Archives

Forthcoming Issue (Fall 2021)

May10

All About My Mother: Archives, Art, and Memory
Laura Engel

Articles

“Archiving Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Invisible Labor of Women’s Literary Recovery”
Jennifer Tuttle

“Anna Julia Cooper, Archival Lacunae, and Black Women’s ‘Muffled’ Knowledge”
Vivian M. May

“Tina De Rosa’s Local Archive: Love Dares to Speak Its Name”
Mary Jo Bona

“Beautiful Meteors: Susan Howe’s Archival Theaters”
Julie Brown

“The 18th-century City Archive: Affective Geographies and Gendered Possibilities”
Kirsten Saxton

Innovations

“Must Anonymous Be a Woman? Gender and Anonymity in the Archives”
Emily Friedman

“The Archive of Lady Anne Barnard, 1750-1825”
Greg Clingham

Notes

“Negotiating Exploitation: An Intersectional Reading of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield’s Performance Contract”
Allie Reznik

Archival Interventions and Agency: Irma McClaurin in Conversation with Emily Ruth Rutter about the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive

May10

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I was first introduced to Irma McClaurin’s impressive body of work through the inaugural episode of the podcast Cite Black Women, which my friend and colleague Kiesha Warren-Gordon recommended.1 Particularly germane to this special issue on “Women and Archives” is the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive housed in the Special Collections and University Archives at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.2 The Black Feminist Archive is a trailblazing initiative founded by McClaurin in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections and University Archives and the W. E. B. Du Bois Center and designed to ensure the collection, preservation, and safeguarding of Black women’s lives. McClaurin kindly agreed to speak with me over the phone about her Black Feminist Archive, and the following is the rewarding conversation that unfolded.

Emily: I know you began your career as a poet with a substantial body of published work and then became an anthropologist, publishing groundbreaking works such as Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America (1996) and Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (2001), which was recognized by Choice magazine as an “Outstanding Academic Title” in 2002. How does your background in poetry inform the work you engage in as an anthropologist?

Irma: In some ways, I see myself as possibly a reincarnate of Zora Neale Hurston in anthropology; she began her career in literature and then moved into anthropology. I think she was able to synthesize these fields and create what I consider some of the first examples of interpretative anthropology. Similarly, my creative writing has probably become more ethnographic, and my ethnographic writing is probably influenced by stylistic things I’ve borrowed from literature. For example, my first field notes in Belize were poems. Also, in Women of Belize, I included a poem I wrote in the field called “A Mother’s Day Blessing” that was a powerful success among Belizean women who immediately connected to it. A colleague doing fieldwork in the United Kingdom also shared it with women who were advocating for fair housing, and they used the poem in their activist work. In other words, the poem, which began as field notes, ended up honoring women’s experiences in a universal sense.

Emily: Right, and in the same way that the poem “A Mother’s Day Blessing” is an homage to mothers everywhere so the Black Feminist Archive is a tribute to women across the African diaspora.

Irma: That’s a good point in terms of the way I define the concept of the Black Feminist Archive, which has a dualistic meaning for me. It is a repository, so my mission at this point—and I really feel like I’m on a mis- sion—is to collect and preserve the contributions of Black women in the United States but also globally. I see myself as building a “home” for Black women. If we think about home as a place of comfort, safety, and security, I am building that for Black women.

The Black Feminist Archive is also about legacy because we don’t have a lot of legacies of Black women in the United States. This is my legacy that I will leave and that will endure. The only time we pay attention to Black women in this country is when they are famous, but what about everyday women? How do we preserve their experiences? The only way that can happen is if we do it ourselves. My archive will be a way that I can enshrine my mother’s life. She was born in Peachtree, Alabama, and there was no birth certificate. She was delivered by midwives. My father had to find his birthdate in a Bible. He had a second-grade education. We need to create a space for people like my mother and father to endure beyond their corporeal lives. I’m also planning to launch a Mother’s Day initiative in which Black women send in photographs of their mothers. If you look at television, the images of Black mothers are mostly negative. We need positive images, and I take as my point of departure the recognition that if we don’t collect and preserve all of this material culture through archiving, then someone will tell the story for us, and it may not be the story we want to be told.

Emily: What was the initial impetus for the Black Feminist Archive?

Irma: It was probably driven by my archival research on and writing about Zora Neale Hurston, though I have always kept drafts of my poems and correspondence. While digging in the archives about Zora’s life, I decided that I didn’t need to publish a biography or write academically necessarily, but I’ve been doing more “public” writing about my findings. For example, my first article on Zora, based on my research, “Belle Letters: ‘Dear Langston, Love Zora,’” appeared in FlaVour magazine, a Black life-style publication in Florida.3 In doing my research, however, what stood out for me was what wasn’t there in the archives—missing were her field notes. But I did find a treasure trove. In her letters to Langston Hughes, Zora is describing her ethnographic process, and these letters offer clues about her approach to fieldwork and also made me re-think the conventional narrative about Langston and Zora’s relationship. They had a documented falling out over their play Mule Bone (1930). But she is consistently writing to him, confiding in him, and even reporting back about the reception of his poetry among the working-class people with whom she was engaging in citrus and turpentine camps.4 You get a real insight into their relation- ship in these letters. Had I not read those letters, I might have followed into the standard interpretation of their falling out. Zora is often portrayed as “unreasonable,” with some male scholars of the Harlem Renaissance giving an unflattering portrait of Zora in discussing the controversy over authorship of the play.5 It is examples like this that have made me realize that the more stuff we put into the archives the more complex the story becomes. Some have described archives as the keeper of memories, secrets, and revelations.

Emily: Can you give me an example of a recent acquisition of papers for the Black Feminist Archive?

Irma: We received the papers of Carolyn Martin-Shaw, who is one of the contributors to my edited book Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics. And, we just acquired the papers of my friend Larry Paros (1934-2019), who was a mentor to me during the time he was Director of the Yale Summer High School program in 1968. Had I not been in the program with Larry, I would have been lost in college. I am a first-generation college attendee, so there was no one in my family who could tell me what going to college was going to be like. I did all of my applications and financial aid by myself because my parents could not help me. Yale canceled Larry’s program the following year, even though this pioneering initiative changed the lives of over 140 underserved teenagers like me. Larry created a documentary about the Yale Summer High School program called Walk Right In: The Movie (2010).6 I was working at the Ford Foundation at the time he was working on it, and he interviewed me. Larry asked me, “Did this program make a difference?” And I was able to say, without any hesitation, “Yes, it did make a difference.” I chose to attend Grinnell College on a full scholarship partly after a discussion with Larry about my choices. He mentored me through that final selection process, even after the program was over.

