Amplifying 300+ years of resistance in the archives, preserving records of today's acts of resistance
It’s amazing what twisting paths spiders can lead us on if we let them. Several months ago I started checking out the biographies of the women captured with Louise in a 1935 Chicago Defender photo with the headline “They Are …
Three years ago, I participated in a project led by Anaïs Duplan of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies and Katie Parry of The Fabric Workshop and Museum. The project was called Endgame: Black Artists for an Urgent Black Future…
As a December 1st deadline approached, I was talking with another Chronicling Resistance Fellow about the challenge of fulfilling the assignment of identifying at least 10 objects from PACSCL institutions that would be included in the culminating exhibition of our …
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 …
Janus is the Roman God / Deity of New Beginning and Transitions, thus on the Gregorian calendar, the year begins in January. For enslaved Black Americans, January 1st, New Year’s Day, was known as “Heartbreak Day” or “Hiring Day.” On …
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 …