All About That Archive

Here’s opening essay to the second edition of my newsletter. To see the full newsletter, check out this and other issues here.

Lately, I’m thinking about archives: You know, that “collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people.”  Partly because I recently ordered  Black Futures, the forthcoming book from NY Times writer Jenna Wortham and curator Kimberly Drew.  What they’ve tried to do, with the help of collaborators, is capture and make sense of all the cultural expression that’s happening at this moment.  The wide adoption of social and digital technology–Tweets, posts, memes, video games, the ability to edit audio and video on laptops, etc.–means that we’re all creating our own responses to our lived experiences daily and minute-by-minute.  But what happens once we throw it up on the Web?  The current rate of creation makes it seem like we’re doing nothing but creating digital ephemera that’s gone in an Internet minute, and won’t be around for future generations to make sense of.  And that’s the question that Jenna and Kimberly  ask: How can we preserve what we’re creating so that future generations can consider it?

So while they’re admirably trying to think ahead, there’s likewise a community of Black archivists (broadly called “memory workers”) who are using the archive–both those of their families and the communities they’re in–to fill in the historical gaps.  Doing so, not only provides a sense of closure, but is also a means of personal and group healing.  Today at Weeksville is the second day of Sensing History, a free virtual gathering of those involved in memory work. It’s part of our multi-year effort called The Legacy Project, which explores the many ways the past can help us understand the present.  And then there’s the work of Columbia professor and MacArthur winner Dr. Saidiya Hartman, who blends historical research and invention to explode the biases that negatively framed Black life or erased it from the canon all together.  

The work they’re all doing–Jenna, Kimberly, the memory workers gathered at Weeksville, Dr. Hartman, to name only a few–is that of reclamation.  They’re making sense of lives–their own included–and making legible our presence, our contributions and our citizenship among the human family.

Say yeah yeah.