Week 13: Collection, Capture, and Consent: Connecting Our Learnings with My Research

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Dr. Pressman (Bookishness) and Walter Benjamin (“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”, trans. Harry Zohn) each describe the fetishism of book ownership, in which symbolic value is attached to the book. I am considering the symbolic value of the book (and the bookish body) in the context of surveillance culture, and in particular relation to my research on sexual violence in fandom convention spaces. I use this post as an opportunity to connect some dots between this week’s bookish readings and my research, as I am presenting it at a conference in a few days.

Benjamin writes that, “for a collector, . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects” (67). “Ownership” as intimacy suggests a close spatial proximity between that which is collected and she who collects, a “nearness” which Dr. Pressman shows is remediated through digital book imagery (Bookishness 10, 35). Following Susan Sontag’s situation of U.S. photography traditions in the colonial pursuit of collecting (On Photography), I consider the practice of (often nonconsensual) convention photography to be a means of “collecting” bodies as datified archival “objects.” By this I mean that the nonconsensual photo documents not only the proximal relationship between the bodies of photographer and photographed subject, but also the photographer’s greater liberty to determine this proximity/nearness through the functions of camera technology. Where the body cannot be literally sexually possessed, the body can be remediated into a collectable visual representation of (forced, coerced, or consensual) compliance with being objectified through the act of being photographed.

For convention culture, this means that the visual archive of the convention overwrites the lived experiences which occur around and beyond the moment of photography / compliance / archival. I am using the convention archive as an entry-point into a larger argument about how surveillance and the “collection” of body-data shapes pop culture practices more broadly. As a class, we have found that the book is a body, and that the body is a book. To build from Nick Couldry’s framework in Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), I want to show how rituals of collecting and archiving serve to “categorize” each body as book or as reader – object or subject – and “naturalize” the book/body as representative of this power relationship. The book and the body are encoded with symbolic value. Dr. Pressman describes the use of the book as a status symbol in the U.S., where reading inherits historic conscription to that position which is “Western, Judeo-Christian, middle class or at least instilled with ideals of bourgeois mobility” (Bookishness 32). This status of reader/archiver is exclusive: the reader is made dominant by their potential to be able to read (they do not necessarily need to read, though this practice would do the ritual work of naturalizing inequality).

Dr. Amira Jarmakani’s Digital and Networked Feminisms course has been a rich complement to our Books class this semester, as each course has offered perspectives on these symbolic and political powers which networked actors produce. Readings on dataveillance have led me to consider the ways in which archival and “collection” practices necessarily datify identities and bodies, producing boundaries and value through containment. When used as a tool (to borrow Amber Rahman’s term) to reinforce violent institutional relationships, archival technologies might also act as technologies of surveillance. Birth certificates, state identification documents, and police drone footage – each what Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (2015) call a “surveillance apparatus” –archive individuals as data units in value-encoded systems (“Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens” 60). The “intimacy” or “thereness” of book collection is perhaps violently remediated through these surveillance practices, which datify people into readable data units that can be ‘opened’ for interrogation at any time. Surveillance is a violent form of archival and meaning production which can be understood as an extension of colonial reading and bookishness.

Benjamin describes that “[t]he most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (60). This containment takes on a grim cadence when we consider the collector as a colonial amasser and the archived “individual items” as humans. Jean-Christophe Cloutier more succinctly criticizes this colonial archival framework by critiquing the language of “capture” (Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature 7). My research is also moving towards grappling with collection as an extension of colonialism and surveillance (each key to collection’s obvious grounding in capitalism).

This leads me to my final project for our class, which will mediate the erasure of personhood that is produced when bodies are collected or captured through the colonial “surveillance apparatus” of the medical record. I am deliberating if my project will suggest resistance more obviously, or if its existence will itself serve as critique. Either way, I am inspired by the postcolonial archival critiques which Marlene Manoff describes in “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”, where creators “reinterpret and recontextualize [colonial archival] information and thus call into question the colonial version of events” (16). I hope that my work on surveillance and sexual violence in the convention space can open up these conversations on the politics of materiality in fandom and pop culture studies more broadly.