Larry called me in March 2019 and said that he wanted to turn over all of the papers for the Yale Summer High School to me. I visited him at his home and spent several days packing up the materials, including all the raw footage and materials from the documentary. In the process, I came across a letter and postcard I had written to Larry in 1968 and 1969. All his materials are now located in the “Larry Paros Alternative Education Collection” within the Black Feminist Archive. On 3 July 2019, Larry passed away, but he went knowing that his papers were safe. They have a home now. Some people might ask, “What’s this Jewish guy doing in the Black Feminist Archive?” Well, if the truth be told, Black women are connected. We don’t live our lives in isolation. We are connected to a lot of people and a lot of places that often don’t get attributed to us because people want to look at one slice of our life. People need to look at the totality. And the archive will help them do that. Another part of what those experiences at Yale and beyond have affirmed for me is the African American cultural notion of “reach one, teach one.” In other words, the Black Feminist Archive is not just about me. It’s about all of these first-generation Black women who, if we dropped dead tomorrow, our families would come in and look at our papers and say, “We need to clean this up.” It’s not that they don’t think what we are doing is wonderful, but they don’t understand the value of it. This is what I call our “academic wealth,” the value of who we are as scholars cannot be measured in dollars. It lies in our intellectual property—our books, our articles, our lectures, our speeches, our service, our activism, our leadership development and impact—that is our wealth, our social capital. The same is also true for Black women activists. Those doing social change rarely have time to document it—and so the archive is aimed at raising awareness among activists to stop and take the time to write down the speeches, organize the photographs, and make sure they receive copies of all the radio and TV interviews they are called upon to do, so that these items don’t just disappear.

Emily: Talk about your choice in the name Black Feminist Archive.

Irma: This is a project that builds on my book Black Feminist Anthropology. I claim feminism not always in the way that it’s practiced but in its original concept, which was centering women as knowers, as creators, as theorists, etc. The use of the descriptive “Black” some may argue is an essentialist idea, but I claim that too. I have a right to be essentialist in terms of positioning my Black woman’s epistemology and my lived experiences as a Black woman at the center of my work and what I choose to preserve. I am not going to be apologetic about it; I’m going to be very proactive. That is not to say that white women cannot be in my archive. If they embrace a Black feminist perspective, then they can send their papers to the Black Feminist Archive.

And to circle back, this is why Larry Paros’s papers can be a part of my archive. Because of the small degrees of separation, because he practiced Black feminist strategies (even if he did not recognize them as such), and because of his trust in me to manage and preserve his intellectual performance as an educator, activist, scholar, and disruptor.

We always see the terms like “archive” or “feminist archive” as somehow detached from racialized thinking, but what is concealed there is an unspoken whiteness. If you look at what is represented historically in archives, you are generally seeing a white perspective. I think feminists need to own up to the fact that they too have practiced exclusion; they too have practiced citation omission; and they have also practiced appropriation of ideas from Black women in particular and scholars of color more generally.

Many people also misuse concepts like intersectionality, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term.7 Her point was this: If we want to solve for inequality, we have to look at the intersection of multiple systems of inequality. How is my gender overlaid with my race, which might be overlaid with my class, which might be overlaid with my sexual orientation? These systemic structures that are designed to perpetuate our inequality are operating together. Intersectionality is not about identity; it is about navigating multiple systems of power and oppression that intersect in our lives. It’s really important to understand that in our personal lives we operate on multiple levels. We operate at the individual level, and that is where a lot of people get stuck; they can never move beyond the personalization or the idea that because that isn’t my experience it’s not real. Then there is the structural level by which I mean that there are systems of inequality in place. It doesn’t matter who is operating these systems of inequality; if people are operating within a given structure, it’s going to be problematic. Specifically, Black and other people of color can be in leadership positions and still perpetuate systems of inequality because of the structures that are in place.

In terms of archiving, the system has been predicated on inequality. Certain people’s lives are preserved, and certain people’s papers are pre- served. Archives have this tremendous power because they get to decide— this material is important, and this other material is not important. This is the power structure of archivists, a field that is like 87.7% white. The last report on diversity from the Society of American Archivists was in 2004—so you see how much attention is paid to diversity; at the time of the report, Blacks comprised 2.8% of professionals in the field.8 I suspect not much has changed in the last decade or so. As I travel to speak about the archive, I have on occasion (very occasionally) encountered Black archi- vists at elite institutions who tell me that they are leaving the field because there is limited professional mobility. Whites dominate and have seniority. It would appear that the people making the decisions are often looking to preserve the lives of people who look like them; they are working within their comfort zone.

Emily: In my view, access to archives is an exigent concern since so much valuable historical information is inaccessible to people outside of academe. In what ways does the Black Feminist Archive contend with these issues of access?

Irma: Once the Black Feminist Archive is ready to “activate,” meaning it has a set number of materials on hand, we will create a website landing page at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Some of my colleagues are already sending us their materials. And I am asking these contributors, as well as other colleagues, to consider making a financial contribution. Let me be clear, this is not a condition of becoming part of the archive, but rather the logical extension of our agency in preserving our lives as Black women. My thinking is that if we want it to be permanent, then we must financially support it.9 I also write grants and engage in fundraising on my own and in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library Development Office.10 More recently, to address your question about access, we have been working on a memorandum of understanding that will make clear that the archive will not just be available to scholars but to anyone who wants to conduct primary research, such as family members of contributors and people in the community. There should be no limits. The memorandum will clarify the principles of acquisition and usage.

Now some may question why I am donating my archive to a predomi- nantly white institution. I have held leadership positions at Shaw University, Fisk University, and Bennett College for Women, all Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); unfortunately, HBCUs don’t have the structural capacity for a major archive because they lack resources. University of Massachusetts Amherst, where the Black Feminist Archive is located, is not only my alma mater but also the home of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center and is the repository for his papers, thanks to his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, who taught at the University of Massachusetts when I was a student in 1973. It is an iconic institution that can support the archi- val “home” I am building for Black women. The Special Collections and University Archive department is devoted to preserving materials related to social change.11

I am an alumna of University of Massachusetts Amherst three times, a former employee, and a former resident and taxpayer in Massachusetts. I spent eighteen years of my life in the state—it’s where my children were born, and many influential friendships and mentorships occurred in that space. Don’t I deserve to have access to the public resources that I have paid for with my taxes? Damn right! I have to give props to the late Rob Cox, the previous Director of Special Collections and University Archives because his approach to the Du Bois archive was to look at the whole person and all of the people to whom Du Bois was connected. Thus, the Du Bois archive contains not only Du Bois’s materials but also that of other people to whom he was connected. We are taking a similar approach with the Black Feminist Archive. It is not just about “me” but about the ways in which I can leverage my privilege to open up doors and resources for other Black women and non-white scholars and support the work at a public university.

