The relationship between Black women and institutional archives has long been fraught. As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, when located beyond property ledgers in the “archive of slavery,” the Black woman was often reduced to “[a] flagellant and a Hottentot. A sulky bitch. A dead negréss. A syphilitic whore.” While slave narratives speak the Black experience into colonial and plantation histories, as Toni Morrison notes, these accounts were highly circumscribed, with evidence of the joys and sorrows of the interior life redacted to appeal to an abolitionist audience. And well into the 20^th century, as Jean-Christophe Cloutier informs, once the collecting of Black artist’s papers gains momentum, Black women’s collections remain “few in number and [...] neglected even by the repositories that own them.” While Cloutier points to the modernist period as the moment of emergence for Black counterarchiving, this panel reveals that such activity both preceded and extends well beyond it. Drawing from the work of Edouard Glissant, Daphne Brooks, Marisa Fuentes, and Christina Sharpe among others, this session will engage a range of Black women’s approaches within and beyond traditional archival repositories.

In 1921 at age 46, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote: “I begin this day to keep the record that should have been kept long since.” Lewis-Timmons engages correspondence, diary entries, and scrapbooks held in Dunbar-Nelson’s papers to interrogate how the author uses the archive she compiles to intentionally complicate her public identity and reputation as a respectable, middle-class, heterosexual Black woman. Dunbar-Nelson’s curation allows for a story of her joys and sorrows to emerge that was perhaps too complicated to reveal during her lifetime, including her experiences with intimate partner and police violence and her romantic relationships with women. As Lewis-Timmons will reveal, Dunbar-Nelson ultimately maintains a record of her private and public selves for a future capable of embracing them.

Though Hurston inherits some of Dunbar Nelson’s generation’s expressive challenges, she also inherits their dexterity with storytelling using multiple forms. Morris Johnson takes as her focus Hurston’s archiving performances – collective methods of recording and extending Black women's vocabularies and narratives that resist enclosure. Morris Johnson argues that Their Eyes Were Watching God deploys an archival poetics that consists of cycles of dynamic suggestion and porous absorption: cycles located at the meeting of artist and audience wherein storytellers “gri[p] the beholder” and their audiences meet, complete, and pass the original storyteller’s expression forward. Informed by the author’s own Southern-informed approach to expression, Their Eyes becomes a dynamic reflective site of archival theater that is characterized by its inclusion of the gesture and the utterance, and the written and danced preservation of Black women’s realities.

If Hurston embeds a site for the collection of Black women’s memory and reflection in her novel, Hortense Spillers extends this work through her use of the notebook as a site of archival intervention. In her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers considers a two-fold meaning of the term invention: (1) “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” and (2) “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.” As Murphy argues, Spillers’ notebooks stage a layering of this discursive order and illustrate the entanglement of pessimism and optimism that defines Black life and Black feminist archival traditions.

Yates-Richard revisits and extends the periods covered by preceding panelists in her centering of Black maternal songs and soundmaking practices as archives of and for Black survival. Charting a path from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and to Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist imaginings of the Cyndi Mayweather cyborg as a reduplicating archive of Black femme life in/as relation, Yates-Richard foregrounds how what she names “Black maternal sonority” functions as an archive of relation. Yates-Richard argues that within these archives of relation, the resonant sounds of Black maternity function as sites of social and political potentiality and as loci of freedom imaginings for Black subjects.

Together, these four 10-minute papers and a 10-minute response from Joycelyn Moody will nuance our understanding of Black women’s approaches to archiving their joys and sorrows. Each panelist highlights the innovative means that Black women have constructed to reconfigure their relationships to the archives that otherwise silence them, contributing to a fuller understanding of Black women’s complicated relationship with memory work.