In the first chapter of “Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature”, I saw that the lifecycle of archives and how they are used throughout time can be a representation of giving new life to history and black representation. On page 9, Cloutier writes, “the forensic imagination that informs much of the contemporary African American scholarship (re)establishes the authority of a collective provenance, conjuring a kinship that, at its best, allows contemporary black life to imaginatively reclaim irretrievable losses.” By looking through different archives over time, it can tell us about the political climate and how people were seen at the time depending on how and who curated it. Through past curations, we’re able to examine beliefs that people held over what is deemed important and how much representation Black people had in archiving Black history.

On pages 9 and 10, a different perspective of archivists is shown. Cloutier states that “collecting practices of individual authors offers a unique counterpoint to the dominant forms of institutional thinking under whose shadow black writers lived. The archives become a site where an author’s hidden identities, affiliations, and political ambivalences and fantasies can be hammered out, notably when these things became too difficult, messy, shameful, or inchoate for public presentation.” When we examine individual writers and are able to piece together their whole story, it fills in gaps and helps the history of important writers to move forward and not be forgotten. Looking at writers’ personal histories and documents and not already curated archives can give insight about the political history of Black writers of a specific decade and its relationship to public perception at the time. For example, American writers such as Richard Wright have had likings towards communist ideas but may have not been open about it because of public perception and possible ostracization. Uncovering this and putting into future archives tells the next generation of the relationship between identity, politics, and what led to having certain ideologies.

I liked on page 11, where the lifecycle of an archive is brought up in relation to time. The text says, “It is only at the end of this period of closure that the archived document is as if woken from sleep and returned to life”…“the use of an archive “results in the resuscitation of life, in bringing the dead back to life by reintegrating them in the cycle of time.” Keeping the usage of an archive going over time, even if it diverts from its original purpose, keeps important history, content, and context alive. By remembering documents or archived mementos of a person with new perspectives, it helps represent the relationship that historical identity has when interacting with life.