Lifecycle Archives and Identity

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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.

Making History

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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.

The air we breathe

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Cloutier eloquently demonstrates the conventions of the archive through Wright’s discourse, ” I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo”– this idea demonstrates how African American writers are marginalized and oppressed in darkness, later for their writings to be rediscovered and reinvented. Furthermore, if we deconstruct the concept or the idea of shadow books we are able to observe the amalgamation of works and writings that are composed by African Americans; together, forming a vast collection of invisible books. Intrinsically, the archive transforms and exegetes a different meaning than what we had originally thought– in this instance, the archive is not a static neutral place in which works can be found but one that is shaped by racism and exclusion; therefore, demonstrating that the archive has become a tool for political persecution.

Cloutier also exhibits the lifecycle of literature under Schellenberg framework, “enduring contributions to modern records management is the lifecycle concept, which appears early in the manual”. This lifecycle expands the realm of how literature is created and used, only to be discarded or disposed when not needed. However, because disposing of literature is part of the life cycle it demonstrates that Black archives are being marginalized, or in other words, history is being erased. Rather than putting an end to part of the archive we should not discard it but reinterpret African American literature– in this way, the shadow of the archive takes a different meaning and interpretation. The archive is not being discarded but works as an act of defiance that refuses to adhere to the traditional standards of the lifecycle of literature. It takes on a different meaning than the one we are accustomed to.

Finally, the archive works in a continuum. What this suggests is that when Black literature is rediscovered or reinterpreted it allows for new generations of literary scholars to disseminate and engage with literature in different manners– to engage with the world differently. Preserving material allows it to be in the archive which consequently allows scholars to redefine the present.

Week 12: Scholarly Archives Now

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After reading Jessica Pressman’s excerpts from Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, Dr. Pressman states that “digital images posted to social media now serve that purpose,” revealing how our relationships with books have evolved in the digital age. Books have always been more than just vessels for text. They are extensions of our identities, emotional narratives, and lived lives. What used to be shown through physical books on a shelf is now shared digitally through book photos, reading posts, or online quotes. These digital traces keep us feeling “close” to literature, even as more of our reading and writing happens online.

This idea connects to our time in the Special Collections last Tuesday, where we explored the Larry McCaffery Papers and other literary archives. As we sifted through boxes of physical manuscripts, annotated texts, and personal letters, we examined tangible extensions of Larry McCaffery’s identity. These were marks of McCaffery’s life displayed through various textual forms. Each marginal note, age-stained yellow page, or folded letter carried a personal and material intimacy that evinced the notion of how deeply intertwined books and identity can be. Pressman’s ideas and beliefs make me think about how future archives might capture this same intimacy when so much of our textual engagement now exists digitally. For upcoming generations of scholars and writers, archives may no longer be built around boxes of letters and manuscripts but rather online folders of emails, cloud storage links, or social media feeds.

Anna explained that part of the archiving process already includes this digital shift. She described how the library receives tangible archives from scholars, carefully scans each item, and uploads them into a digital archive database. This process not only preserves the physical materials but also makes them more accessible to future researchers. It also blends the tactile history of literature with the evolving digital landscape. The “bookishness” of today’s academic and literary life may look a little different than it used to. However, it still extends our identities as physical books once did. This shift complicates what it means to be “near” to a book or to literature itself. The digital archive might preserve our identities through a screen instead of paper.

Week 12: The Archives Spoke to Me

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Reading Cloutier’s introduction to Shadow Archives got me thinking about something I’d never really considered before. What happens to a writer’s papers after they die? Honestly, I knew archives existed, but I’d always imagined them as these static, dusty repositories where things just, you know, sit. Reading Cloutier completely flips that idea on its head.

The quote that really stuck with me comes early on, when Cloutier talks about Richard Wright’s Black Boy and how it took decades for the full text to appear. He describes how Wright’s words were “preserved in their creator’s archive—that boxed site of enclosed darkness where words sit poised ready to tell, to march, and to fight for another day” (1). There’s something almost haunting about the way that image is described. These words that are written with great power, just waiting in the dark for someone to find them and bring them back into the light.

