Description
Book SynopsisShadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers and provides a nuanced view of how archives shape literary history.
Trade ReviewA very timely addition to the contemporary discussion of “the archives” among scholars of African American literature, culture, and history and in literary studies generally. * Modern Philology *
Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s excellent
Shadow Archives reminds us that scholarly archives, especially literary archives, are always a sort of interpretation. -- James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst * Modern Philology *
Though the subject is narrow, this study succeeds at being both masterfully scholarly in tone and at the same time easily comprehensible. Valuable to those in the fields of library science, history, and African American literature, this rich volume should not be overlooked...Highly recommended. * Choice *
Most compelling is Cloutier’s overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists—Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison—approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies. -- Steve Nathans-Kelly * New York Journal of Books *
Shadow Archives is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the “scenario” of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics. -- Stephanie Browner, Eugene Lang College–The New School * Textual Cultures *
Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an “archival sensibility.” * The Columbia Review *
[This] monograph promises a historically and theoretically grounded account of the archival practices that informed the writings of McKay, Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. . . Generally, Cloutier’s book is highly recommended to anybody interested in African American literature of the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, any future history or theory of the archive in African American letters will have to grapple with Shadow Archives. -- Stephan Kuhl, Goethe University Frankfurt * African American Review *
With Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s scholarship in hand today, we are now better informed and poised to protect the integrity of African American archives for tomorrow. * New England Quarterly *
In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms “archival sensibility.” Grounded in Cloutier’s astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections,
Shadow Archives reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry;
Shadow Archives is a welcome addition to literary criticism. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
Shadow Archives is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers—Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison—actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large. -- Salamishah Tillet, author of
Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights ImaginationNo novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is—hands and laptops down—one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In
Shadow Archives, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who’s who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship. -- William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis
As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration,
Shadow Archives demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the “archival sensibility” of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier’s book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang—an exhilarating reminder of the “belated timeliness” and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete. -- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black InternationalismTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: “Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang,” or The Lifecycles of Twentieth-Century African American Literary Papers
1. Black Special Collections and the Midcentury Rise of the Institutional Collector
2. Claude McKay’s Archival Rebirth: Provenance and Politics in
Amiable with Big Teeth3. “At Once Both Document and Symbol”: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and the Lafargue Clinic Photographic Archive
4. An Interlude Concerning the Vanishing Manuscripts of Ann Petry
5. “Too Obscure for Learned Classification”: Comic Books, Counterculture, and Archival Invisibility in
Invisible ManCoda. Disappointed Bridges: A Note on the Discovery of
Amiable with Big TeethAppendix: Artifact Biographies or Vagabond Itineraries of Key Documents Discussed in This Book
Notes
Permissions
Index
