Archive [Yellow] Fever reads Black Feminist approaches to the archive of slavery in the Caribbean in order to ask questions about the scholar’s embodied relationship in the present to historical documents and artifacts produced in the context of Atlantic world slave societies. How is a scholar affected by and implicated in the production such an archive? This class explores this and other questions produced by this scholarship, with a particular focus on historical and contemporary concerns about what enslavement does to the physical body and the affective impacts of institutionalized bondage. The course also provides an introduction in methods of working in historical and contemporary archives. We will explore themes of contagion, sex, birth, and death by reading fictional, archival, methodological and theoretical texts, including the work of, Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Steedman, Jennifer L. Morgan, Jenny Sharpe, Robin Coste Lewis, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Bryan Edwards, James Grainger. The class will make two trips to special collections, one to view archival texts from the period and another to find an archival object of the student’s choosing (relevant to their own research interests) that will provide the topic of their final paper. This course is offered as part of the Migrations Research Sequence. (1650-1830, 1830-1940) This is a research and criticism seminar intended for third- and fourth-year English majors. Students may petition for entry.