Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature
Jean-Christophe Cloutier
New York: Columbia University Press, 2019
383 pages
ISBN: 978-0231193313
Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s most recent book, Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, demonstrates the difficult and unusual ways in which archived twentieth-century African American literary papers are reused through a process called a lifecycle. Lifecycle, as the book defines it, is a common concept in the field of archival research indicating that records have a life akin to those of biological organisms. Cloutier explains that the documents go through stages of creation, capture, storage, and disposal; these are processes that are analogous to the basic stages of life like birth, youth, and death. Shadow Archives describes Cloutier’s journey through special collections of black writers as an attempt to delineate the counterfactual histories denied to be accommodated during their writers’ lifetimes due to the sociopolitical sphere of midcentury American society.
Cloutier is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and he is the coeditor of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (2017). In Shadow Archives, he accomplishes the task of researching the archives of a number of pioneering African American novelists by providing a general methodology of archival research. He stresses the uniqueness and effective power of the African American writers’ oeuvre that collectively marked a shift in black literary collecting practices during the middle of the twentieth century. He argues that Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison are good examples of novelists whose archival sensibilities had been underappreciated by previous archival studies. This book, hence, traces the archive collections of these writers kept in the shadow for long and validate the ways these authors preserved accounts of their personal lives in their collections and by doing so revive them in fiction. The shadow, in this respect, is a reference to preserving the legal, emotional, economic, and political contexts which these writers practiced in substantial parts of their work ‒ collected in their archives. The shadow is also a reference to the way these collections remained hidden because of the provocative topics they explicitly portrayed, including as those of social injustice in the United States.
Cloutier defines archives as “pastness to come-un passé à venir” (5), which occur during the lifetime of a certain author to be preserved and ‘(re)deployed;’ these usually resurface after the death of the writer. He underlines the significance of the archives for African American studies and scholars as they can grant access to memories that would otherwise be irreparably lost: for instance, the archived documents about slavery can fill in gaps of African American history. In addition to this, the archives can also serve as a sites to dig out veiled identities, tendencies, and political associations of certain authors ‒ otherwise they could be problematic, reprehensible, and even too immature and chaotic to be presented to the public today. Thus, new alternatives of curation, both political and aesthetic are foregrounded in this volume to approach private ways black writers conducted their archival practices.
The first three chapters of the book interpret the notion of the shadow archives while the last two are devoted to the methodology of searching for them. Cloutier argues that African American authors have a unique relation to preserving and archiving their documents developed mostly with the aim for publication but rather planned for postponement, which was mostly due to circumstances related to the struggles these authors faced in their time. For this reason, he describes shadow archivism as an “Afrofuturist pledge-an affirmation made in the face of the ’wreckage upon wreckage’ of centuries of violence” (17). Therefore, it was inevitable for the archives to stay in the shadow subjected to oblivion, destruction; with luck, they could experience rather a revival.
The first chapter of the book is a survey of African American manuscript collections studied in the wider context of the growing amount of contemporary literary papers. The James Weldon Johnson Collection (JWJ) founded at Yale University in 1941 plays a prominent role in the revolution pioneered by the Harlem Renaissance (HR). This archive traces how HR writers preserved the black past and goes on to fulfill this function itself. Carl Van Vechten, a well-known white member of HR and a portrait photographer who provided support to many black writers, had an initiative role as an institutional collector of African American letters in the JWJ. A year later, when MacLeish formed the Librarian Council at the Library of Congress to forge the national heritage collections, Van Vechten consented to have the JWJ archives added to that collection because he was impressed by the idea itself. Van Vechten was successful in including black texts in this collection and so other black collections started growing mainly via donations. However, they remained on the margins of archival processing for decades and were not made available until the final decade of the twentieth century. As Shadow Archives illustrates, there may be a temporal gap between acquiring and processing a collection: many books remained in the backlog for many years as it was the case with the manuscripts of Ann Petry’s two novels, The Street (1946) and Country Place (1947). These novels were acquired in 1949 by Yale and had remained unprocessed until now.
