Now, more than ever, the question of the archive has become crucial to teaching and scholarship on modern languages and literatures. As James Lowry and Heather MacNeil observe, we are currently “seeing a renaissance of archival theory” (“Archival Thinking,” 2021). Much of what is often called “Critical Archive Studies” has followed Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) in identifying a problematic and destructive western positivism at work in received archival practices. In keeping with other components of white western modernity—and the etymological roots of “archive” in the word ᾰ̓ρχή (origin, sovereignty)—traditional archives purport to master the past through technologies of rational ordering, documentation and totalizing containment. Ultimately, though, acts performed in the name of “preservation” serve to maintaining western institutional authority. Western archives don’t so much record and preserve as help “make” the west and negate its others. As scholars including Shawn Michelle Smith (American Archives, 1999), Antoinette Burton (Archive Stories, 2005), Ann Stoler (Along the Archival Grain, 2012), and Bhavani Raman (Document Raj, 2012) demonstrate, western archives, as a result of their allegiance to white modernity, violently excise and consign to oblivion any materials that challenge dominant power formations and the notions of order, reason and whiteness on which they rely.

While some scholars have taken us far in identifying and analyzing the hegemony of traditional archives, others perform the indispensable work of theorizing and locating counter-archives. They include Paula Amad (The Counter-Archive, 2010), Domietta Torlasco (The Heretical Archive, 2013), and Jamie Lee (Producing the Archival Body, 2020). Their work has shifted scholarly attention from the ordering of things in western modernity to unruly collectives and heterogeneous collections that unsettle and subvert. The counter-archives that emerge in this scholarship “historicize differently,” “disrupt[ing] conventional national narratives” by writing difference into public accounts of the past (Archive/Counterarchive, 2018).

This panel, composed of a diverse group of men and women hailing from the US and Australia, engages the scholarly challenge of the archive as theoretical concept and heuristic by examining three collections: the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Library, the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham, and the mass of contemporary fantasy and sci-fi literature usually labeled climate fiction. Each of these archives constitute counter-archives. There are many potential approaches to these counter-archives, but their subaltern potential emerges most clearly, we claim, when highlighted by writers of color. If “counter-archiving” is, to borrow from Syrus Marcus Ware, “a practice of interrupting the whiteness of archives” then surely BIPOC authors can offer us valuable insight into the poetics and politics of subverting hegemonic documentation and record keeping. Building on work by Mark Anthony Neal (Black Ephemera, 2022) and Jocelyn Fenton Stitt (Dreams of Archives Unfolded, 2021), this panel affirms the utility of race in not just critiquing white archives but also tracing counter-archival alternatives.

The first speaker, Christopher Breu, returns to the psychanalytic grounding of Derrida’s Archive Fever, but with a new-millennium emphasis on climate, infrastructure, and fantasy. Rethinking the making of the archive, Breu looks at the representation of infrastructure as an archive of the unconscious in climate-conscious novels by Colson Whitehead, Karen Yamashita, and Octavia Butler. Drawing on Laplanche and Pontalis, Breu shows how these writers of color stage fantasies that imagine infrastructure as offering a potential escape from the ecological and economic violence of the present.

The second presentation, co-delivered by Kathy Lavezzo and Harry Stecopoulos, emerges from their work with the Stuart Hall Papers, housed at the University of Birmingham. Their talk centers on the Oxford dissertation on Henry James that Hall abandoned in 1956. Lavezzo and Stecopoulos seize upon the incomplete archive of Hall’s dissertation, which exists only in the form of hundreds of notes on James’s novels. They consider how this unfinished and indeterminate archive adumbrates Hall’s future work on the processual nature of identity when understood in a diasporic and deconstructive frame.

The final speaker, Sarah Gleeson-White, draws on her current scholarship in the Wallace Thurman Collection at the Beinecke, where she held a 2024 Ruth Stephan Research Fellowship. In material that will appear in her book-in-progress, Wallace Thurman, 1922-1934: Black Authorship and Print Culture Between the Wars, Gleeson-White tracks how a recent acquisition sheds new light on the writer’s dynamic and contingent relation to a network of Black producers. A heretofore neglected three-act play by Thurman discloses, an intriguing—confounding—collaboration of sorts between Thurman, and the authors—Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes—collaboration (of sorts) between Thurman, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.