Bookishness and the Loss of Books

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As I opened this weeks reading, the introduction to Bookishness, the first thing that came to mind was the TV show Blackish. It was about an upper middle class Black family, that felt distanced from the Black culture that the parents had grown up in due to living in a higher income neighborhood. Similarly, the term “bookish” made me think about the distance that’s grown between reading and books. The -ish ending means ‘somewhat’, as if an e-reader is somewhat a book. And it is, I suppose. Dr. Pressman begins the introduction by talking about her “Mac BookBook”, which was a laptop case designed to look like a book. This case is more than just a fun, quirky design, but an ironic expression of how we’ve changed our approach to reading. Pressman writes, “My Mac BookBook displays the book to be a powerful form of residual media actively shaping digital culture.” Residual media– the leftovers from the media of the past– is still effecting the culture that started to leave it behind. But why? We’ve already established how many aspects of the internet were named after physical objects for familiarity, such as the window, desktop, and page. But this is about artistry and expression, not association or functionality.

Pressman puts is plainly: “Bookishness is about maintaining a nearness to books.” Despite using harsh words like “residual media” earlier, there would be no book themed art without people wanting book themed objects. It’s not like people completely stopped reading, although I’m sure there was a dip in overall interest in books with the rise of internet accessibility throughout the 2000s. E-books and audiobooks were not only cheaper than books, they didn’t need to be carried and they didn’t take up space. But e-books are not books. They are electronic books, and they are their own thing. The only similarity between the two is that they feature words to be read. They share the same primary function, yes, but they aren’t the same. So if bookishness is about maintaining a nearness to books, it’s also about mourning the loss of books. Bookishness emerged as a desire for a way to relieve the nostalgia for the book. The book may be obsolete, but that doesn’t not mean it has no value.

We don’t yet live in a world without physical books. I don’t think we ever will, if bookishness is any consolation. There will always be a desire for the physical object. When I see book art, such as sculptures or papercraft, I think of the second life that the object has been blessed with. I think of how much more you can do with the book, what unintended things you could create with it. People don’t want to lose that.

Self-Representation Through Book Acquisition

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In the chapter “Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin indirectly displays books as a commodity, and as it has been discussed in this class plenty, an object to fetishize. As Benjamin unpacks his library, he gives the reader “insight into the relationship of a book collector and his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection” (pg. 59) by recalling the various methods of collecting books and the mental or emotional loops one experiences during these acquisitions. Some of these methods of acquisition mentioned are writing books yourself, going to auctions, and buying from bookshops. 

In this excerpt, Benjamin spends a considerable amount of time talking about the method of getting a book through an auction, and how this method not only requires recognizing the quality or provenance of the book, but also being aware of one’s competitors who will keep “raising his bid – more to assert himself than to acquire the book” (pg. 64). In Benjamin’s lamentation of the auction’s fierce and prideful atmosphere, it is obvious how books have been marked as objects of fetishization and serve as an outward projection of a persona which is explored in Dr. Pressman’s Bookishness. As Dr. Pressman discusses how “bookshelves as a means of self- fashioning and self- representation” through “judging people by the covers of their books” (pg 34) in the context of physical codices and the rise of the digital page, it’s not thoroughly explored how the cost books also contributes to self-representation, as much as it is explored in “Unpacking My Library.” In Benjamin’s excerpt, the cost of the book and how it’s acquired is practically the focus. This act of finding a book, whether that be through auctions, going to bookshops, or travelling around the world as Benjamin has done, becomes less about the book and more about the wealth needed to acquire the book and the stories about retrieving the book. Though Benjamin ends up buying Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers at a secondhand shop, what makes the story riveting is that he was at an auction where he had been outbid, and then learned how to wield a lack of interest in these spaces to get what he wanted. The interesting part is less the book and more the story of getting the book.

The conversation of bookishness is constantly being furthered as the semester progresses, showing me how every aspect of a book and outside of a book can be part of fetishization. It also reminds me that plenty of objects have not gone unfetishized, as “every passion borders on the chaotic” (Benjamin, 60) and is a part of an obsession, whether we acknowledge it or not. 

Final Project Proposal

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For my final project, I plan to examine the undervaluing of women-made work as “lesser scholarship” due to categorization practices and its relegation within the domestic sphere. Historically, much of literary works made by women have been viewed as less technically refined and socially significant as public perception renders these works as “craft” rather than “art.” Such examples like scrapbooks, chapbooks, and women-made journals reveal how the creativity and intellect of female narratives have been excluded from the literary canon as this work was seen as amateur and of the private sphere. With the distinct character of these female voices as often intimate and communal, understanding the richness of their practices and multimodal forms of craft in publication is critical to understanding female authorship, visibility, and cultural contributions that have been barred by gatekeepers.

