Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Since the mid-1990s, interest in archival research has grown dramatically in the field of African American literary scholarship. On the one hand, there are those who, in the absence of archives about the “many thousands gone,” attempt to fill the gap with imagined scenarios, as in Saidiya Hartmann's Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the African Slave Route. On the other hand are those who commit themselves to rummaging through old cardboard boxes and dusty stacks of forgotten papers. Shadow Archives is both a product of that development and a sign of the growing attention to how archives come into being, as well as theoretical perspectives on archives in African American studies. Jean-Christophe Cloutier's book is distinctive in framing itself partly within the ambit of archive studies as such—treating the sort of things professional archivists and records administrators study, such as cataloging systems, what to include in finding aids,...