The Black Feminist Archive’s collaboration with the Du Bois Center is very much public-facing, and because the Black Feminist Archive will be digitized, it will be open access. The Du Bois Center works with schools and community colleges and does public programs. We want the Black Feminist Archive to follow that same public access model and find ways of highlighting what is in archives through virtual exhibitions and program- ming. Our goal is to ensure that anyone who has a computer or a smart phone will be able to tap into these rich, archival materials that document, preserve, and raise the profile of Black women’s lives. I have heard from Black people interested in looking at primary materials held at a white institution who call about gaining access to a unique Black collection and never have their calls returned. That will not happen here. This is why I am so actively engaged.

Emily: Another thing that your work makes me consider is the myth of neutrality that shapes the discourse of archives. Might you talk about the personal dimension of archiving?

Irma: I recently clipped out a quote from a book review of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong. Vuong was quoted as saying, “Every person is an archive and we often forget that.”12 That is what I’m finding. I presented a talk on the Black Feminist Archive to 125 Black women law professors in 2017, and I asked them, “How many of you have thought about archiving your work?” Only one hand went up and the only reason she had thought about it was that she had been approached by her university library about preserving her papers because she one of a small number of women deans of law schools who is Black. There I was among all of these women writing these amazing journal articles and law reviews and teaching courses on law and social justice who had never thought that they were worthy of being archived. Wow. Yet, as Vuong is saying, each one of us carries that archival space inside. So, part of the creation of the Black Feminist Archive, is about asserting our power as Black women to control the narrative spin of our lives—to archive the materials that shape the story we want to tell about who we are and what we have done. And, I am finding for myself, as has my colleague Kesho Scott, that the process of organizing and curating your life before it goes into boxes to be shipped is highly personal, complex, sometimes difficult but also revealing about how much one has contributed.

Emily: In your view, what is missing from current discussions about archives, both in academe and beyond?

Irma: I want to be clear that I do not claim to be a professional archivist; I am an outsider and novice, so I have to turn to the experts. Let me reference an article by Canadian archivist Rodney G. S. Carter entitled “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and the Power in Silence.” What Carter says is in alignment with my own thinking on the matter:

The notion that archives are neutral places with no vested interests has been undermined by current philosophical and theoretical handlings of the con- cept of the “Archive”; it is now undeniable that archives are spaces of power. Archival power is, in part, the power to allow voices to be heard. It consists of highlighting certain narratives and of including certain types of records created by certain groups.13

The point he makes is that we presume archives to be sites of neutrality. In truth of fact, this is a false narrative. First and foremost, archives were established to publicly present power. They were shrines to those who had resources and wanted to be remembered. And archivists are historically, and today, complicit in this enterprise. So, what gets into archives is vetted, both today and yesterday.

Birds do it, Bees do it—Everybody’s doing it. Since I began this project, the concept has caught fire. Archives have suddenly become top of mind and on everybody’s list. I have seen people who are not Black feminists appropriate the idea of the Black Feminist Archive without giving any attribution as to where the idea came from. There is still an intellectual dishonesty, even within feminist scholarship, whereby Black women are being omitted as the generators, the architects of our ideas, of our experiences—all the more reason for my archive.

I think in the past conversations about archives were missing trans- parency and honesty about the origins of archives. Just like museums, archives were created to preserve the lives of people considered to have value and other people were left out. I think we need to hear more about these problematic origins and the remedies. I know museums are talking about “empathy” and libraries are talking about engagement, so what are archivists talking about?14 I know from my interactions with people that Black archivists, particularly women, feel marginalized in a field that is still overwhelmingly white. We need to be transparent about that too. But that is changing inside the archive field with discussions about archivists as advocates and activists.15

Emily: I’m also thinking about activists whose sociopolitical impact is not always visible in print.

Irma: Yes, we especially need to be thinking about activists. Where are all of those speeches and posters and recordings? We need to preserve these elements in the Black Feminist Archive because activists are in the business of doing the work rather than documenting the work. My agenda is to make the process of archiving Black women a collective effort and to preserve the labor of activists in a way that highlights what is really important to remember about their work and who they are as individu- als; they are more than what they do, and the complexities of how they have navigated their lives must be preserved. My archive also recognizes the power of the visual. Right now, there are almost 400 digital records of photographs I took between 1974-1990. To illustrate, these photos include images of James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, and Jessie Jackson on his first presidential campaign. What do they tell us about life in Amherst where most of my photos were taken? We will see. Already, I have uncovered some “hidden figures.”

We are interested in photographs of activists, especially with their fami- lies and communities. We often see, write about, and represent activists in isolation, as if they don’t have families. We see them out there on the platform, and then we speculate about their lives. I’m asking people to give us access to those private moments with direction and intentionality and agency.

Emily: Any further thoughts about the Black Feminist Archive that you want to share with our readers?

Irma: Archives are the way that historians write history. If those archives are partial, we will always have partial histories. Just as I saw my book Black Feminist Anthropology as an intervention into the field of anthropology, I see the Black Feminist Archive, in its totality, as an intervention into the way in which history gets written—be it traditional history, gender and women’s studies history, or African American history. If Black women are not integral, then it will ALWAYS be a partial history. I am also fascinated with the ways in which material cultural gets preserved.

To advance the Black Feminist Archive, I intend to leverage whatever privilege I have acquired over the decades as scholar, former university president, award-winning author, etc., to preserve the lives of Black women of the African diaspora. When I give talks about this archival project, I always ask Black women, “What are you doing to preserve your life?” Not unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, we have to emphasize self-preservation—and archives make that possible.

I’ll close with a message that is really a call to action. If you (Black women who are activists, artists, academics, and every day folk) have access to materials that you believe are important to Black feminism and to lifting up the extraordinary and the ordinary experiences of Black women, and you want these to be preserved and kept safe, indeed, if you want these materials to have a “home”—a Black feminist, Womanist, Black community “HOME”—please contact me: http://irmamcclaurin.com/works/black-feminist-archive.

