Tag Archives: archive

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: 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.

Week 11: Digital Texts “Brought Back to Life”

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In both Katherine Bode and Roger Osborne’s chapter “Book history from the archival record” and Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s introduction to Shadow Archives, the authors reveal that archives are never neutral spaces. Archives are shaped by the cultural values, power structures, and technological conditions of the eras in which books are produced and preserved. Bode and Osborne explain that a book exists far beyond its physical covers, arguing that “no book was ever bound by its covers” (220). By tracing the “book network cycle,” they highlight how the creation and circulation of a text passes through numerous stages and hands including writers, editors, printers, publishers, distributors, collectors, and archivists. Each of these agents plays a role in determining which works are preserved and recognized as culturally significant. Therefore, archives become curated reflections of dominant ideologies.

Cloutier also argues that archives reveal the values and exclusions of their historical moment, especially when examining African American literature. He describes African American archives as “shadow archives,” existing in the margins because mainstream institutions historically excluded or undervalued Black writers and cultural production (12). His metaphor of the archive as a “boomerang” suggests that texts may disappear from view but can return to relevance when cultural interests shift or when scholars retrieve and reinterpret neglected materials. In this way, Cloutier illustrates how archival life cycles are deeply tied to questions of race, access, and institutional power.Both Bode and Roger Osborne’s text and Cloutier’s introduction raise questions about whether “dead” texts can return to life. The idea feels especially relevant in the digital age. I started to think about our last class in the Digital Humanities Center. Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen demonstrates how a work can temporarily “die” and then be brought back to life. For example, when Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen’s software aged out, her work could not be read or shared. However 5 years later,it was revived through technical migration to new platforms. This digital example parallels Cloutier’s boomerang metaphor because texts can fall out of circulation not only due to cultural exclusion but also technology that continues to evolve and update rapidly.

The Archive

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I never viewed books under the framework presented; books as a quantitative and qualitative objective measures–books for me, for the most part, are a vessel of knowledge and entertainment; I have never viewed books as an archive– specifically how archival records interject with different modes of medium– physically and digitally. In this instance the archive is defined or categorized as “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept. Whether in a library museum or an online database”. This allows to not look at records but understand the perplexities of the history and the science behind the book– not merely at the content of the book but as an artifact, as a medium. Echoing Derrida’s scholar take on the archive. Derrida deconstructs the archive, the notion of archiving and scrutinizing a meditation on time and technology– both factors interjecting on how the archive has transmogrified. The archive are not merely process of keeping documents boxed up but demonstrate a relationship between the different modes of inscription and the technological advancements of the time period the records were written. Such processes, laudable yet problematic. As mentioned earlier, qualitative measures analyze books for its content and meaning, exhibiting the relationship between time and values; on the other hand, the quantitative measure seeks to find patterns across literary records– both metrics seek to accomplish to understand the archive. Furthermore, this archive duality demonstrates how digitalization shapes and reconstructs our perception regarding the permeance of objects. It guides our thinking through an “extended meditation… on time and technology”. Just as the archive shift from paper to screen, its contents become widely accessible yet unstable– bouncing between the different modes of medium online. The traditional standard of the archive carries from within its original content matter– annotations, missing pages, highlights; the online archive loses those privileges, yet privileges accessibility and equity– facilitating the process for those who seek it. The archive operates in a spectrum, constantly being redefined as our understanding changes.

Week 11: Close Listening in Archival Silence

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In Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019), Jean-Christophe Cloutier claims that “archivists are the life coaches of civilization’s undead” (12). This image of the archivist as conjurer brought to mind the experiential Gothic pessimism offered by Maisha L. Wester in African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (2012) and Sheri-Marie Harrison in “New Black Gothic” (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018 — warning for graphic descriptions of anti-Black and sexual violence). As Harrison describes, the New Black Gothic represents “an ever-present and visible lineage of violence that accumulates rather than dissipates with the passage of time” — ghosts that never “move on”, wounds that never heal, and archival absences that are never restored. I consider this traumatic temporality alongside Cloutier’s “boomeranging” temporalities of Black scholarship (15) in order to question how we approach violent archival silences.

