JWJI Colloquium featuring Laura Helton

From the venue:

Talk Title:

Scattered and Fugitive Things: Collectors, Collecting, and the Defiant History of Black Archives

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Helton will discuss her recent book, Scattered and Fugitive Things, which tells the stories of Black collectors who created the first enduring set of African American archives: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. At a moment when the very idea of Black history aroused doubt, these collectors defiantly activated Schomburg’s declaration that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” That activation entailed both risk and pleasure, and it produced archival abundance—a proliferation of files and repositories. Generations of scholars and readers have benefited from that abundance, but what did these archives mean at the moment of their founding?

Conjoining African American and archival studies, Scattered and Fugitive Things traces acts of collecting in Black public culture between 1910 and 1950, traveling from the parlors of Black bibliophiles in the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. It creatively draws on overlooked sources, such as book lists and card catalogs, to reveal the surprising risks collectors took to create Black archives. It also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. At each site, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment and political possibility. The makers of these collections refused to see Black history constrained or threatened, and out of that refusal, they created new possibilities for the future.