IRMA MCCLAURIN, Ph.D., is the founder of the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (http://irmamcclaurin.com/works/black-feminist-archive). She is also an activist anthropologist and diversity consultant. Past leadership roles include president of Shaw University, Deputy Provost at Fisk University, Chief Diversity Officer at Teach For America, Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, and Senior Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. She also held tenured positions in anthropology at the University of Florida and the University of Minnesota. An award-winning writer, McClaurin is editor of Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics (2001), an “Outstanding Academic Title,” and in 2015, she was named “Best in the Nation Columnist” by the Black Press of America. She is a columnist and culture and education editor at Insight News. Forthcoming is an essay collection: “JUSTSPEAK: Reflections on Race, Culture and Politics in America.”

EMILY RUTH RUTTER is Associate Professor of English at Ball State University. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball Behind the Color Line (2018), The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry (2018), and Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists, forthcoming from University of Delaware Press in fall 2021. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2020).

NOTES

1 Christen Smith and Irma McClaurin, “Citation and the Black Feminist Archive with Dr. Irma McClaurin,” season 1, episode 1, Cite Black Women, pro- duced by Smith and Michaela Machicote, 40:37, accessed 10 November 2020, https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org.

2 The Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive is being compiled and is not fully available yet. There are some collections within the Black Feminist Archive that are accessible now, such as the Irma McClaurin Papers, Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collection Online, https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/collec- tions/commonwealth-oai:6w92c383g, which consists of 397 black and white photos taken by McClaurin of people like James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Cade Bambara; the Carolyn Martin-Shaw Papers, 1962-2017, MS974, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst; and the Larry Paros Papers, 1964- 2014, MS 1081, W. E. B. Du Bois Library. For more information about the Black Feminist Archive, see http://irmamcclaurin.com/works/black-feminist-archive.

3 Irma McClaurin, “Belle Letters: ‘Dear Langston, Love Zora,’” FlaVour: Black Florida Life and Style, Autumn 2000, 16-19. FlaVour was published by Paul Jerome, a writer for the St. Petersburg Times. According to McClaurin, “He was aiming for a general audience of Black professionals who wanted to know about the unique con- tributions of Black people connected to Florida. Hurston was at the top of the list.”

4 Turpentine, refined pine resin, was extracted from trees beginning in the mid- 1800s and continuing through the 1920s. The product was used to repair naval ships initially, and slave labor was the primary source of workers. After emancipa- tion, newly freed slaves worked seasonally in turpentine camps to augment their meager income from sharecropping, sometimes working alongside prisoners, who were not paid, and were mostly Black as well. Over time, Black communities developed in proximity to the camps. The interest in timber extraction eventually killed the turpentine industry, which was brutal work with significant health risks. See Dan Hughes, “The History of Florida Turpentine Camps,” Herald-Tribune (Sarasota), 15 March 2004, https://www.heraldtribune.com/article/LK/20040315/ News/605205566/SH. (Access unavailable at time of publication).

5 For example, Arnold Rampasad—a definitive Harlem Renaissance authority— characterizes Zora in the following way: “Hurston’s suspicion of [an affair between Hughes and Louise] Thompson seems to have been based on little more than a gen- eral sense of insecurity with a woman younger, prettier, more poised, and, although in a more orthodox way, as intelligent as Hurston herself”; see Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 196; cited in Julie A. Mangoff, “The Bone of Contention: Mule Bone and the Friendship of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston During the Harlem Renaissance” (honors project, Illinois Wesleyan University, 2013), 53, http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/history_honproj/50.

6 See Lawrence Paros, “‘Walk Right In,’ The Movie, Classroom Version,” 8 April 2018, https://youtu.be/ORt9kTn3PTY. See also UW Video, “Walk Right In—Larry Paros,” interview, 14 November 2013, https://youtu.be/UiIEiiKwev8.

7 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, No. 1 (1989), 139.

8 Victoria Irons Walch, “General Data Analysis” (PowerPoint presentation, Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 19 August 2005), http://www.archivists.org/a-census/reports/Walch-ACENSUS.pdf.

9 According to McClaurin, “Financial contributions will ensure that the archive is sustainable and that contributors are a part of that process. Asking people to consider making a donation follows the adage of putting our money where our mouths are, but it is absolutely not a condition of being included. I make an annual contribution and have one contributor who is planning to put the Black Feminist Archive in their estate plan, something I also have done.”

10 In April 2020, McClaurin was awarded a $15,000 Historical Archive grant by the Wenner Gren Foundation to organize her papers and photographs, transport them, and work with the University of Massachusetts Amherst to prepare descriptions of the materials for digitization. The grant does not support the actual digitizing.

11The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries Special Collections and University Archive collections policy reads in part:

In pursuit of our mission, the Department of Special Collections and University Archives collects materials of enduring historical and cultural value relating to four major thematic areas: the history and experience of social change in America; the histories and cultures of New England with an emphasis on Massachusetts; innovation and entrepreneurship; and the broad community associated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

See “What We Collect,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries Special Collections and University Archive, accessed 2 January 2021, http://scua.library. umass.edu/umarmot/overview/collection-policy.

12Ocean Vuong, “Acclaimed Poet Ocean Vuong’s Novel is a Beautiful, Complex Vantage on Motherlands and Mothers,” interview by Jessica Q. Stark, Indy Week, 5 June 2019, https://indyweek.com/culture/page/ocean-vuong-on-earth-were-briefly- gorgeous-interview.

13 Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria: The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists, 61 (2006), 216, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/ article/view/12541.

14 See Elif M. Gokcigdem, ed., Fostering Empathy Through Museums (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

15 See Richard Pearce-Moses, “Finding Our Voice: Pleading the Value of Archives,” Provenance: Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists, 31, No. 1 (2013), 4-6, https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/provenance/vol31/iss1/3.

Women and Archives, Spring 2021, Vol. 40, No. 1

May10

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Laura Engel, Duquesne University
Emily Ruth Rutter, Ball State University
Vol 40, No. 1 (Spring 2021), 5-13

Women and Archives

In her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983), the novelist Alice Walker pays tribute to the anonymous women and Black women in particular whose creativity has been either neglected or unaccounted for by dominant conceptions of what counts as art or literature. As Walker queries, “But when . . . did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? The answer is so simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high—and low.”1 Walker discovers that “our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read” (p. 1186). Indeed, while we conjure literary ghosts and excavate the lost and found of women’s “creative spark,” we must always remain mindful of the voices and innovations sewn into but, like invisible thread, unseen in the archives. Put another way, while archives offer scholars like us many affordances, they are also hindered by both epistemological and material limitations.

