Shadow Archives

Jean-Christophe Cloutier

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

Shadow Archives

The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Jean-Christophe Cloutier

https://doi.org/10.7312/clou19330

Overview
Contents

About this book

Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers and provides a nuanced view of how archives shape literary history.

Author information

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) and editor of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d’hommage (2016).

Reviews

Steve Nathans-Kelly:
Most compelling is Cloutier’s overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists—Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison—approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies.

Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism:
As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration, Shadow Archives demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the “archival sensibility” of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier’s book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang—an exhilarating reminder of the “belated timeliness” and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete.

William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis:
No novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is—hands and laptops down—one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In Shadow Archives, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who’s who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship.

Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination:
Shadow Archives is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers—Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison—actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University:
In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms “archival sensibility.” Grounded in Cloutier’s astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections, Shadow Archives reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry; Shadow Archives is a welcome addition to literary criticism.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	xxi
Introduction: “Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang,” or The Lifecycles of Twentieth- Century African American Literary Papers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Black Special Collections and the Midcentury Rise of the Institutional Collector Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
2. Claude McKay’s Archival Rebirth: Provenance and Politics in Amiable with Big Teeth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
3. “At Once Both Document and Symbol”: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and the Lafargue Clinic Photographic Archive Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
4. An Interlude Concerning the Vanishing Manuscripts of Ann Petry Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
5. “Too Obscure for Learned Classification”: Comic Books, Counterculture, and Archival Invisibility in Invisible Man Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Coda. Disappointed Bridges: A Note on the Discovery of Amiable with Big Teeth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Appendix: Artifact Biographies or Vagabond Itineraries of Key Documents Discussed in This Book Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313
Permissions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	361
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	363

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 29 b&w photographs

eBook

Published: September 3, 2019
ISBN: 9780231550246