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 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 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.