During 2020, we confronted new exigencies and constraints as we attempted to conduct research and produce scholarship during a global pandemic. For public health reasons, archives were made more inaccessible than ever. There were also fresh concerns regarding gender and labor, with scores of women (often the primary caregivers for children, the elderly, and sick friends and relatives in general) attempting to juggle new personal responsibilities alongside their active research agendas. Intersectional forms of oppression exacerbate these gender inequities. As we write, the yawning gender gaps that have always existed in the publication, recognition, documentation, curation, and scholarly analysis of women’s literature—and have acutely impacted BIPOC and LGBTQ+ women’s literature—are likely growing wider.

Even before COVID-19 altered the world as we know it, archives were generating a great deal of academic concern among and beyond archivists. Over the last several decades, many scholars have pivoted away from conceiving of archives as simply sites to conduct research and have instead highlighted the role that vaults and repositories of documents and artifacts play in curating and preserving particular forms of knowledge at the expense of others. Indeed, as theorists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, historians Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, and Marisa J. Fuentes, and literary and culture studies critics Diana Taylor, Ann Cvetkovich, Christina Sharpe, and Sara Ahmed, among others, have made clear, archives are never neutral.2 Ahmed points out that “the act of building such an archive is not exhausted or exhaustive; there are things forgotten, paths not followed.”3 Archivists Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook similarly assert that “archives have the power to privilege and to marginalize. They can be a tool of hegemony; they can be a tool of resistance.”4  This dual function of the archive as a vehicle for both reinforcing social inequities and engendering counternarratives frames our two special issues on “Women and Archives.”5

In thinking through how to introduce these issues, we decided to record our conversation about the paradoxes that lie at the heart of archives. We especially consider how our scholarship in distinct fields—eighteenth- century British literature (Laura) and contemporary American and African American literature (Emily)—as well as our lived experiences inform our understanding of the intersection of archives and women’s literature.

Emily: I thought we might begin our conversation by attempting to define the archive.

Laura: The archive can be both a tangible and an ephemeral thing. When we are talking about archives, we’re usually talking about institutional spaces that save significant materials in one way or another. Often women’s archival material was only preserved when they were connected to “men of importance.” There are also more informal ways of thinking about archival collections in everything from libraries to people’s own personal attics and closets. In other words, the archive can be both public and collective and a personal collection of things.

Moreover, the materials can be written and narrative, but they can also be objects. I’m really interested in how objects tell a different kind of story or even augment the story narrative material tells. Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) is, for example, a key text in pointing out the repertoire of rituals, behaviors, and performances, among other acts that the physical archive cannot contain. For me, the question of how to archive the intangible is really important. When we try to connect to traces of the past, we have to do it through the material that we have, but we also have to be mindful that that material never tells us the whole story.

Emily: For me, that absence is really how I became interested in the archive. As a lot of the essays in these issues suggest, creative writing plays a crucial interventionary role in the archive, especially in terms of marginalized histories. As a scholar and teacher of African American literature, I’m always thinking about the role that literature plays in both highlighting and filling gaps in recorded history. A classic example is Toni Morrison’s tour-de-force novel Beloved (1987), which ruminates on the unspeakable emotional and psychic trauma of enslavement and its aftermath that is notably absent in slaveowners’ ledgers of names, dates, and transactions. In other words, I’m consistently probing literature for its epistemological implications, which often leads me to consider how creative writers engage with the dilemma of the archive.

Laura: Even in the way the archive is curated and catalogued, we have to think about white patriarchal influences. The question then becomes: How do you develop another system for research and discovery? Emily Friedman offers a new model for digital research with her innovative database Manuscript Fiction in the Age of Print, 1750-1900, which seeks to create a way to search and catalogue manuscript fiction unpublished in the author’s lifetimes.6  This tool is an example of the ways in which technology can potentially help us to find texts and authors that would have previously been unsearchable. There are also strategies for thinking about archival gaps that employ creative and/or curatorial methodologies in order to make informed speculations about the invisible connections between materials. I am reminded of both of our current projects here. Emily, your theory of “creative recuperation” in your forthcoming book, Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists, proposes that creative writers, particularly poets and novelists, play significant roles in complicating and reconfiguring dominant narratives of famous Black figures. In my recent book, Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1790-1915 (2019), I offer a strategy for considering archival research through the lens of tourism and performance. I contend that as researchers we are all tourists in the archive, curating materials according to our own subject positions and contextual performances. We both emphasize that creative ways of engaging in critical speculation are crucial in piecing together marginalized histories.

Emily: Absolutely, and like many of the essays featured in these issues, my research strives to reconceptualize the archive as more of a set of questions rather than a stable place or series of answers.

Laura: We have to think about our own investments and the different ways that we re-curate the materials and make meaning. Even though we work in different time periods, one of the connections between our research is the question of embodied history and its relationship to archival materials and knowledge.

Emily: Yes, it’s really important to be critically self-aware about the set of embodied experiences that we are bringing to the archive or archival materials. In other words, how can we as white, cis-gender women encounter the archive in ways that do not repeat a kind of white, male master narrative, which the archive has been historically designed to reinforce?

I’m also interested in hearing your thoughts about what recovery means in the context of our two “Women and Archives” special issues.

Laura: I know there have been recent pushes to move away from a paradigm of recovery, or the search for previously unknown texts by women, but I would caution against thinking that recovery is not important anymore or thinking that there is nothing left to find. I’m also encouraged by the ways in which the digital realm has provided scholars and those outside of academia with more access to things. There is always more to find and other ways to know the texts, objects, and ephemera that we rely on to make sense of the past.

Emily: Right, to cease recovery or presume that we’ve “discovered” all of the significant texts or materials is to repeat the pattern of canon-making that we’ve inherited from white patriarchal institutions. As most scholars will acknowledge, the literature and objects of value to women have often been excluded or minimized in the dominant histories to which archives lend credence.

