A key point of inspiration for my final project is Danielle Brathwaith-Shirley’s “BlackTransArchive”: In this work, Brathwaith-Shirley, who is a Berlin-based Black trans artist and game developer, creates a digital, interactive archive in the form of a video game, designed in collaboration with Black trans coders and artists as a way to center Black trans lives and fight against the erasure of their history. Here, she attempts to ensure that the Black and trans people who enter her virtually-created world on the archive are given a dedicated and safe space, by presenting a series of initial questions to the user, which then designate the parameters of their interaction and accessibility to the content, depending on their identity and the levels of privilege they are afforded. The BlackTransArchive entangles difficult concepts such as opacity, consent, and other ideas by indexing different lines of play, prompting user interaction, and creating fantastic digital imagery that prompt the user to question where they lie in contemporary structures of power, and how that affects the way they experience both the world and Brathwaith-Shirley’s work itself.

I read BlackTransArchive less as a an expansion or reconfiguration of the archive than as a mode of critique that ruptures the traditional conceptions of the archive, whereby the latter’s epistemological and political contribution tends to be marked by empiricism. To read this work as a kind of critique is to heed David Kazanjian’s call in “Scenes of Speculation”: To attend “less to the wills, desires, and voices of the historical subjects in question and more to the speculative work done by the textual traces they have left in the archives… that which might not be the expression of a subject’s will, desire, intention, or voice but might still be readable by us, today, as a powerfully political text.“ For I would argue that by refusing the familiar tropes that characterize the archive as a repository of of information and evidence, Braithwaith-Shirley, in the BlackTransArchive, calls not only the archive itself but also the liberal notions of justice—inflected with assumptions of “expressions of humanity understood as willful, desirous interiority” that follow the longue durée of post-Enlightenment thought (see: Towards a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira Da Silva)—in question/speculation. The artistic production of this work, as such, can be read as a speculative theory of justice. The BlackTransArchive’s series of questions (“Are you Black & Trans, Trans, or cis?”; “How will you help us?”) and demands (“Use your privilege to help us”, “You must agree to center Black Trans lives”) read to me as less a gesture to empathize with Black Trans lives as to reach towards liberal inclusion that it is a speculation on what reparations, allyship, and memory means and should politically positioned.

With all this in mind, I wonder the following: Given the rise in speculative fiction and literature as a mode of imagining new possibilities, what is speculation’s impossibilities and limits? Here, I am thinking of Saidiya Hartman’s warning in Scenes of Subjection regarding the “difficulty and slipperiness of empathy”: “Empathic identification… cannot be extricated from the economy of chattel slavery with which is at odds, for this projection of one’s feeling upon or into the object of property and the phantasmic slipping into captivity, while it is distinct from the pleasures of self-augmentation yielded by the ownership of the captive body and the expectations fostered therein, is nonetheless entangled with this economy and identification facilitated by a kindred possession or occupation of the captive body, albeit on a different register.” With this in mind I cannot help but wonder the ways in which Kazanjian’s mode of reading the “scenes of speculation” in the archive is always-already enmeshed in the humanist entanglement of political desire and an objectivist logocentric project, whereby speculative works are incessantly assumed to be acts of resistance and agency—not to productively configure a political project, more than it is to feed into, what Frank Wilderson describes as, “the kinship, or communal, structure of feeling that [is presumed] to exist ab initio.” What are the ways in which liberal hegemony paradoxically requires resistance as a signifier of human singularity? I appreciate Kazanjian’s essay a lot, which is why I surface these concerns.

I posted my initial blog concerning the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection, a collaborative project hosted by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), prematurely. My initial impression of the site was one of great excitement that such an extensive national organization valued Black women’s history to the point where they wanted to foreground their involvement in the suffrage movement. This was a movement that lead to the ratification of the 19^th amendment which has typically been historicized as a White women’s movement. Initially, White and Black suffragists were able to stand and fight back against patriarchal systemic inequities in solidarity, however the movement became racially polarized when the right to vote was decidedly a race between Black men and White women.

Needless to say, I was excited by the site: the apparent diversity of the DPLA team, the aesthetically pleasing layout, and the many photos of women I recognized from my Black feminist genealogy, historical leaders like Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Charlotta Bass. And I must say, the collection of papers and artifacts they have for these three women are impressive. However, as I took a deeper dive into the site after my initial post, I was disappointed. The other collections, The Featured Primary Source Sets, are drastically diluted. Of the six collections, one is announced with a picture of a group of white women marching and the collection contains several pieces of suffrage memorabilia from the white community, another promises artifacts pertaining to Black women’s involvement in the Black Power movement, signaled with a beautiful piece of artwork, but the artifacts primarily pertain to men. The Equal Rights Amendment collection features Alice Paul and other white women, and I could go on.

