Amplifying 300+ years of resistance in the archives, preserving records of today's acts of resistance
I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.
These words, from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W.W. Norton 2019, p. 299), encapsulate what I imagine was …
Of “Spectral Infrastructure”
I’ve been pondering a couple of ideas about the limitations of archives that were sparked by two recent webinars. The first of these provocations occurred back in April 2021 when I tuned in to a symposium organized …
A spider sure knows how to ensnare the unexpected in its web.
A friend received from her sister a discarded library book titled Illustrated Tap Rhythms And Routines by Edith Ballwebber, an Assistant Professor of Physical Education teaching at the …
What does Louise tell us about herself in what appears to be the only existing professional photo of her? What clues are there in her attire, her make-up, her facial expression, her stance, or in her inscription to dancer Ludie …
On Sunday, May 23, 2021 NPR published a piece on Shuffle Along, the 1921 production by an all-Black creative team, including Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and performed by an all-Black company, that took Broadway by storm. By bringing …
“Spidering” is how Nadine George-Grave describes the dynamics of her research approach—“some lines of the webs…will break through other lines of wisdom and memory; some will be dead ends….” Since Louise didn’t leave us much to know her by, I’ve …
I’ll be honest. As I’ve learned more about the research some of my CR cohort colleagues are up to, I’ve sometimes felt that my research topic is a little light on significance. Fellows are researching the history of abolitionism in …