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Exploring Black imagination and its archival repertoires across encounters with enslavement, imperialism and apartheid
What do we mean when we invoke the idea of the Black Archive? What are the conditions, genres and modes of expression through which Black life, imagination and desire become legible? These questions complicate how we understand the concept of the archive. If Black life has variously been described through terms such as fugitivity, maroonage, and waywardness then any engagement with its archival footprint will have to grapple with these logics. Black archives come into existence through a refraction, a re-staging of epistemological temporality, a re-enchantment of the material world of everyday existence, in excess and beyond the library, the museum, the university, the nation state and other institutional infrastructures that seek Black containment.
The Black Archival Imagination Lab examines how Black experiences have posed problems with regards to representation across imperial encounters. It takes seriously narrative and creative reasoning, and as such, genres such as the novel, poetry, film, photography, sound, critical fabulation and digital spaces in thinking through the idea of the Black archive. A key objective of the Lab is to think through these genres as methodological interventions in understanding what the Black archive is. We do not take the Black archive to be unitary or static but as mutating repertoires in the figuration and preservation of black experience as well as provocations of what the past and future might look like. But we can also think of the Black archive as endangered, erased, made possible as well as constrained by the conditions of dispersal that define Africa and the Black diaspora, past and present.
The Lab is anchored by a graduate seminar, a public seminar series, an edited collection from the seminar series at the University of Cape Town, and archival work from a museum in South Africa. Its co-directors are: Christopher Ouma, Associate Professor of English, and Khwezi Mkhize, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies.
The Black Archival Imagination Lab is funded and administered by the FHI, with generous additional support from the Office of Global Affairs.