I was hoping not to sound overtly disparaging when two representatives from the DPLA came to give a talk in class. I was able to point out the disconnections between what the archive promises and its delivery, and the representatives were very gracious in receiving feedback. Their efforts in curating the collections are ongoing and to be commended. Take away: Collections have to be monitored for accuracy, especially 1) when you are dealing with artifacts from and of people that have been historically marginalized and minoritized and 2) when you have many partners contributing to an archive or from many different sources.

This course in archival encounters has been very inspiring. Upon arrival to my PhD program in English (and maybe even sooner), we have been encouraged to consider occupations outside of academia. I think archival management may be a possibility higher on my list.

Artistic engagements with archives have inspired and informed my final project. The notion of speculative work as described by Kazanjian in “Scenes of Speculation” is directly related to artistic practice. In the article, the example of the letter written by a formerly enslaved black American settler in Liberia in 1858 shapes and questions our understanding of freedom – to recover the past and to look toward the future. Freedom is not objective, rather, it unfolds, changes, and is open-ended. 

Odumosu’s example of the photograph of the Afro-Caribbean crying child in “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons” is another scene of speculation which has the potential to unearth representations of colonization. Odumosu asks “how can we extend concepts of caretaking and custodianship beyond institutions toward reparative strategies proposed by artists, activists, and other agents of change?” The image of the crying child has been found alongside other photographs in albums of Dutch families of the Caribbean in the early 20th century. Different meanings arise depending on the other photographs surrounding the child, one album shows Caribbean people dressed in their Sunday best, another album shows the crying child alongside a posed and confident “nice girl”. In this case, the acts of curation and cutting/pasting (as in a collage or photomontage technique) reflect similar artistic practices done by artists. Artist La Vaughn Belle’s intervention of placing her own family photos beside photographs of the Danish West Indies from the Royal Danish Library collection (including the crying child) become a reformative act, a way of building community, and connecting her family to history, “The narratives embedded in the images become collapsed, converted, contested and re-imagined in the simple gesture of juxtaposition and/or adding captions to the images.” Belle has created her own type of archive, one that has more meaning than viewing digital material from the library collection on its own.

I recently visited a small exhibition at the Met, “Pictures, Revisited”. On view was Lorna Simpson’s 9 Props. In it, Simpson recontextualizes portraits taken by photographer James Van Der Zee who took pioneering portraits in Harlem in the early 20th century. Instead of portraits of people, Simpson fabricated the objects in Van Der Zee’s portraits, photographed them as the subjects and included descriptive captions describing Van Der Zee original portrait and the object’s place in it. Through this work, Simpson critiques what can’t be seen in either photograph – issues of class, race, and culture. This work depends on, and even demands, the viewer’s engagement to imagine new narratives. Although she doesn’t refer to it as an archive, I consider Simpson’s 9 Props to be a type of archive – gathering, re-making and re-assembling historical images. 

Following these examples, my final project attempts to recreate these artistic practices and translate them to a digital stage. Considering archives can take many forms and have different aims, there is room for experimentation in how we build archives for particular audiences. Perhaps, instead of the main consideration being which platform to choose (Omeka vs. WordPress, for example), we can also contemplate how the viewer interacts with the archive, ways of engaging the viewer, how to use emotion as part of the archival experience, and how the physical form of the digital archive relates to the content itself.

My ideas around archives, what they are, what they look like, what they include (and don’t include) have been shaped by the readings and experiences of the semester. Coming into this class, my limited view of archives were things (objects, books, papers) that were organized in boxes, stored in libraries, accessed by researchers, and sometimes digitized for the public. Although I have used archives before and have even been involved in organizing archives, I am a dilettante when it comes to actual archival work. I was never exposed to the various forms of archives or thought about how their organization could structure knowledge. 

One of the early readings “What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers” introduced theoretical archival concepts by Foucault, Derrida and Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst – that the archive has a role in society, it is an idea, it is the entirety of history. This expansion of the definition stayed with me. When I visit a museum, I now look at exhibitions as archives. The curator’s job of assembling works, placing them in specific positions on the walls, providing historical context in the object descriptions, is a type of archival work. Exhibition catalogs, art books, and other types of non-fiction books can therefore also be considered archives – they gather objects, provide information and knowledge in the form of essays and writing. This translates online, as well, as shown in the Colored Conventions project, which separates the records from the exhibitions. Certainly, the records themselves are important, but for someone like myself who was unaware of these political meetings, the exhibits provide knowledge, understanding, context, and meaning. 