In the essays we’ve gathered here, however, scholars are deeply invested in recuperative work with at least an implicit aim to challenge further the biases that, however latent, still structure much of the curation of Western knowledge. I’m thinking of Laura Vrana’s analysis of Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015), Meredith Benjamin’s excavation of the extra-literary materials, further editions, and performances of the iconic anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1981), and Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith’s crucial insights into the archival significance of women’s autobiographies and memoirs. All of these scholars are thinking about the archive in especially intersectional ways.

Laura: In terms of intersectionality, I think we also want to be clear that, while we use the term “women” in the title of our special issue, we are neither defining gender in biological terms nor thinking about womanhood in terms of patriarchal notions of the feminine.

Emily: Exactly, but the reality is that it is still necessary to focus specifically on archival knowledge germane to women and women writers because, if we don’t make that specific effort, we risk repeating a pattern of focusing primarily on men whose lives produced the majority of what has been preserved.

Laura: I agree that there is still a place for thinking specifically about writing that is produced by women and considering the cultural constraints placed on them. We can’t deny that the material conditions for women’s creative production were characterized by constraint, and we are still faced with many of those same constraints even as our conceptions of gender are more fluid and inclusive. I’m particularly struck by how important it is to think about the circumstances for creative women during this unprecedented time in history. So many women are in the middle of balancing their own work with home schooling, child care, elder care, and so on without any support. These realities are necessary to think about in the context of the archive. What will be imagined, produced, and saved during this period is just as crucial as what remains unwritten and invisible.

Emily: The pieces in these issues illuminate wide-ranging material constraints and conditions specific to intersectional women’s lives. There is a tension between subjectivity and objectivity that is shot through nearly all of the essays as well as the archival records of women’s lives. For instance, Vrana explores Lewis’s poetic engagement with the artistic objectification of women of African descent, which overlaps with but is distinct from Benjamin’s examination of the implications of Gloria Anzaldua’s archive for interpreting This Bridge Called My Back. Melissa J. Homestead’s subversion of the prevailing narrative about the purported destruction of Willa Cather’s epistolary exchanges with her partner, Edith Lewis, also reminds us that the archive is a contested, epistemologically unstable site. Jennifer S. Tuttle’s essay shows not only the process whereby Charlotte Perkins Gilman was recovered as a feminist icon but also the extensive labor of archivists themselves in reimagining her legacy; Tuttle reminds us, therefore, that archivists and scholars work in tandem to produce knowledge, even as scholars are often credited with discoveries and interventions.7  Alternatively, Lorna J. Clark’s piece about a newly discovered cache of letters penned by the little-known novelist Sarah Harriet Burney (1772-1844), half-sister of the more famous novelist Frances Burney, not only enriches scholars’ knowledge but also sends us back to Sarah Harriet’s fiction. Fiona Ritchie, too, draws us into her archival research through the Kathleen Barker Archive; pouring over Barker’s papers, Ritchie affirms that the history of regional theater in Britain and Ireland is in fact by and about women. Taken together, these wide-ranging essays suggest that archives provide not the only truth that matters but instead resources for complicating and offering alternatives to dominant narratives about women’s art and lives.

Laura: There is a tension between the authentic and the constructed that we also want to be attentive to when we are thinking through archival documents. When encountering objects in the archive, one is really tempted to think they are raw or unvarnished materials, but they are often curated and constructed. Letters, for example, which may seem to be private, may be public documents as well, especially in early times when they were the most useful form of communication. Frances Burney recreated scenes and dialogue in her letters and journals that were often highly scripted and performative. We have to approach these materials as constructed documents rather than unmediated authentic narratives.

This also brings me to a point about the personal and the political that I want to hear your thoughts on. I think it’s fair to say that we as coeditors, as well as the other scholars in this issue, are approaching the archive through a feminist lens. Are we harking back to second-wave feminism in terms of the idea that the personal is political, or do you see this issue as a critique of that stance, or something in between? In other words, what do our feminist hermeneutics look like for this issue and the subsequent one that will follow this fall?

Emily: I think the mantra that the personal is political has always already been true, even when people have refused to acknowledge it. Particularly when it comes to the intersection of archives, literary research, historiography, and gender, neutrality is a mythical and especially problematic notion. I’m reminded of something that Irma McClaurin notes in her interview included in this issue about the ways in which terms like “archive” or “feminist archive” [become] somehow detached from racialized thinking, but what is concealed there is an unspoken whiteness. If you look at what is represented historically in archives, you are generally seeing a white perspective. I think feminists need to own up to the fact that they too have practiced exclusion; they too have practiced citation omission; and they have also practiced appropriation of ideas from Black women in particular and scholars of color more generally.8

Considering McClaurin’s insights, we can then begin to think about the idea of the personal being political in a deliberately intersectional manner.

Laura: Even if most archives are not foregrounding the intersectional, we are. In a recent re-reading of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1995), I got to thinking about the privilege of saving something and caring for something over time that many marginalized groups don’t have. A lot of work on the queer archive talks about the ephemerality of tracing activist movements, as well as the emotional labor, affective connections, and even grief that attaches itself to movements. How, in other words, does this all get saved? Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003) and Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) are pivotal texts in thinking through this question about ephemerality and affect and the ways in which embodied experience becomes part of the archive. The closet is also a potent metaphor for the kinds of things that we save or don’t want to unearth versus the kinds of things that become visible and are potentially cathartic. The affective dimension to the archive is key, and I think we can see Julie Phillips Brown’s essay on Susan Howe really bringing that dimension to the fore.9

Emily: Thinking through the personal further, I’d like to return to the idea of the selves we bring to the archive. For example, as a white woman who studies and teaches African American literature and who can trace my mother’s (white) family tree to the Jamestown colony, I have a responsibility to approach the archive with a sense of its role in racial truth and reckoning, not to mention in strengthening the case for reparations. In other words, I’m keenly aware of my responsibility to mine the written records, objects, and even literary texts that inform how we know what we know about Southern history so as to grapple with the genocidal violence and oppression that continues to structure the American present. The essay I wrote with Derrick C. Jones, who, like me, is from North Carolina, but whose family tree is filled with Black freedom fighters whereas mine has at least a few slaveholders, is a poignant example of the necessity of recognizing that we don’t check our bodies at the door to the archive. Being conscientious about what that embodied knowledge means (and the unearned advantages and disadvantages that get attached to our physical selves) is crucial for my approach both to historical research and to contemporary literary studies.