What Cloutier calls the “shadow archive” is this whole ecosystem of removed, lost, and delayed texts that keep coming back (hence the boomerang metaphor). It’s not like these texts are gone forever though. They’re circulating in this weird liminal space (sometimes for decades) before they resurface. The fact that Black Boy wasn’t published in full until 1991, more than forty years after Wright died, is kind of crazy to think.

I think what makes this argument so compelling is how it challenges the way we think about literary history. We tend to assume that once a book is published, that’s it. The author’s work is done, the text is fixed. But Cloutier shows how African American literary texts have these complicated lifecycles shaped by censorship, archival politics, and institutional gatekeeping. The archive isn’t neutral. It’s actively shaping what we get to read and when we get to read it.

This also made me wonder, how many other texts are sitting in archives right now, waiting to be “restored?” And who gets to decide when and how they come back? Cloutier’s framework makes it clear that archives aren’t just about preservation. They’re about power, access, and whose stories get told. The boomerang always comes back, but the question is, who’s there to catch it?

Week 12: The Archival Function of a Novel

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In last week’s post, I went on a tangent about an essay that was cited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier in Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature. I’m glad to get to write a second post about this text, so that I can actually write about this text.

What struck me this week was Cloutier’s emphasis on the “archival function” of novels (24). Every novel is a collection of direct quotes from, indirect references to, and vague recollections of all the literature that the author has ever read. A novel archives the spirit of the time and place in which it was written. Both the archivist and the novelist must curate only what is essential from the entire available zeitgeist. Although they may serve different functions, both the archive and the novel are valuable research tools.

Cloutier recounts discourse on whether fiction can fill gaps left by the archive, an argument which relies on the premise that novels are less valuable than archives for scholarly research. My personal experience in the academy (and my life in general) has given me the view that there’s no single objective measure of a medium’s value in academic research. Different disciplines, and different niches within them, will all have their own standards for determining the value of different forms of media used in research. The question of whether fiction can be used in research doesn’t feel like much of a question anymore. Of course it can. Fiction doesn’t just fill gaps. It’s a vital part of history.

Fiction and other forms of creative writing like poetry and creative nonfiction offer individuals the chance to distill their personal histories and libraries into portable, sharable mini-archives. This is valuable work. As Cloutier says, “If a human being’s life can contain Whitmanesque multitudes, then a single literary collection can potentially refashion an entire field’s underlying architecture” (23). One powerful book can force institutional change.

One of Cloutier’s central arguments in Shadow Archives is that there are limits to the powers of the archive as a research tool. Archives are run by people who have biases. Even archives which do their best to limit bias will have physical and financial limitations. However, they have more power and access to resources than individuals. The archival function of an archive is to offer a broad view and a more distant reading of a cultural moment. The archival function of a novel is to offer a unique perspective and a close reading of a cultural moment.

Archivists: The Gatekeepers of History and Literature

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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.

Keeping stories alive

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When I read the introduction of Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, one line really stopped me. It says: “In part because many African American authors lived with a constant threat of annihilation and in part because of a forced self-reliance, they deliberately developed an archival sensibility whose stakes were tied to both politics and aesthetics, to both group survival and individual legacy.” (p.9) 

From my point of view is this a very deep sentence. It’s not something you can just skim past. The idea that people had to build an archive not out of luxury or curiosity, but out of fear of being erased felt both heartbreaking and powerful. It made me think about how fragile memory can be when the world doesn’t want you to exist in it.

What I found most moving was how this “archival sensibility” wasn’t just political but also deeply creative. These writers weren’t only keeping records to survive, they were turning that survival into art. The act of saving letters, manuscripts, or photographs became something beautiful a way of saying we were here, and our stories matter.

