit in an archive. The goal, for some, is that the book is important enough that the people reading the book today want people in the future to read it as well. It seems to be a shallow distinction, separating the archive from the archivers to the patrons. But without each cog in the machine, the archive becomes nothing more than a dump. Archivers are ‘speculating’ what these ‘unborn hands’ will want and need. This is where archiving becomes a necessary tool for everyone, yes, but also for marginalized communities. In terms of African American literature, it could be argued that the civil war would have gone slightly differently without the accounts of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, but the way slavery and the civil war is taught would be completely different if their writings weren’t archived. People had to decide that these stories would survive, because they thought that those of us in the future would need them.

And towards the end of the chapter I reflect on my time spent in Special Collections this semester. While the library is an archive, I have only ever used it to read books. Some of them were old books, some were old stories repackaged and republished for the next generation. Courtier has captured how I felt working with what felt more like artifacts than books; ”This is the pledge and promise of shadow archivisim, where the preservation of records anticipates a future where the dream may once again grow young, where the vicissitudes of blackness, the split and fragmented, the delayed and deferred, the incomplete and indecipherable nature of these archives become the message.” For the books that are written languages unreadable, the words stop becoming the message. They were the originally message, but time has passed. The frayed edges of the page tell their own story, and while the archivist has saved them so they could be seen, it’s the job of the people to read them.