My project will be completed through a scholarly essay to thoroughly explore this topic and represent the aforementioned research in the most straightforward manner. I will begin by situating female authorship within historic contexts, tracing how the domestic sphere shaped the material form and cultural perspective of female work. With this foundation of women-made texts, I will then explore how such perceptions of women-led genres like journals and magazines are taken as less serious works; however, these publications are vital to literary culture, intersectional scholarship, and the circulation of the female voice. The examples I’d like to observe are journalistic works of the Modernist period as this era signified women assuming more dominant roles within publicly recognized works despite lack of critical acknowledgement and Ms. Magazine, a landmark feminist publication of the 20th century. Across different time periods, these works highlight women’s continued output of literature in journalistic forms which assert intellectual authority and build a communal voice despite being categorized outside of “serious scholarship.” The purpose of this paper will be to acknowledge the scholarship of women that falls outside of the normative canon and suggest a necessity to push the boundaries of what constitutes scholarship for inclusion of all voices through representation by their characteristic mediums.

As a creative portion of this project, I am considering including the new issue of the magazine that I am working on as I feel like this is a modern-day representation of the issues that I am presenting. I have personally edited all the writing within the magazine and designed the page layouts, but I’m not sure if this will be acceptable for submission as it was not made for the direct purpose of this project. Another creative element that I am considering is creating a scrapbook page and taking inspiration from Woman’s World in connecting the medium with my project’s message.

Thesis: By examining the historic roots of female literary scholarship and how such material forms of scrapbooks and chapbooks have been dismissed as “craft” due to confinement within the domestic sphere, this paper observes how historic cultural perceptions and oppression have perpetuated marginalization of later female-produced works. Thus, by acknowledging the significance of these formats as characteristic of female scholarship, the legitimacy of these multimodal formats is vital in correcting absences of women in the literary canon and understanding the representation of their “art” through their own craft which has been excluded by male-defined categories.

Annotated Bibliography

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, editors. Dear Sisters : Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Basic Books, 2000.

Together, Baxandall and Gordon have compiled in their novel broadsides, cartoons, manifestos, and other forms of media that influenced the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Included in this collection is Ms. Magazine which is analyzed by this source as an intellectual hub for female scholarship and gathering for the movement. By analyzing works by women for the betterment of women, this source analyzes the significant ties of medium and message in female scholarship and creates these various modes as worthy forms.

Black, Jennifer M. “Gender in the Academy: Recovering the Hidden History of Women’s Scholarship on Scrapbooks and Albums.” Material Culture, vol. 50, no. 2, 2018, pp. 38–52. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27034312. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.

The article examines what is considered “high” and “low” forms of media and how such work created by men is professional while comparable work by women is deemed amateur. In this source, scrapbooks and albums are studied to argue that men have been hierarchically privileged in academia while women have been pushed to the margins. This source will demonstrate how the view of women’s work as inferior stems from issues of gender rather than medium of materials alone.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979, https://bac-lac.on.worldcat.org/oclc/421550916.

The Madwoman in the Attic is a foundational work in considering female literature as it acknowledges the “double bind” female authors are positioned within as they position themselves against the male literary canon while also needing to rely on it for scholarly acknowledgement. Key female authors including Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë are cited for their works and the maddening they are placed in within the private sphere as the novel’s title suggests. Through characteristics of these female authors’ texts, Gilbert and Gubar point to female literature having distinct traditions outside of a male-defined literary tradition. This work is important to my research in critically acknowledging the hypocrisy in the vitality of female works despite dismissal. Gilbert and Gubar set the foundation for gendered cultural hierarchies dismissing all work by women because of creation by female and that this is not dictated as a result of medium selection.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Media Studies: A Reader: Media Studies, 2019, pp. 124–37.

In considering mass culture, like magazines, Huyssen considers it to be gendered as feminine in the ways that it is devalued against modernist art. This gendering of mass culture is connected historically as genres like romance and drama are associated with women while modernist principles stand for autonomy and intellectual rigor. Despite women being key players in the Modernism movement, their lack of recognition reflects modernism’s roots in misogyny and elitism as illustrated by its fears of commodification into popular culture and falling outside of “true” art. Huyssen’s argument that modernism’s aesthetic can not be separated from gender politics helps illustrate the devaluation of women in production.