But, it is not only the act of archiving or what is archived that is important, it is also how it is accomplished. I am reminded of readings such as “Archival Encounters: Rethinking access and care in digital colonial archives” and other projects we reviewed such as the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection and the Barnard Zine collection whose creators shared their processes of care in dealing with sensitive materials. They showed that empathy and not necessarily objectivity is crucial to assembling and maintaining archives; that there is bravery in confronting past injustices; that archives provide questions and not answers.

Lastly, throughout the semester, I’ve been taking note of various descriptive words about archives that have interested me. I list them here with no explanation and will let the words speak for themselves: recognize, redress, reorient, produce, reproduce, acknowledge (not obscure), question (not define), quantify, qualify, interrogate, recover, discover, disassemble, reassemble, deconstruct, reconstruct, reconfigure,  articulate, enrich, remix, decentralize, provoke, rethink, reform, speculate, interpret, complicate, challenge, restructure. 

When we think of History, we immediately  think that we will be learning about nonfiction events which have already occurred in the past. However, how often do we oppose what we are learning about in history ; we usually just accept what is being told to us and move on. In the Question of Recovery, Laura Helton explains that when Amos Beman looked up the history of Africa and its people, all that was found was racial arrogance and ignorance. 

Similarly in his novel, India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination 1890s-1920s, Clem Seecharan explains that the overall history of East Indians was also always presented in an ignorant manner.  Both texts strongly supports Helton’s point of whether or not the information being recovered and archived can be trusted when it comes to learning about our histories. I am somewhere at the midpoint of Helton’s 2 proposals because while I do strongly believe the truth is lost throughout history, I also believe that without the hard work of previous historians and archivists, we would not have been educated about our history. So in essence, there could be successful arguments which support either side of this debate. It is for this reason that I chose to create an exhibition of postcards. I believe that postcards will give its audience a chance to interpret what the images and scripts on the postcards show rather than to read someone else’s interpretation of them. 

I would like to outline several challenges I think I might face while working on this project.

First and foremost, you don’t have just one archival collection of materials related to the artist. The papers of Jacques Hnizdovsky are held at several different institutions around the country. There are at least two institutions in New York that preserve his papers. There is another one in Connecticut which has his materials. Finally, a small collection of his papers is part of an institution based in Minnesota. And these are just the collections that have the artist’s materials.

When conducting research, we should not forget about the papers of others who also might have archival materials of Hnizdovsky. And, indeed, I was able to locate several of such collections, where you have Hnizdovsky’s correspondence as part of that archive—and these are a publisher Hnizdovsky cooperated with, as well as several poets he collaborated with.

This leads to the second major challenge—accessibility. I’m hopeful the archives in New York will open soon enough so I can start working and preparing material as early as this summer. The same concerns the institution located in Connecticut. Also, I look forward to trying and requesting scans of archival materials from other institutions mentioned below. Taking into account that often this is something that is done for a fee, it would be worth considering and applying for a grant that can help to cover these expenses.

When Jacques Hnizdovsky, born in what is now Ukraine in 1915, passed away in 1985, the New York Times published an obituary in which pointed out that the artist was known for this woodcut prints exhibited in museums and galleries across the country and elsewhere in the world, but also underscored that he illustrated books by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Frost.

Of course, this was not the only three books the artist illustrated. As the recent bibliographical guide on Hnizdovsky suggest, the artist worked on more than two hundred books (he began as early as in the 1930s and worked until the end of his life). Most of his book cover designs and illustrations were commissioned by various Ukrainian publishing house operating in the diaspora in the United States, Canada and Europe. However, Hnizdovsky also cooperated with American publishing houses—and this cooperation, and the result of this cooperation, is a focal point of my research.

Hnizdovsky’s artworks have their special place in both Ukrainian and American art. And his artworks are interesting for several reasons. First, he really managed to create his own style, a style that is quite recognizable. Second, he was successful in finding his own niche and place in the US, and many American art scholars and critics highly regarded his works—something very unusual for artists of his generations who came to this country as refugees after the end of World War II. Third, throughout his whole career, Hnizdovsky had special attention to books and, more importantly, work on books was a significant part of his creative output.

The visual part of the book—specifically, its cover and illustrations—shapes the way we look at books. They are both fragments and details of these books. As Hnizdovsky himself said: “An artist should not interpret the text. A book illustrator should merely suggest.” The artist’s observation should be formulated in such a manner they don’t create a distorted or limited image of the book.

