Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future)
by: Laura Helton (Author)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 16 April 2024
Language: English
Print Length: 328 pages
ISBN-10: 0231212747
ISBN-13: 9780231212748
Book Description
During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.
About the Author
Review Scattered and Fugitive Things is a methodological, theoretical, and archival tour de force--at once the capstone of a decade of groundbreaking scholarship in Black archives and librarianship and a call for us to turn our attention to these pioneering Black bibliophiles and their institutions.--Derrick R. Spires, author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United StatesLaura Helton's stellar and timely book reclaims the vital work of Black librarians, collectors, and bibliophiles who built the archival infrastructure on which scholars of Black history and culture rely. Those long-overlooked men and women are brought back to life with the fidelity that can only come from deep archival immersion by a superb writer. Her exceptional work and that of the brilliant people she profiles reveal a rich world of unexplored archival abundance which continues to serve as a bulwark against both unfounded speculations and outright assaults on Black history.--Barbara D. Savage, author of Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman ScholarScattered and Fugitive Things is an absolute marvel: for anyone who works in Black archives, anyone interested in Black liberation, Laura E. Helton records for us the strategies these Black librarians, collectors, and archivists employed in the first part of the twentieth century. Each page is a treasure to be savored.--Vanessa K. Valdés, author of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso SchomburgThis ingenious study of the quietly radical innovations of African American librarians and collectors transforms our understanding of the documentary impulse in Black history. Helton shows us that archives are not staid and passive repositories, but instead laboratories for experimentation, even insurrection, in the ways that the traces we preserve can intimate and anticipate shared futures.--Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black InternationalismExtensively researched and brilliantly constructed, Scattered and Fugitive Things weaves together the remarkable story of librarians, archivists, bibliophiles, and collectors of Black history. It describes the radical lengths that some went to collect, exhibit, and classify Black books, manuscripts, and ephemera. An essential book for anyone interested in the backstory of Black history.--Ethelene Whitmire, author of Regina Anderson Andrews: Harlem Renaissance LibrarianLaura Helton's Scattered and Fugitive Things is an extraordinary book that chronicles and contextualizes how Black archives and libraries were built, organized, preserved, protected and used in the early twentieth century. Beautifully written, this is a major contribution to Black Studies.--Elizabeth McHenry, author of To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship
About the Author Laura E. Helton is an assistant professor of English and history at the University of Delaware. She is a coeditor of the digital humanities project “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg.”
未经允许不得转载：电子书百科大全 » Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future)
评论前必须登录！
登陆 注册