Laura: For me, I’m often thinking about how to put pressure on the narrative of the extraordinary that often underwrites the archive and to think instead about documenting or archiving ordinary lives. Trying to record and access everyday lives is something I bring into the classroom, my scholarship, and my own relationship to my family history. For example, what can future scholars learn about cultural life, contexts, and struggles through the documentation of ordinariness? As a scholar of the past, it seems that almost everything we learn about women is extraordinary, yet we want to avoid thinking about an individual’s experience as representative of the whole, especially since we don’t have all of the data. These special issues attend to this tension between what we do have—in other words, what has been preserved—and what is absent in, say, the vault or the ledger. Further, while I’m tempted to think about this tension between archival presence and absence as a historical concern, it is also true of contemporary life.

Emily: Absolutely, and Smith and Watson’s essay makes precisely this point about the through-lines of women’s self-documentation in the past and the present:

In a sense, each of us is an archive unto ourselves, storing the remembered experiences of our past lives not only in memories but also in artifacts, documents, and memorabilia. In an age of social media and self-curation, this observation may seem obvious, but it is not particular to the contemporary moment. In fact, the history of life writing suggests that women have stored up written records of their personal and family pasts—in diaries, letters, and, when they existed, published works that tracked the stages and earlier versions of their lived experience and feelings, as well as in material objects such as samplers and quilts, photograph albums, and drawings.10

Smith and Watson’s attention to public and personal archives also returns us to Walker’s opening call to look high and low, and ultimately to think capaciously and conscientiously about what constitutes artistic knowledge, discovery, and the act of searching itself.

***

This conversation is only the latest in a series we have had over many years about the significance of the archive not only as a repository of artifacts and documents but also as a crucial epistemological concept for examining the relationship between power, knowledge, and identity, both past and present. Some scholars in these two special issues draw heavily on archival material (Homestead, Bona, and Tuttle) to shed new light on women author’s extra-literary lives, others consider women’s writing as an archive (Smith and Watson, Benjamin, Brown, and Saxton), and still others examine literary interventions in the idea of the archive and its problematic preservation of hegemonic narratives (May, McClaurin, and Vrana). Our Archives (Clark, and Rutter and Jones), Innovations (Ritchie, Clingham, and Friedman), and Notes (Reznik) pieces elucidate the new narratives that emerge from understudied figures, texts, and artifacts.11 Marginalized groups, including women, have maintained what might best be described as an ambivalent relationship to archives; read alongside one another, the essays in our two special issues capture this complex tension between the archive as a space of recuperation and of erasure.

LAURA ENGEL is Professor of English at Duquesne University where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and theatre. She is the author of Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1790-1915 (2019), Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011), Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs (2014), and coeditor of Stage Mothers: Women, Work and the Theater, 1660-1830 (2015). She recently co-curated an exhibition “Artful Nature: Fashion and the Theater, 1770-1830” at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University and is working on a new proj- ect entitled “The Art of The Actress in the Eighteenth Century” for the Cambridge University Press Elements Series. She is the editor of the book series Performing Celebrity published by Delaware University Press.

EMILY RUTH RUTTER is Associate Professor of English at Ball State University. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball Behind the Color Line (2018), The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry (2018), and Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press in fall 2021. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2020).

NOTES

1 Alice Walker, Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A. Smith, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 2014), 1186. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 2012); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: Norton, 2019); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

3 Ahmed, What’s the Use, 20.

4 Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Shaping of Modern Memory,” Archival Science, 2, No. 2 (2002), 13.

5 The two “Women and Archives” issues are Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 40, No. 1 and 2 (2021).

6 Manuscript Fiction in the Age of Print, 1750-1900, accessed 21 January 2021, http://www.manuscriptfiction.org.

7 Jennifer S. Tuttle’s article will appear in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 40, No. 2 (2021).

8 Irma McClaurin, “Archival Interventions and Agency: Irma McClaurin in Conversation with Emily Ruth Rutter about the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive,” interview by Emily Ruth Rutter, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 40, No. 1 (2021), 122.

9 Julie Phillips Brown’s article will appear in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 40, No. 2 (2021).

10 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Alternative, Imaginary, and Affective Archives of the Self in Women’s Life Writing, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 40, No. 1 (2021), 19.

11 The works by Mary Jo Bona, Jennifer S. Tuttle, Julie Phillips Brown, Kirsten T. Saxton, Vivian May, Greg Clingham, Emily C. Friedman, and Alexandra Reznik will appear in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 40, No. 2 (2021).

Introduction, Spring 2019, Vol. 38, No. 1

Apr30

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Carolina Alzate, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá
Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring 2019), 13-15.

Latin American Women Writers

When I was appointed to the editorial board of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature in 2012 for a three-year term, I decided to focus my contribution on strengthening the exchange and dialogue between Spanish-speaking Latin American and American women scholars and their respective critical traditions. Although language and national borders are often thought of as the origin of separate cultural fields, questioning those borders and revealing their arbitrariness has been crucial for women writing and thinking in Latin America since at least the nineteenth century. Building sisterhood across borders has been a way to create networks of intellectual, creative, and political exchange and support that cross not only national borders—in Latin America and elsewhere—but also oceans and languages. Excluded from the brotherhood of citizenship since the creation of republics in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, Latin American women were expected not to leave home, not to leave their nations, religion, or language. Soon after independence, they learned other languages, created their own journals, published their fellow women writers, became translators, traveled, and witnessed, both for themselves and for their women readers, that there are different ways of being a woman and that there is no “natural” path attached to any of them.

These networks are still vital today, both for writers and scholars. They are powerful but can, and need, to grow stronger. For this forum, then, I engaged three young scholars who demonstrate the transnational character of women’s writing in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Their articles show the ways in which American and British work on and by women has been read by some Latin American women or how these women dealt with similar challenges in order to pursue the education, material resources, and intellectual autonomy that would enable them to devote their lives to writing. Publishing articles about these crossroads in English in such a relevant journal as Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature aims to show the ways in which the literary and critical traditions of Latin America and of the United States and Britain are interwoven and shed light on each other. It is also a way for writers and critics to continue the cross-cultural work that has helped women to share and build their lives.

Two of the authors included in this forum, Lucía Stecher and Azuvia Licón, are based in Latin America—Chile and Colombia, respectively—while Claudia Cabello Hutt is currently located in the United States. Stecher is originally from Perú, Licón from México, and Cabello Hutt from Chile, and they are all a part of a network of feminist scholars that have been working together for nearly ten years with frequent meetings mostly in Santiago thanks to the generosity of our colleagues at Universidad de Chile but also at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. The articles focus on late nineteenth-century women’s periodicals, working-class women’s writing and professionalization in the 1920s and 1930s, and feminist activism and criticism from the 1930s and 1950s. The literature discussed in the articles shows women negotiating authority based on their needs and on their particular national, class, and ethnic identities in dialogue with work from Europe and North America.

