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 “An experiment in archive”: Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus” and Contemporary Black Female Poets’ Conceptual Epistemologies

Laura VranaUniversity of South Alabama
Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 2021), 69-94

This article intervenes in debates about experimental poets’ ethical obliga- tions by examining Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015), a long poem for which she drew all the text from written descriptions of millennia of visual art depicting Black female figures. It elucidates Lewis’s engagement with these archives as a key contribution both to revisionist archival scholarship and to conceptual aesthetics. Focusing equally on Lewis’s research and writing process and on the resulting poem, this paper demonstrates that “Voyage of the Sable Venus” refutes the widespread claim that conceptual aesthetics produce “unreadable” texts. Instead, Lewis insists that close reading both visual art and her poetry—rather than succumbing to distant reading or data-driven approaches—constitutes an ethical act that is necessary to correct misrepresentations of Black women in Western art and life, historically and today.

This entry was posted on May 3, 2021, in Abstract.

“An archive of accounts”: This Bridge Called My Back in Feminist Movement

Meredith BenjaminBarnard College
Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 2021), 45-68

This article reads the now-classic feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981) in the context of the archival materials surrounding its production, reception, and post-publication circulation. The archived papers of the anthology’s editors and advisors, including Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde, as well as the files of its original publisher, Persephone Press, reveal dimen- sions of the anthology beyond the published book: from the affective labor involved in its development and editing to its re-organizations and re-embodiments in staged perfor- mances. The anthology’s attempts to create freedom for movement and the ways in which an archival approach illuminates these attempts are epitomized by a script preserved both in the records of Persephone Press and in Anzaldúa’s papers, which the essay considers in detail in its final section. Responding to calls for new narratives of feminist writing and history, this essay reads This Bridge Called My Back as a dynamic work, both the result of movement and an impetus to new forms of movement.

This entry was posted on May 3, 2021, in Abstract.

Alternative, Imaginary, and Affective Archives of the Self in Women’s Life Writing

Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan
Julia Watson, The Ohio State University
Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 2021), 15-44

This essay interrogates and expands conventional views of the archive by considering how subjects who write themselves engage in processes of archival thinking and practices of curation in autobiographical discourse. It tracks features of alternative archives of the self in life writing through six microstudies that engage different concerns in autobiographical texts by women in recent centuries. The issues explored are affective archives of feelings and impressions; archives for rewriting the past; the imaginary archives of possible selves; digital archives of embodiment and desire; archives in global circulation; and archival remediation. The conclusion poses questions for those developing theoretical frameworks and methodologies to interpret the archival imaginary in the lives women inscribe and the afterlives they acquire. This article looks to expand methodologies in the field of archival studies that do not sufficiently attended to the status of the evidentiary in autobiographical materials and the archival imaginary mobilized in some autobiographical acts and practices and their afterlives.

This entry was posted on May 3, 2021, in Abstract.

Spring 2021, Vol. 40, No. 1

WOMEN AND ARCHIVES, PART 1

Women and Archives, 5-14 [full essay]
Laura Engel and Emily Ruth Rutter

ARTICLES

Alternative, Imaginary, and Affective Archives of the Self in Women’s Life Writing, 15-44 [abstract]
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

“An archive of accounts”: This Bridge Called My Back in Feminist Movement, 45-68 [abstract]
Meredith Benjamin

 “An experiment in archive”: Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus” and Contemporary Black Female Poets’ Conceptual Epistemologies, 69-94 [abstract]
Laura Vrana

Willa Cather’s Letters in the Archive, 95-118 [abstract]
Melissa J. Homestead

INTERVIEW

Archival Interventions and Agency: Irma McClaurin in Conversation with Emily Ruth Rutter about the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive, 119-130 [full interview]

INNOVATIONS

Archival Relations: Women and Regional Theater in the Kathleen Barker Archive, 131-136
Fiona Ritchie

ARCHIVES

Discoveries in the Archives: New Sarah Harriet Burney Letters at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, 137-150
Lorna J. Clark

“The rights and privileges all people should enjoy”: Reflections on Archival Collaboration and Black Women’s Epistolary Resistance, 151-160
Emily Ruth Rutter with Derrick C. Jones

REVIEWS

Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution, by Kacy Dowd Tillman. 161-162
Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch

A Double Life, by Karolina Pavlova, translated from Russian by Barbara Heldt. 163-165
Catherine Ciepiela

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History, by Michelle Medeiros. 166-168
Leila Gómez

Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career, by Daryl W. Palmer. 169-170
Christine E. Kephart

Faraway Women and the “Atlantic Monthly,” by Cathryn Halverson. 171-173
Miranda Hickman

Christina Stead and the Matter of America, by Fiona Morrison. 174-176
Michael Ackland

Ukranian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan, by Oleksandra Wallo. 177-179
Tetyana Dzyadevych

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction, by Robin E. Field. 180-181
Jerrica Jordan

Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture, by Karen E. H. Skinazi. 182-184
Susan K. Thomas

Reviews, Fall 2020, Vol. 39, No. 2

Unbinding“The Pillow Book”: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic, by Gergana Ivanova, 349-351
Joannah Peterson

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, by Samara Anne Cahill, 352-353
Misty G. Anderson

Religion Around Mary Shelley, by Jennifer L. Airey, 354-356
Staci Stone

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, by Jocelyn Harris. The Making of Jane Austen, by Devoney Looser, 357-358
Natasha Duquette

Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism, by Laura Scuriatti, 359-361
Tara Prescott-Johnson

The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance, by Hannah Roche, 362-364
Emma Heaney

Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange, by Rebecca Colesworthy, 365-365
Elizabeth Anderson

Women’s Writing in Canada, by Patricia Demers, 366-379
Patricia Keeney

Bright, by Duanwad Pimwana, translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, 370-372
Janit Feangfu

This entry was posted on December 7, 2020, in Reviews.