After reading The Lifecycles of African American Literature, I was very much intrigued because I always wondered how much of people’s work were never stored away or kept. The chapter goes on to tell us that simply pushing away other people’s stories and not archiving them or let alone acknowledge them; creates this erasure of the person as well as their identity, culture and of course, their work. When you purposefully do not include people’s work in archives you are damaging and controlling the flow of information as well as the history. This thought stuck to me so much after reading this quote from the chapter, “We nevertheless journey to black authors’ special collections to “search amongst the fragments of life unlived,” hoping to map out the counterfactuals that history refused to accommodate.”
The quote really stuck out to me because I remember in my journalism class a few years ago we read stories of black authors that got purposefully shadowed by the city they lived in. We also read newspaper stories about how small towns were caught lying and changing the history about how they treated black authors. That class and now this have been the only times that we have ever discussed about black history and stories being shadowed by people. It honestly bothers me a lot about people would misuse the archive to purposefully erase people. I have been more and more interested in archives because I too also believe that when you archive something, you treat it with care because you still believe for it have some life even though we “discard” them because they are “dead”. (2)
Overall, I learned a lot more about shadow archives and what authors were blocked off from society who didn’t get the recognition they truly deserved. Archives are very much important, but it is more important to document the “correct” information and I quote correct because whoever is the one archiving the information; they are labeling it with their bias. All and all, a lot of things to see and bring up to light, so that stories, people and history are not taken away from society.
Great point here: “Archives are very much important, but it is more important to document the “correct” information and I quote correct because whoever is the one archiving the information; they are labeling it with their bias”. Remember your “objective” part of your essay? How does objectivity falter when we think about archives?
Hi Mario. I also had similar thoughts about what works are chosen to be archived, although I went about it from the angle of what was chosen, more so than what was purposefully excluded. I like how you wrote “…you are damaging and controlling the flow of information as well as the history.” Books are history, and in turn, controlling the books is controlling the information. Controlling the information is controlling the story. Without books, there is no proof. An archivist with less than noble intentions, or even just a biased one, directly shapes what books are available for the future generations to read. It’s awful, but some people are awful. It’s a shame that we can’t change the past, be we can be active monitors about how stories are told about people of different races, and how it is that their work is valued.
Hello Mario,
This is great work! I never viewed archives as being biased or not objective– to me, they were merely documents that are stored. I have come to the realization that archives are not static as they operate on a feedback loop and interject with the scholars archiving them.