This is a reflection of our readings coming from the 2016 issue of Social Text, that probe the possibilities and impossibilities of recovery as both historical method and ethico-political act. In Helton et. al’s “Questions of Recovery,” the authors flesh out a brief history of historical recovery and the expansion of the archive as prominent and, at the time, essential practices, whereby “the consolidation of a global color line” and “in the wake of efforts to forge black internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s” seemed to necessitate attempts to “to preserve and narrate pasts that could be used to contest global inequality.” Foundational to these attempts are the fundamental belief “that one of the most pernicious manifestations of racism was the exclusion of Africans from narratives of historical progress“ (emphasis mine). However, as the authors go on to explain, contemporary thought regarding the relationship between blackness and the archive—especially among those who take seriously Patterson’s “social death” thesis—call into question the supposed utility and political purpose of historical recovery (and thus, archives) by understanding the archive as “subject” instead of source”, in light of “the discrepancy between a present marked by racialized forms of social negation eerily similar to those of slavery, and conventional frameworks for understanding the black past that revolve around the progress from slavery to freedom.“ In this sort of analytic, the archive is a “mechanism of racialized discourse and governance” as opposed to a “storage mechanism” that can provoke, say, a flat and impossible empathy by revealing the “humanity”—or, in da Silvian terms, “transparency”—of the racialized subaltern. As such, the ongoing exploitation—as opposed to exclusion—becomes the primary signifier of anti-black violence in this critical move, paralleling the call to unpack what Hartman has dubbed “the afterlife of slavery.” Historical recovery, here, must reconfigure its political purpose against desires for liberal inclusion, and reconsider, then, what “justice”, “freedom”, and “democracy” should mean and look like.

I appreciate the authors uptake of the “social death” thesis not only because the idea is heavily contested and disregarded in the academy (especially as it’s taken up by Afro-pessimists), but also simply because I personally see it as the most apt analytic in a moment where historical recovery and archival expansion/reconfiguration has seemingly been unable to produce even adequate conceptions of “justice.” As I elaborate in my own project regarding the uptake of archival practices in light of recent movements against “anti-asian violence”, the recovery and documentation of anti-asian violence—in an effort to produce public empathy in opposition to “hate”—has led to carceral (which is to say, anti-black) notions of justice, producing legislation and public desires for increased policing and surveillance. I don’t think it would be far off to claim that this uptake of historical recovery, in the context of recent “never forget, never again” recovery projects within the Asian American community, is inextricable from earlier movements for global racial justice, which include 20th-century Black social movements, as well as the global confrontation of the Holocaust and the intense memory practices that followed it. However, as Valentina Pisanty asks in The Guardians of Memory: “Is it really sufficient to remember past events to guard against the eventuality that something similar might happen again?“ Given the continuation of anti-black violence and terror in our contemporary moment despite the now extensive documentation of anti-black violence in the US, it would seem that “progress” is called into question.

Thinking off of Helton et. al’s “Questions of Recovery,” I’m also considering two other things. The first is the relationship between “recovery” and of “humanity” in the first instance, whereby both may be considered liberal humanist projects. Lowe elaborates on this relationship briefly in “History Hesitant”: “To focus the inquiry on recovery mobilizes the different valences of the term: a sense of the retrieval of archival evidence and the restoration of historical presence, on the one hand, and the ontological and political sense of reparation, on the other, that is, the possibility of recuperation, or the repossession of a full humanity and freedom, after its ultimate theft or obliteration.” Here, Lowe draws a connection between the ethico-political act of recovery to a desire to be included in—yet reveal the always-already being-of—the ontological status of “Human.” However, as Lowe seems to gesture towards but doesn’t fully elaborate through Hartman, Fanon, and Mbembe, the notion of “The Human” and “humanity” is a racialized project in and of itself. Recovery, then, is also an attempt at an ontological intervention. Without going too much into it, I’m wondering then, in what ways does “dehumanization” fall short as an analytic for recovery? How does this play into liberal hegemony?

The second thing is the fetishization of the archive as a gesture towards global justice. While Helton et. al, Lowe, and Rusert acknowledge the racialized history of the archive as contingent upon the sovereign goals of a select (white) few—and as such, an understanding that “recovery” also (perhaps inevitably” leaves things out—I think what could be useful in corroboration with this acknowledgement is a comprehensive understanding of how the archive becomes fetish: What are the ways that, perhaps, that liberal hegemony is entangled with humanist desire, such that “never forget—never again” becomes a political go-to and an ethical imperative? As Dominick LaCapra explains in History and Criticism, “The archive as fetish is a literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian. When it is fetishized, the archive is more than the repository of traces of the past which may be used in its inferential reconstruction.” What makes the archive so seductive, especially within the academy, and how might this understood through material understandings of the state? These are the sorts of questions I think, might be helpful in future work re-considering the political possibilities and limits of historical recovery and archival research.