“to betray the archive of violence:"

Black feminist archival methods as insurgent pedagogies

Abstract

The archival imperative for recursive description of racialized violence precludes Black humanity and necessitates methodologies that attend to “black Atlantic livingness” (McKittrick, 2016, 2021, p. 104). Many Black feminist scholars have been in conversation on the question of how (and can we) curate these methodologies; yet, they are largely absent in archival scholarship, reflecting “intellectual, methodological, and racial homogeneity” that is an outcome of a sustained “privileging of whiteness” in LIS (Ramirez, 2015, p. 340). As someone deeply implicated in these conditions, I ask: How can LIS/archives workers ethically engage radical, interdisciplinary, Black feminist archival methods in our pedagogies, practices, and day-to-day lives? How can we co-conspire with Black feminist scholars in and outside academia, moving towards the abolition of racial-capitalist and imperialist systems that encompass academia and our profession itself?