Jordan, Tessa, and Michelle Meagher. “Introduction: Feminist Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 93–104. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26528615. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.

This article examines feminist periodicals through the lens of scholarship with the aim of examining how “print culture tell[s] us about feminism’s past(s), its present articulations, and its future aspirations” (Jordan and Meagher). In defining feminist print culture, this work includes zines, periodicals, feminist presses, scholarly periodicals, popular periodicals, textbooks, and blogs to understand how these sources expanded feminism politically and culturally. Utilizing this article will be beneficial in my examination of 20th and modern day female publications as sites of scholarship.

Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History. 1st ed., University Press of Kentucky, 1995. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jcxv. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.

Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History acknowledges the work of women in the Modernist literary movement and the critical underexamination of their labor. Citing many female contributors and the “little” magazines they worked on, Marek gives credit to these women as being guiding hands in pushing key authors of this period, like Ezra Pound. This novel restores women’s editorial effort in literary history and challenges narratives of these women as “only” editors and not influential contributors to the movement, creativity, and history. In relation to my work, this source confirms the marginalization of women even in periodical culture due to gendered separations rather than effort. This reinforces my work to establish women as characteristic to the publications they work on in adding to what is culturally recognized as legitimate scholarship 

Rawle, Graham. Woman’s World : A Novel. First Counterpoint edition., Counterpoint, 2008.

Woman’s World is a mixed media novel as Rawle took 40,000 fragmented words sourced from women’s magazines to create a narrative which reflects on the female experience of fragmentation and how society views women. This work is a powerful piece as it legitimizes women magazines as the novel is constructed by such material and the subject of the novel, Norma, compares her life to these magazines that are said to be made for her. Woman’s World exemplifies why multimodal work by women deserves space within the canon as a form or scholarship that pushes creativity and women’s stories to combat the rigidity of genres that consequently marginalize.

Senchyne, Jonathan. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.

Senchyne’s novel is the piece that inspired my research as I was interested in how women in the home produced writing. In his book, Senchyne looks at the earliest form of paper production and what materials groups who did not have access to paper would use to write. In relation to women, textile workers would weave cloth and housewives would save rags. This archival evidence contains work by many lesser-known figures, many of which were women, and sets forth a new perspective on literary periodization founded on materiality. In this look of paper, the page is seen as political in its relation to gender, labor, and race access.

Final Project Proposal

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Moby Dick by Herman Melville is a foundational work of the American canon that has been read, reread, and taught for decades now. It is a timeless narrative that explores transcendentalism, class, power, religion, and the natural world while also questioning what it means to be educated, American, and even human. Most importantly, it’s a text about the art of reading, how to read, and the process of reading the world around you. Ishmael models this form of reading throughout the novel, not only by observing people and animals, but also by treating the world itself as a text, reading the markings on Queequeg’s body and the engravings on the whale’s back. Thus insinuating that books are not the only way to read and learn, and that knowledge comes in many forms. 

This led me to question: Does form affect content? Or, in other words, does the medium through which information is delivered shape the way we comprehend and emotionally engage with it? In this scholarly analysis, I will be interrogating different textual media of the same novel, Moby Dick, to examine their scale, interface, design choices, and how these all work together to tell their own story. To do this, I will be investigating a limited edition Arion Press artist book, a classic codex, and a PDF online version, exploring how these adaptations affect my reading experience, emotional response, and absorption of the text.

Bookishness

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When reading Bookishness, I was shocked with how I started to remember this fetishization of the book as a physical object. I remember when I was younger I had an obsession with the physical object of a book. I had to hold/read it a certain way so it wasn’t damaged, I wouldn’t let people borrow my beloved books, I had a book stamp that printed my name into every book I owned, and I would even pack my books a certain way on a road trip to ensure they were not damaged. I can think of so many other absurd examples of my own relationship to bookishness back then, but none of these things apply to my today as I write and fold all the pages in my books- coffee stains and all. I wonder what changed in my bookishness, could be a lot of things, but it’s interesting to read this book in context of thinking of my own bookishness actions. Although I was aware about these aspects of bookishness and the obsession with the object, I had never thought about it in the context of increasing digitization.”So what happens when the book get digitized and bookish culture goes digital- when the word ‘book’ may or may not refer to a material object?” (Pressman, 3). This question highlights the transition from bookishness being physical and now digital- something 12 year old me would not understand. Bookishness is in the physicality of the book, but what happens when we no longer have that? These ideas are being reimagined, and I can see how my own relationship with it has changed over time as books have become digitized. I read on a kindle almost every night before bed, but 6 years ago I refused to read on a kindle as I felt I was betraying my physical books- Bookishness.