Three case studies are presented in the two subsequent chapters describing how the authors make use of their records through different processes such as ‘fictionalization’ as it is the case with McKay, Wright, and Ellison. The first example is Cloutier’s own research on Claud McKay. The famous HR poet developed his prose fiction writing skills by his archival practices that lead him to write Amiable with Big Teeth as an attempt to disrupt “power dynamics threatening black autonomy” (98). The novel was discovered in his archives in 2006 and published posthumously in 2017, after Cloutier had spent years attempting to authenticate McKay’s authorship of the manuscript. Furthermore, Cloutier allocates the last part of Shadow Archives, referred to as a ‘Coda,’ to the journey of discovering this forgotten novel of McKay and the process of its authentication. The second example discusses the Lafargue Clinic, which was the first mental health clinic opened in Harlem between 1946-1959 providing treatment to local people and the story involves Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Interestingly, the existence of the clinic is not officially recorded in the administration records of the city. However, ‘Psychiatry Comes to Harlem’ by Richard Wright (1946) and ‘Harlem is Nowhere’ by Ralph Ellison (written in 1948 and published in 1964) are two essays proving the existence of this institution, as they were both written based on distinct documents belonging to the former clinic’s archive. The story of the clinic showcases a fundamental question related to the status of black people living then in Harlem and which subscribed to “what remains unseen does not exist enough” (116). The tenet is related to many serious issues such as juvenile delinquency. This issue concerned both Wright and Ellison and led the latter to write his masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952). Ellison believed in the power of visual aids and that is the reason why he collaborated with Gordon Parks, the famous Harlem photographer, in documenting the clinic and certain sites of the Harlem in photos, a project that was hibernated in his archive until 2016. The third example presents the case of Ann Petry’s vanishing collections. Petry presents an interesting case related to the scarce Black women writers’ archives which is actually the topic of the fourth chapter.
This chapter represents a dramatic shift in terms of tone and structure as Cloutier adopts the first-person narrative technique to recount his quest for excavating Petry’s archives. Cloutier suggests that manuscripts of Petry’s novels remained hidden for political and personal reasons. The political reason lies in the fact that before 1969 writers donated their collections to different libraries willingly as they received a tax deduction in return. When this law changed, many writers, including Petry, held back from making such donations. Secondly, Petry’s archival practices are referred to as ‘idiosyncratic’ in this volume as she herself destroyed or let her manuscripts be destroyed due to bad storage. She was not willing to share with the public what she considered to be private ‒ and sacred.
The fifth chapter of this volume discusses the question of ‘method’ and ‘access,’ which are often hidden behind the shiny façade of completed works. Archival invisibility connected to Ellison’s famous novel Invisible Man is in the focus of this chapter. Both critics and readers have been unaware of the presence of the elements of comic books in Ellison’s work as his archives show. Cloutier provides a very avant-garde and captivating investigation of the resemblances between Ellison’s Invisible Man and comic books. It is a new perspective that Cloutier successfully corroborates not only through the visual power of the novel, but also by substantial ways in which Invisible Man, the eponymous character, can be compared to the superheroes of comic books. Cloutier goes beyond the usual understanding of archives as he forms a strong connection between his selected authors by emphasizing their attempts of a ‘corrective’ version of history. Wright, Ellison, McKay, and Petry are shown to deploy the archive as an effective means to preserve history as they experienced it, as it happened, and as it was recorded in their collections. Their archives, in this sense, are “a worthy weapon of choice — not like an arrow but indeed like a boomerang” (208). Their archives do operate like a boomerang indeed in the sense that they “come back to life” after being obscure or lost for variant periods of time.
In addition to being a well-structured and thoroughly researched book, Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature provides a wide range of illustrations to validate the points raised. Wright’s unpublished photos of the Lafargue Clinic from his Fredrick Wertham Papers archive collection at the Library of Congress serve as both validation of the clinic’s existence and illustration of therapists and therapees. Similarly, exceptional insights are given in the form of snapshots into the actual collections of the writers; moreover, can see Petry’s handwritten editing notes on the original manuscript of her debut novel, The Street. However, there is an imbalance in terms of the space dedicated to each writer with McKay having, for example, the lion share in the book. Petry’s chapter is shorter in comparison to the male authors’, which could be related to the limited access to her work and private life or is simply due to her marginalized status as a black female writer in the mid-twentieth century United States.
Shadow Archives is an interesting read to those working on archives studies as it goes beyond the procedures of preserving papers in the biggest libraries in America; it rather presents cases where the archives were (almost) lost due to the lack of considerate storage and curation in those libraries. The book can also be of interest to scholars of postcolonial studies, multiculturalism, and racial issues pertaining to American literature since it introduces some of the main literary figures of the mid-twentieth African American literature as well. New insights to the personalities of the writers can also be acquired through looking at the different stages they went through in composing and archiving certain literary works. Besides, non-academic readers can as well engage in reading this volume due to its anecdotal style and insightful content. Cloutier’s personal style of writing and his individual approaches in excavating some collections add a sense of intimacy and authenticity to the entire book.
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