Licón’s article, entitled “Modernity, Editorship, and Readership in Victorian and Colombian Periodicals: The Girl’s Own Paper and Soledad Acosta’s La Mujer,” “presents a comparative analysis of two late nineteenth-century magazines’ positions on women’s work and independent living,” arguing that the ways in which the two periodicals negotiated “tradition and modernity were influenced by their respective publishing markets and readerships” (p. 17). It is an article about periodicals for and by women and the tensions triggered by modernity when social class and gender intersect. As the article shows, “the study of the nineteenth-century periodical press sheds light on the professionalization of women’s writing, the expansion of public female readership, and the participation of women in public space” (p. 17). The theoretical and critical framework Licón employs helps her explore “the processes, actors, and forces involved in the configuration of the press and its place as a cultural object in the intellectual landscape” of Colombian journalism, which she has recently helped to reconstruct (p. 18). Her study argues that the reduced publishing market in Colombia “resulted in more editorial freedom for Acosta, which translated into not only wider editorial agency (which set a precedent regarding female roles in the public space) but also more conservative discourses on gender” (pp. 18-19).

“Working to Pay for a Room of One’s Own: Modern Women Writers in Latin America,” by Claudia Cabello Hutt, explores the work of two renowned working-class Latin American women poets and essayists, Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) and Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957). Faced with the challenges and opportunities brought by the development of an uneven modernity since the late nineteenth century in Latin America, Storni and Mistral reflect on the material conditions necessary for intellectual and creative work in general as well as on the conditions particular to women who wanted and needed to build and preserve their autonomy. Cabello Hutt shows how, for these two poets, the conditions identified by Virginia Woolf in her essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) were only the beginning of their quests. Examining their concerns about productive working conditions, Cabello Hutt asks: “From where does [the] money come? What happens after writing? What are the non-monetary costs of women’s writing? How does a woman negotiate space and power in the literary field?” (pp. 40-41). This article examines the material conditions women workers faced in Argentina and Chile during the 1920s and 1930s and the many ways in which Mistral and Storni dealt with them. Cabello Hutt argues that writing for newspapers, editing magazines, and establishing networks with writers across the Americas and Europe, while often working in poorly paid jobs, was essential to these authors. This article reveals “the extent to which the interaction of class and gender together with geographic marginality—coming from a province in a country that is peripheral to global culture—shaped their ideas of and strategies for participation in the literary field” (p. 41). Having a job and earning a living shaped their writing, but they longed for more time to devote to their work.

Lucía Stecher focuses on Camila Henríquez Ureña (1894-1973) as a transnational scholar and intellectual in “Camila Henríquez Ureña’s Feminist Essays and Literary Criticism: The Trajectory of a Transnational Intellectual.” Born in the Dominican Republic, where she lived during her early childhood, Henríquez Ureña spent most of her life between Cuba and the United States during the tumultuous decades prior to the Cuban Revolution. Her feminism drew from the traditions of both countries, but she distanced herself from the imperialistic and egotistical tones she found in American feminism. For Henríquez Ureña, Stecher states, “feminism must maintain a critical perspective regarding hegemonic conceptions of liberty and autonomy, which at that time greatly privileged individuality over collective projects and responsibilities” (p. 66). This article is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Latin American feminisms and of the strong movement that developed in Cuba in the 1930s, bringing to light a figure that has not yet been recognized as one of the movement’s most relevant activists. Stecher also studies Henríquez Ureña’s essays on women authors, especially in the epistolary genre, which in many ways makes her “a predecessor to the feminist criticism of the 1980s” (p. 72). As is the case with many other women, Henríquez Ureña’s transnational perspective helped her develop her career and autonomy but also deprived her of recognition within a national critical tradition.

These three articles show some of the main trends in scholarly research on women authors being done in Latin America today. The work in our field has shifted its emphasis for several years now from the study of literary works to the study of their production and circulation and of the material conditions of writing. The contribution of this focus to the comprehension of the Latin American literary field in general has been enormous, and it has also helped characterize and make visible the intellectual networks that have been vital both for women’s writing and for critical understanding.

Carolina Alzate
Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá

Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing

Jun29

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Special Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
Edited by Elisabeth Bekers, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and
Helen Cousins

This special issue aims to appraise the burgeoning field of Black British Women’s Writing in a collection of essays that considers the literary innovations of British women of African and African-Caribbean descent since the 1990s. The issue will highlight the centrality of aesthetic creativity in writing by black British women in order to acknowledge their investments in innovation and their challenges to literary tradition. We invite essays that recognize and celebrate the aesthetic qualities of this writing alongside or instead of the more usual socio-critical investigations, which understand the politics of these texts as a type of sociological information. However, the focus on innovation and experimentation should not neglect the political intent of writing that challenges social, political, and cultural issues. On the contrary, the special issue will be framed by an understanding that literary aesthetics, race, and gender intersect to produce/question particular social and material in/exclusions in specific historical and socio-cultural contexts.

We welcome essays on the full range of genres (including novels, plays, poems, performance, life writing, essays) that are adopted, and adapted, by contemporary black British women writers. We also seek to draw attention to a wide range of writers, beyond individuals who have gained prominence in recent years; therefore, we encourage contributions discussing authors with developing reputations.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

  • Innovation in literary form, for example, through hybrid cross-genre writing, linguistic play, anti-realism, narrative and structural modes that create fragmentation.
  • The ways in which the formal experiments of black British women’s writing ask challenging questions of society.
  • The intersection of race and gender with ideas of literary aesthetics in black British women’s writing.
  • How alternative reading practices can open up explorations of black British women’s aesthetic innovations.
  • The effects a critical focus on aesthetics and innovation has on canon formation for black British women’s writing and beyond.
  • The traditions and norms that limit black British women writers’ artistic expression to “authenticity” and cultural representation.

Initial queries and abstracts are encouraged though final acceptance will be determined by the completed essay. Essays should be 6,000-9,000 words (excluding notes), should conform to the endnote style of the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and should be submitted in Microsoft Word. Please submit essays through email by 1 October 2019 to elisabeth.bekers@vub.be and H.Cousins@newman.ac.uk.