When I continued with this reading I also found it fascinating when reading about the Mac BookBook. “My Mac BookBook displays the book to be a powerful form of residual media actively shaping digital culture” (Pressman 7). I found this idea of a Mac BookBook the epitome of Bookishness itself: a digital device pretending to be a physical book. Not only does this device make a book appear to be something its not, but it shows something that is no longer there. I found this very fascinating and also shocking. The aesthetic of the book went so far, you wonder why it was changed in the first place. It makes me think that people need change but are also afraid of it- as they hold on to the physicality of the book even when the Macbook was present. Bookishness is more than an aesthetic, its also a lifestyle, as I discussed before I was a part of this before I even knew it. The amount of bookishness themed things I owned: book stamps, book earrings, book t-shirts, etc. I was matching this bookishness of wanting to be near the physicality of the book but I did not even realize or know why- I am not sure I know now. The materiality doesn’t change the content: the words in the book are still the same. But at the same time the materiality of the book feels like its a part of its content.

Week 13: Unpacking

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Completing our final reading of the semester, I couldn’t help but reflect on the aspect of humanity that exists in the creation and keeping of books. In Walter Benjamin’s reflection of books and the collecting of them in “Unpacking my Library,” he also alludes to the significance of owner to object and how books exist nostalgia and memory. This is described, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories” (Benjamin 60). By situating the collection in memory, it becomes not a place for accumulation, but rooted in emotional engagement with the past. Though from a scholarly perspective the archive is often revered as a site of self, personal collections extend this ideal to present these collections as a site of self- of the things we love, our fears, the stories we find self in, etc. 

Books have meaning because of the worth we give them. Benjamin shares this by wisely sharing the fate of a book lies with its owner which may give it a new life. Owning books, therefore, is not a passive experience as the significance of books is granted through personal contexts. 

The last time I visited home, I took notice of an old children’s book, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, residing on the counter of my family home. As my siblings and I are now all adults and there are no grandchildren in the family, I asked my mom why this had been taken out from wherever she stored books. To this, she told me that when she was babysitting a neighbor’s kid for the evening, she had read this book, the copy being an original print from her childhood and the same one that her mom read to her. As I watched guilt play out on her face, she told me the little girl she was watching had asked to keep the book but that she couldn’t part with it. At fifty is my mom often reading The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse? No, but her experience of emotional attachment towards this book and having a sentimentality towards keeping it in her collection illustrates Benjamin’s argument that books gain value through the person who owns them. To most, this book, worn and weathered, probably is worth nothing, but to my mom, that book connects her to her past and, thus, herself. This is the beauty of the “chaos of memories”– though cliche, one book owner trash is a collector’s treasure.

P.S. For anyone wondering, my mom bought the little girl her own copy of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse to enjoy. Thus, a new collection was born and books live on.

What is Lost and What is Unseen

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When I taught ECL 220, I had a section of the class devoted to understanding the Great Migration, where we looked at Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and other Black authors of the early half of the twentieth century, how they became voice for a generation of Americans who were systemically denied one. However, it became apparent when I was preparing for this section of the course that by only analyzing the written word of Black Americans and how they experienced the Great Migration, we would be continuing to turn a blind eye to many others who never had the opportunity to put their experiences down in prose. I think this is a critical misstep to avoid when considering the literary canon in regards to Black authors.

In Shadow Archives, Cloutier states that Kevin Young “proposes a triadic taxonomy of ‘shadow books’: the unwritten, the removed, and the lost He suggests that the legion books by African American authors that ‘fail to be written’ symbolize ‘ the life denied [them], the black literature denied existence.'” This, Cloutier argues, is why it is so important to visit special collections and learn to understand the unpublished work of these writers. However, I think that, particularly for the time period, it is important to focus on other aspects of storytelling, particularly music.

For Black Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and today), access to the written word was very difficult to come by, especially in the Jim Crow South. As a result, we have very little literature from this time, from this place. Richard Wright is one of the rare exceptions to this and had he not moved away from the South we may never have gotten Native Son or Black Boy.