Cloutier finds that the “forensic imagination that informs much of contemporary African American scholarship (re)establishes the authority of a collective provenance” which can “allo[w] contemporary black life to imaginatively reclaim irretrievable losses” (9). This “collective provenance” or “conjured kinship” is an affective and political orientation “across time reaching back to a common ancestry in Africa and hurled forward into a speculative future” (10). Lives and sites silenced by the archive might be “reclaimed” through archival kinship, but they cannot be “retrieved.” The temporality of the archival absence must be produced by the archivist, situating silence between the rhythms of extant records. (I was led to this thought by Cloutier’s mention of Margo Crawford’s “‘rhythm’ of blackness in time”, 17). It is also possible, however, to consider the “irretrievable” as outside time entirely.

Cloutier identifies a Black “spectral poetics of anticipation that gestates in and through archivism”, “boomeranging” between temporal sites of “release” and “delay” (17). As Cloutier’s work with Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth shows, the “delay” between production and archival is sometimes lengthy — and sometimes indefinite — for Black authors excluded or expelled from the archival canon. The potentiality of Cloutier’s archival model suggests that archival absences might be understood as delays which can find “release” in the imaginings or archivism of kin across time. This might set those who are erased or eradicated from the archive as existing in an atemporal stasis. If the delay is forever, is it still a delay?

Following Wester and Harrison’s rejection of closure, I wonder if we might frame contact with violent archives as a traversal across both temporalities and atemporality. By this I mean that the archival absence — the indefinite delay — by design contains its victims in a vacuum apart from temporality, and thus apart from kinship’s boomeranging revivals. We need a framework for approaching these voids. What would it look like to embody and move through absences in the archive without seeking to restore them? We know that we can read archival silences, and Cloutier shows that speculative potentialities can be imagined across these lesions. I am thinking of a more embodied integration with the atemporality of archival rupture, one which occurs at the site of contact between traumatized archivist and traumatic archive. What in the archival silence is only possible for the listener attuned through shared or inherited trauma to hear? How does this quiet traversal differ from conventional methods of archival and reading?

I am thinking about this approach for my final project, which I will build as part of my graduate thesis on technology, disability, and trauma. I’m wondering if I could critique the “romance of the archive” through a metafictional experiment with bodily datification and documentation, destabilizing the violent archival voice through the very ruptures that it creates. This would build from my framing of cringe culture as a violent archival project which continues historic practices of racist and ableist archival. To follow Carolyn Steedman’s archival future perfect tense (qtd. in Cloutier 17), it is never going to have been acceptable that this violence has been done. Survivors can sit with that reality and, from this vantage, explore it in ways that generate “kinship” and new knowledge. If the archive is “the site where the past changes at every sitting” (31), then we also need to learn how to sit within those sites outside of time.

Edit: I just read Andrea Miller’s chapter, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption”, in Ruha Benjamin’s Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019). Miller open possibilities for exploring the “insensible” in a much clearer way than I have, and I thought I’d share their conclusion here: “Maybe it is in thinking with rather than against the insensible that we can begin to inquire not simply into other futures but also into other, perhaps less recognizable or altogether unrecognizable, presents, politics, and historical archives” (101).

Week 11: Archives as Places of Power

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about bookwork and Carrion’s characterization of the archive as a cemetery for books. This idea is revisited in this week’s reading of Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In the introduction, Cloutier cites Achille Mbembe’s essay, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” for Mbembe’s analogy of the archive as a tool for resuscitation and resurrection of texts. After this reading, we can expand upon the metaphor. An archive isn’t just a cemetery. Archives and cemeteries, rather, are two spaces which serve similar functions in society. They are both places of power, created to heighten the experience and abilities of those within them.

When I went back to get the link for my blog post, I saw that Sierra left a comment I missed when it was posted, which expanded upon the analogy of archive as cemetery. Part of this comment is a refutation:

“Why cemeteries and not memorials, or something else? The idea of cemeteries are to host the dead, but why are books dead? In our interaction with them, do we not make them alive? They are not really dead, because when one person looks at the book they are seeing it through their own lens (societal, religious, political, etc) and it is different for each person.”

