Christophe Cloutier in Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature sees the archive as something active–a creation of a story. He states that “the archive becomes a site where an author’s hidden identities, affiliations, and political ambivalences and fantasies can be hammered out, notably when these things were deemed too difficult, messy shameful, or inchoate for public presentation” (10). In other words, the archive is a living thing which changes depending on the person archiving it. The subjectivity of the archive makes it such that it reflects systems of oppression, thus the importance of focusing on African-American (and other minority) archives.

The various forms or “multiplicity of lives” (12) which an archive can have demonstrate the impossibility for objective storytelling. If the same archive can have various different associations, then it is impossible for it to have an essential story. This is relevant when put in the context of academia when it is in pursuit of truth. As Cloutier states, “archivists guide–or perhaps one should say, manipulate–scholarly practice” (24). The archive denotes the understanding of what is being archived. In other words, in a sense, the archive speaks for itself.