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).