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 …
Assembling ‘The 10’ and Reverse-Engineering
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 …
Resisting by Doing What She Had to Do
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 …
The Hidden and the Haunting: Spectral Infrastructure; The Right to Invisibility
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 …
Taps Illustrated
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 …
A Paragraph in that Look
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 …
Who’s Got a Brown Paper Bag?
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 …