2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This roundtable focuses on the practice of the history of black women, highlighting the methodological concerns that arise at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in archives of the 17^th through 20^th centuries. Our comments focus on the opportunities, limits, and challenges presented by the archives of African American women’s history, as well as contingent approaches to the same.

Our comments will revolve around three interrelated themes. First, we will discuss the so-called “broken” archive of black women’s history. We ask: How do we negotiate our limited but ultimately legible archives? What tensions exist between an incoherent archive and genre conventions of historical writing that value coherence and narrative? How do archives document—or refuse to document—the circulation and flow of black women’s ideas, their intimate lives, and their affective experiences? Second, we will discuss our interpretive practices, asking: How can our interpretive practices reflect both the biases embedded in documentation and collection practices alongside the desires embedded in our own reading practices? How do sources—manuscripts, law, print or material culture, or oral histories—differently shape our ability to write African American women’s history? Finally, we will address the telling of histories laced with trauma and pain. We ask whether our retelling of those stories reinscribes violence against our historical subjects (Hartman 2008), ourselves, and our readers: how do we write stories of trauma in ways that both honor the lives of our historical actors as well as care for ourselves, our readers, and our students?