More than any other scholar, Jean-Christophe Cloutier has elucidated the problems of archival methodology, biography, and literary history that coincided with the rise of institutional collections of African American literary papers in the twentieth century. His new book, Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, reveals how the African American literary imagination from the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s to the present—such as in the works of Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry—has employed the archive as a theme, trope, or actual source of historiography. But he also shows how the archive has been a crucial institution in and of itself. The archive possesses its own modern history of human resources, collection facilities, and scientific methodologies; it mediates the private, public, and commercial access of enthusiasts and experts alike to the personal and literary records of African American writers. Cloutier verifies the unique challenges that...
Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature
Gene Andrew Jarrett is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. Specializing in African American literature from the eighteenth century to the present, he is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature(2007) andRepresenting the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature(2011); he is also the editor of several collections of African American literature and literary criticism. His next book,Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, a comprehensive biography of the Dayton-born African American poet, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in Spring 2022.
Gene Andrew Jarrett is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. Specializing in African American literature from the eighteenth century to the present, he is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature(2007) andRepresenting the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature(2011); he is also the editor of several collections of African American literature and literary criticism. His next book,Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, a comprehensive biography of the Dayton-born African American poet, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in Spring 2022.
Gene Andrew Jarrett; Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. The New England Quarterly 2021; 94 (4): 604–607. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00924
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