Mbembe has some answers for these questions. Memorials are objects of commemoration. Mbembe says that commemoration is, “part of the ritual of forgetting” (24). Memorials serve to help us let go. Cemeteries do hold memorials, such as gravestones, but they also hold the dead themselves. They are haunted. They are places to remember, relive, and revisit as much as they are places to let go and forget.

Archives are comparable to cemeteries because, “fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there” (Mbembe, 19). Archives conserve work produced by those who are now dead. They hold onto work by living authors, saving them for future generations. Books carry information about creatures that have gone extinct. Many physical books in archives are made from the fibers and skins of dead plants and animals. Their existence may be overlooked by many readers, but the archive is still their final resting place. Books are objects of the dead.

The content of the books, however, is in many ways immortal. I think this was Sierra’s main point in the above quote. The codices and the printed text in an archive are alive in that they continue to exist and degrade when not in use. The ideas come to life when they are revisited by the reader. That visitation becomes an impression in the reader’s memory, forever changing both the reader and the idea. A powerful enough memory will not die. Even as it fades from conscious to subconscious, it will continue to influence the reader.

The physical space of the archive is designed to heighten its ability to create a strong memory. They are not just places to access the remnants of the dead, but places to access immortal, perhaps divine, ideas. Mbembe does not just compare archives to cemeteries, but also to places of worship:

“… the physical space of the site of the building, its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms, the organisation of the ‘files’, the labyrinth of corridors, and that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that gives the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there” (Mbembe, 19).

Cloutier explains that these comparisons are based in the conventions of “genre fiction” (Cloutier, 19), but I don’t think that means we can’t also take it seriously.

When I visited the reading room, I felt a genuine sense of religiosity. I had to perform the requisite rituals of filling out forms and checking out books. The priest and acolyte (a trainer and trainee) quietly discussed the esoteric knowledge of proper handling as they set the books up at the tables. The library is generally pretty quiet, but it was extra quiet in the reading room. There was a feeling of being watched, not just by the acolyte at the front desk, but by some higher power that would ensure the safety of the books (or maybe CCTV). I entered through the dome, which always feels a bit like the entrance to a sacred space (even when it’s raining and they have to set up buckets to catch all the drips)(maybe especially then). Although I was looking at a book made of paper towels and cardboard and typos, a book not meant to take itself too seriously, the space elevated the experience. The book had a greater impression on me because of the architecture and aesthetics of the room and the rituals I had to perform to look at them.

Archive Fever

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I was under the impression (wrongfully) that electronic literature was simply e-books or PDFs stored in a digital device; I never made the connection between literature and the capabilities of the electronic device—for example, digital media have hyperlinks and other modes of interaction, creating a new manner in which literature is reproduced through different modes of media. One example that caught my attention was that electronic literature branched out into several forms such as “chatterbots, interactive fiction, novels that take the form of e-mails, SMS messages, or blogs.” There are many forms and genres in which electronic literature is being reproduced—and, as technology evolves, so do these modes and media. I always thought about the relationship we have with literature as a feedback loop—author, word, and text to reader. E-lit challenges and blurs this paradigm by immersing the reader in a different experience, one that cannot be offered by traditional books. By no means am I making a clear distinction that one is superior to the other, but rather highlighting the idea that they both offer a different user experience. In a similar manner, in a previous post I discussed how language is not static or fixed, as it is always changing and adapting, echoing the framework in which e-lit operates—digital media has branched out through all the user participatory interactions, which demonstrate the instability or nonlinearity of this media. Intrinsically, this also demonstrates the ephemerality of electronic media; just as books can be considered outdated as we have culturally shifted to e-book’s and PDF’s, electronic literature can be archived if the software/ web cease to support that particular format– our current tumultuous political climate also influences. The government has erased several online pages that preserved publicly known information, censoring and making works disappear completely– demonstrating the fragility of this mode of media and echoing that we are in a constant state of change. The relationship between media, text and readers have changed and evolved– from time to technology.