"There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or better still on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn't exist… the book had to". -Toni Morrison, World Magazine, 1989
In the above quote, Toni Morrison offers up her 1989 novel, Beloved, as a literary memorial. In the absence of physical markers embedded in the built environment recognizing the lives of the enslaved, Morrison writes, “the book had to.” While there are more memorials to the enslaved now then there were in 1989, this issue of how to recognize not just the lives of the enslaved but
Black life more broadly, given the challenges of the archive as well as ongoing conflicts surrounding public memorials, remains an active one. More recent museums, archives, and memorials such as the National African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Obama Library, the South Side Home Movie Project, Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive and the renaming of Douglass Park in Chicago for Frederick and Anna Douglass reflect some of the recent efforts to archive, preserve, and memorialize Black life and culture. But what counts as a memorial, who deserves memorialization, and what form should a memorial take remains an active question.
Some of these questions are being taken up by the Mellon Foundation via their Monuments Project, a five-year, quarter-billion-dollar commitment to support efforts to “recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.” Mellon is funding efforts to build new monuments, memorials, or historic storytelling spaces, contextualize existing monuments or memorials through installations, research, and education, and relocate existing monuments or memorials. But while Mellon’s efforts seem largely geared toward physical memorials in built space, Morrison’s theorization of the literary as a site for memorialization superseding the built environment continues to raise questions about the range of methods and modes for memorialization beyond plaques, statues, and benches.
This cluster project asks students to think about the function of the memorial in this more expansive sense. Who has the right to decide what to memorialize? What is the relationship between speculating about the present and the future and memorializing the past? What are literature’s tools of memorialization and how have those tools been used to memorialize Black life in particular, especially given its treatment as disposable and unmournable at key moments in our past and present? When do the projects of memorialization and fabulation go hand in hand? Research projects might consider these large questions in direct ways but might also attend to the status, history, and upkeep of particular physical or virtual monuments to Black artists—everything from more formal works such as murals and statuary but also mixtapes, airbrushed t-shirts, and roadside temporary shrines. How and where has black art, artistry, and aesthetics been memorialized? What can we learn by mapping and studying these sites? What new forms of memorials and monuments might we imagine that can continue to do this work?
With the successful launch of the Black Shakespeare(ans) Database, the academic year 2021-2022 and the start of 2022-2023 have represented an opportunity to develop new projects. At its peak, the cluster had three research assistant members majoring in Anthropology, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, English, or some combination of the three, whose work in the cluster has focused on archival theory and practice in Black Studies. Due to students’ varying levels of familiarity with the scholarly literature in this area, faculty sponsors initially led an extracurricular reading group (covering major critics like Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes and appropriate theories and methods) to prepare students to undertake their own research projects while also providing guidance in practical dimensions of archival research in the field of Black Studies, including discussion of the distinctions between state and grassroots archives and orientation in the growing number of digital archives on Black life in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. Over the past year this groundwork has supported project-affiliated students like Gabby Mahabeer (BA, ‘22), in research focused on historical and contemporary archives of queer life in the Caribbean and its diasporas that has already culminated in an external internship with the Caribbean Equality Project in South Florida (where Mahabeer worked in visual and documentary archives to develop a proposed doctoral project); and Gabby Kinlock (BA, ’23), who is currently developing a documentary film based on her summer research in Germany on the afterlives of the Afro-Deustche movement of the 1980s.
Among our core faculty, SJ Zhang and Kaneesha Parsard have agreed to continue leading the project for the coming years and will draw on their extensive expertise in relevant areas (most centrally Zhang’s scholarship on seventeenth through nineteenth-century archives of Black and Indigenous slavery, marronage, and resistance in the United States and Caribbean; and Parsard’s work on how gender and sexuality structure race, labor, and capital in the long wake of slavery in the Americas). For the remainder of this academic year 2022-2023 and the following year 2023-2024, the Black Studies cluster project will continue supporting individual student research initiatives while also collectively working to develop a blog or similar web-based project where past and current project-affiliated students can publish their findings in durable form, share updates on their research, and communicate their findings to a wider public. The Black Studies cluster project is also developing plans for a collectively organized campus exhibition (at the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library or a similar venue), where students can display primary archival finds, communicate their significance, and publicize the research projects that have scaffolded these archival discoveries.
In addition to the faculty co-sponsors of the project, students’ work in the cluster will be supported by several colleagues with overlapping interests (including Noémie Ndiaye, Tina Post, Christopher Taylor, Riley Snorton, and Kenneth Warren) and a number of relevant courses including “Black Quietude” (Post); “Archival Methods: Race, Indigeneity, and Gender Before 1900” (Zhang); “Black in Colonial America: Three Women” (Zhang); “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Issues and Methods” (Warren); “Forms of labor in Caribbean Literature” (Hansen).
Once again, both our internship awardees and other interested students will be supported by our departmental Writing and Research Advisers (Nell Pach and Sylvie Boulette) as they conceive and develop independent research projects.