Shadow Archives by Jean-Christophe Cloutier is a book about how African-American literature is treated not only by the public, but by archivists. As I read the introduction, I had to keep in mind what it is that archives are for and what archivists do. The archive is meant to preserve books, art, and information for future readers, and archivists are meant to curate what books, art, and information are preserved for future readers. But what books are they meant to curate? And with American archives, libraries, and the publishing industry itself being predominately white, what does that mean for African American literature? To be more specific, which books were picked to be saved? Cloutier writes, ” The paradox here–namely, that future presence is born out of past absence, that anything saved serves only to remind us of all that was lost–forms the archivescape of African American literature.” Not everything could be saved, but when I think about what books I know from pre-contemporary African-American authors, the vast majority of them touch on slavery in some sort of way.

This got me thinking about how non white authors tend to get shoehorned into writing about specific topics. For African American’s it’s slavery, segregation, or racism in general. For Latino authors, in tends to be immigration. For indigenous authors, colonialism. Nonwhite authors are stuck regurgitating the same stories of suffering due to the American audience being majority white. These are the stories that were picked to survive.

Of course, African American authors have written a plethora of stories across genres and types. And people do want these writings to last for the next generation. But, sometimes, writings don’t get processed timely, if at all. Archivists have their list of priorities on when they process their records, and in what order. For some of them, such as the Library at Yale, African-American authors aren’t the priority. Cloutier writes, “Record managers stand as gatekeeping celestial Lutherans on the threshold of life and death, imposing limits on the number of births and decreeing salvation or damnation for those who have come to the end of their days.” It is up to the archivists to go through the records, but archivists are people. People are flawed, and many of them are straight up bad. Without processing these records, without detailing what they’ve been given, no one will know that they’re there. Not only will people not know that the files are their, but the files are accessible. They might be “safe” in the archive, but archives are meant to be used. Yale, and I’m sure other institutions are guilty of this” treated these works as if they were nothing. It’s infuriating, and hopefully, things will change.