When we look at the archives of these Black authors, we must also wonder what was not included in the archive, or what was destroyed, and we must consider all of Black literature from the time period through this lens. The fixity of the book also lends its contents a fragility. A book can be burned, can be shredded, can be thrown in the river, so even for those lucky enough to successfully learn how to read and write in a world that told them they should not, their words were always under threat.

With music, especially the blues during this time period, there is an ability to circumvent these policies and threats. Music, unlike the book or the written word, is very difficult to regulate. Black storytellers of the time used this to accomplish the fixity that the book promised white and educated members of the society. Lead Belly, an infamous blues artist, was the first to record “Midnight Special” and “Cotton Fields,” songs he heard while in prison in Arkansas, which would later both be covered by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Without Lead Belly’s recording of these songs, they would likely be lost. Much of what transpired during the time of the Great Migration, particularly in the South, would be lost without being transcribed in song. The victims of the worst racism were often the poor and uneducated. They did not have the same opportunities to move to places like Harlem and Chicago. RL Burnside wrote songs on the porches of his Mississippi homes, playing in juke joints not much bigger than a chicken coop. Blind Willie Johnson, who was blinded by his stepmother throwing lye into his eyes, spent most of his life homeless and in abject poverty, but his “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” was included on the Voyager spacecraft to best exemplify the human emotion of loneliness to extraterrestrial life.

The point is, that when we look at the special collections of Black authors of this time, yes we must consider how their writing was shunned and ostracized by the literary world, as Cloutier explores, but we must also consider the lives of the even lesser privileged among the Black community, which, more often than not, means the experiences of people from the South. And so to properly consider the “literature” of the time, we must also consider the oral storytelling present in these communities and those that came before, where stories were passed from generation to generation in slaves’ quarters, often retellings of tales handed down from passages across the Atlantic in the hull of slave ships, often things that had been handed down from a more ancient tradition in Africa, where these stories would be told more as performance, often accompanied with stringed instruments and drums, following rhythms that, over time, would persist all the way until the advent of the blues in America some centuries later, where these chords would intermix with those of poor white people in Appalachia during front porch sessions, ultimately giving us country music and rock and roll and hip hop.

We think of the book as fixed, but we cannot ignore its obvious shortcomings in some areas, especially when a people who have been denied access and denied a say in the world are trying to make their voices heard. Fixity can be lost, and to fill in the gaps we must look around and listen.

(Got a little confused on the reading assignment for this week, so I’m uploading late.)

The Shadow Archives

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I found the introduction of “Shadow Archives,” by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, to be extremely intriguing because it discusses the concept of ‘shadow books,’ which are works that are either forgotten, discarded, removed, or never published. Cloutier places special emphasis on the importance of these works and the preservation needed for them. On page 2, Cloutier writes, “the preservation of the removed is precisely the condition which genitor criticism depends: the alternative versions and abandoned drafts retroactively cast their shadow back upon the maimed books that survived. By disrupting textual stability, special collections further encourage “a willingness to recognize the unfinished” as a condition of the literary– not only what has been removed but also what the removed may one day inspire.” These shadow books are a crucial aspect of the literary world because they offer insight into unknown stories and allow people to gather more information and context surrounding the work. In this introduction, Cloutier discusses Richard Wright’s Black Boy, a book that had been heavily edited or had text removed. Years later, it was republished with notes from the author and a ‘restored text’. With this updated version, Black Boy has become a staple in African American literature. Imagine what lessons, ideas, and opinions could have been lost without that revised edition. Cloutier’s chapter provokes the question of what can be done about lost media and the importance of trying to preserve it. While it may not seem like much at the time of publishing, some works need to be processed with time. Richard Wright, along with countless other authors are recognized posthumously through their work and the resurfaced shadow books. The preservation of these shadow books bring more awareness to the author, publisher, and the ‘invisible labor’ that Cloutier mentions. in the article, Kevin Young states that he became a collector “to save what we didn’t even know needed saving.” This statement really stuck out to me since we live in a time where so many pieces of work are discarded or ignored. Sometimes there is just no time to view it. Despite that, it doesn’t lessen the work and becomes something worth saving. Often items are ignored when it comes to archives so it is important to be aware of what is saved and recorded while other material is lost or ignored. This circles back to the power of an archivist and collector. They are able to pick and choose what they want and exert power over what they deem worthy to be collected. Shadow books fight against this and prove that awareness is always shifting.

Shadow Archives

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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.