Tag Archives: Week 12

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 This, Cloutier argues, is why it is so important to visit special collections and learn to understand the unpublished work of these writers.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.

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.

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.

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.

Week 12: Archival Theory

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The archive is a place for authors to say they were ‘here,’ alive in a certain time in history and creators of work that reflected that exact time and their lived experiences in it. During their life time an author may not be able to publish all or any of their works, who they were, what they thought, disappears a few years after their deaths and cannot be retrieved in the future unless properly archived and saved. Unfortunately, not all works are destined for the archive, many do not get added to archival collections, or if they do, they time to process them is long and waiting. Because of this some authors, particularly African American authors as mentioned by Jean-Christophe Cloutier in, The Lifecycles of Twentieth Century African American Literary Papers, have made their own archives, ones to preserve their works and ideas similar to how any institutional archive might.

Their archives would keeps safe their works and thoughts, sometimes even providing the “train of thought” or work process to develop them by preserving documents besides a finished product. An authors archive even went beyond what an institutional archive would display, they would, “becomes a site where an author’s hidden identities, affiliations, and political ambivalences and fantasies,” could be kept, even if they would typically be determined, “difficult, messy, shameful, or inchoate for public presentation.” (Cloutier, 9-10). When creating their works these authors knew that their books could be published, but had to prepare for the possibility that they would not be archived and preserved as valuable. However instead of accepting that possibility and future those authors followed a “desperately human desire” to “fill that unfillable space” (19), by carving out and ensuring and time proof location and place for their words.

I have thought at times of making my own archive like this as well, collecting and organizing all my saved essays and assignments in folders and boxes for safe keeping. My archive would not be made with the expectation that it would ever end up in a collective archive, but with the hope that if a family member within a coming generation were to ever receive it that I, my work, would be remembered and re-read.