The book also describes this process as more like a boomerang than an arrow. I love that image. Instead of moving in one direction, these stories keep coming back, circling through generations, reminding us that history isn’t gone it keeps returning to us, asking to be heard again.

Week 12: Archival Theory

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In “Shadow Archives,” Jean-Christophe Cloutier talks about something he calls the “shadow books,” meaning the stories and writings that were lost, removed, or never finished. I really like this image of shadows because it shows how much of literature and history stays unseen. These “shadow archives,” as he calls them, keep traces of what was forgotten or left out, especially in African American writing.

Cloutier explains how many Black authors had to fight to make sure their work and their stories were not erased. He writes about Richard Wright, who left behind a lot of unpublished and unfinished work that only became known later. I found this really moving. It made me think about how much effort it takes to be remembered and how unfair it is that some voices have to work so hard just to survive in history.

What also stood out to me is Cloutier’s idea of the “lifecycle” of records. He says that archives, like people, have their own lives. They are created, lost, found again, and brought back to life. I love that thought because it makes archives feel like living things, not just boxes full of paper. The title of the introduction, “Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang,” fits perfectly with this. It is like these lost stories keep coming back, even after being gone for so long.

Reading this made me think about how much power archives have. They decide what gets remembered and what disappears. I also thought about how digital archives today might help give space to voices that were ignored before. Maybe technology can make it easier for people to find and share the things that were once hidden.

For me, Cloutier’s idea of the “shadow archive” feels both sad and inspiring. It is sad because it shows how many writers were pushed into the shadows. But it is inspiring because it also shows that their words did not disappear forever. They waited, like echoes, to be found again. I think that is what Cloutier means by the boomerang, that history can return and that the stories that were lost can still find their way back to us.

Shadow Archives: Archival Theory

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The except I read from this book is arguing that archival impulse- on saving texts that we didn’t know needed to be saved- is the invisible Hallmark of 20th century African American literary practice. Seemingly, that the underlying notion of archiving is saying that these texts have another life and/or meaning. I found this argument to be interesting, that archiving is bringing another life and meanings to these texts. As before this class I knew slim to no information about archiving, I have grown a deeper understanding and respect for it. Its not only preserving texts, but also giving them new interpretations and meanings- basically what we did for out midterm projects. But going back to the text… when its discussing one of the first mainstream African American authors- Richard Wright- it discussed how popular his work was but also how archival brought some of it back to life. “Black Boy” for example, restored Wrights underappreciated novel that was called “The Outsider.” Archival brought new meaning the the first text, as well as giving the second the proper recognition that it deserved. So not only is archiving important to preserve the history of books, its also important when thinking about new interpretations and meanings of books- ones that might not have been made before. Parts of the book were taken out or lost in its original form, while archiving it was able to create new meaning and restored parts that were lost. Basically, we had failed to understand the book the first time, but the second time it was restored to what it was supposed to be the entire time. It came out of the shadows.

I also found the “progression of actions-lifestyle method” to be quite interesting when thinking about the text. This cycle includes creation-> capture-> storage and maintenance-> use-> disposal. When thinking in terms of archival this cycle is useful, and it made it easier for me to visualize its process. The idea of an archive being the reason that something truly existed, is fascinating. Archives can bring relevance, historical importance, or help create new interpretations about books, paper, writing, history, and more. I think the idea of archives intrigues me so much because of this, and when thinking about where we might be/not be because of the use of archives. Not only this, but specifically when thinking about African American archives in this way too. “The forensic imagination that informs much of contemporary African American scholarship (re)establishes the authority of collective provenance, conjuring kinship, at its best, allows contemporary black life to imaginatively reclaim irretrievable losses” (pg. 10). I found this quote summed up what stood out to be most in this reading. Archiving has been a massive what that African American works have been (re)established and imagined over time, especially during the New Negro movement and the Black Arts Movement. This reading was really interesting, as I learned more about archiving and also about how it related specifically to African American arts.