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...

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