Curiosities born from the intersection of Black Studies and the archive have become inflected in recent works that undertake speculative histories located in fiction, poetry, performance, and the racial imaginaries they help create. In particular, the recent work of Christina Sharpe (2011, 2016), Saidiya Hartman (1997, 2007, 2019), Omise’eke Tinsley (2018) and Alys Eve Weinbaum (2019) have all theorized imagination as a site of epistemology for the memory of the formerly enslaved. The anxiety of “re-memory” (Morrison, 1987) and archival redress continue to live in the pages of the literary contributions of black creatives who have long used the imagination to shorten the historical distance between the experiences of ancestor and descendant. The archives of anti-black violence paradoxically expand under the conditions of “erasure,” noting that they are not necessarily gone but extant elsewhere. For some scholars, the rejoinder to “erasure” does not necessarily signal a “recovery” of said archives where its subjects can be saved from its meeting with violence (Nash, 2016; Cruz, 2016). Nevertheless, a more pervasive, paradigmatic approach to violence and the archive contorts the ways the blackness becomes (im)material for readers engaging with racially fraught histories and how the repertoire of archival material survives or remains lost in the afterlife of slavery (Hartman 1997; Taylor, 2006).

As such, this panel offers a discussion which interrogates anti-black violence and its attending cultural artifacts as archival material. Several questions drive this panel toward its ultimate goal of troubling the axioms of thought that impact archival and theoretical inquiry into imaginative memory of anti-black violences. Such questions that drive this dynamic discussion include, but are not limited to: How does anti-black violence impact the potential for archival research as well as the archival apparatus itself? How does literature bear alternative methods for research in-text? This panel invites creative analyses on the strictures that are presented by these challenges when researching antiblack violence made apparent in archives of lynching, the Anthropocene, and black filial dispossession.

This special session will begin with the presider, Mali Collins-White, who will introduce the panelists and ground the panel with the aforementioned questions. Following this 10-minute introduction, panelists will be allowed 15 minutes for each presentation so to provide 20 minutes for audience discussion. The session will then begin promptly with Dr. Joshua Bennett’s presentation of “Cherishment: Ed Roberson at the end of world.” This paper examines the writings of the poet and former limnologist, Ed Roberson, and focuses primarily on the specter of species extinction in his 2010 collection of poems, To See the Earth Before the End of the World. Bennett’s exploration of Roberson’s work is meant to further elaborate his ongoing emphasis on cherishment as an ecological imperative. For Roberson, Bennett argues, cherishment is simultaneously a mode of intellection and an approach to social life; both a meditative practice and a means by which we might fundamentally re-imagine the way we share the planet. Herein, Bennett makes the claim that Roberson presents us with a world that has in many senses already ended, and thus invites us into other practices of gathering, other modes of black sociality and study and archival imagination, alongside the nonhuman forms of life and death that populate the landscape.

Dr. Rhaisa Williams will then present her paper, “Black Dreams as Anti-play and Antidote: The Short Life of Toni Morrison’s Dreaming Emmett” which analyzes Toni Morrison’s only full-length play Dreaming Emmett which premiered in 1986. Forced to dream endlessly about his murder for thirty years, “Emmett Till” writes a screenplay for a movie in which he exacts revenge against his murderers and bring his mother and himself a sense of justice and closure. Staging the competing narratives surrounding the “real” Emmett Till’s murder and his symbolic currency, with that of dreaming “dead boy” who is as vulnerable as he is vengeful, the play is filled with factual errors and fuzzy timelines. However, Williams argues that Dreaming Emmett illustrates the murky relationship between black lives and the source material that “dominant reality” is based upon. This murkiness, she contends, is a major factor that orients black grief and the resultant frustration with staging it towards the end of justice.

The formal presentation will end fittingly with a contribution from Linette Park, whose paper, “Tempus fugit: Lynching Violence and Blackness as Non-Presence in the Juridico-Legal Archive and Racial Imaginary,” examines the forty-year gap between the enactment of California’s anti-lynching legislation in 1933 to the first prosecution in which the penal code was utilized. In the court hearing of People vs. Jones, the juridical interpretation of lynching relied on a profound distortion of lynching’s common definition that points to the racial terrors and anti-black history of lynching violence. Rather than seeking an “alternative archive” or “imaginary” in which lynching violence could possibly be recorded in and recovered from its gratuitous scope, the paper explicates on the structural interdiction in which blackness is prohibited as a juridico-legal subject, thus making such archival possibilities untenable. In doing so, the paper argues that this interdiction marks blackness not as fugitivity of and from the archive, but rather signals the ways in which blackness is imprisoned in a paradigm of violence as tempus fugit—that is, as time flies. The panel will then end with an informal discussion moderated by Ms. Collins-White who will support an exploratory conversation in which audience members can contribute their questions and comments for the panel.

To conclude, this panel looks forward to enriching this years’ presidential theme, “Being Human” as our discussion brings forth questions of the human/nonhuman/inhuman into play as a perennial entanglement in the question of the sustained making and unmaking of black textual archives (Trouillot 1994). With this, we believe that the stakes of our discussion are not only deeply committed to timely and historical political concerns around racial violence, but also calls into question the imaginative possibilities in rethinking the limitations of race, the (in)human, and the archive.