What do we mean when we invoke the idea of the Black Archive? What are the conditions, genres and modes of expression through which Black life, imagination and desire become legible? These questions complicate how we understand the concept of the archive. If Black life has variously been described through terms such as fugitivity, marronage, and waywardness, then any engagement with its archival footprint will have to grapple with these logics. Black archives come into existence through a refraction, a re-staging of epistemological temporality, a re-enchantment of the material world of everyday existence, in excess and beyond the library, the museum, the university, the nation-state and other institutional infrastructures that seek Black containment.
The Black Archival Imagination Lab examines how Black experiences have posed problems with regards to representation across imperial encounters. It takes seriously narrative and creative reasoning, and as such, genres such as the novel, poetry, film, photography, sound, critical fabulation and digital spaces in thinking through the idea of the Black archive. A key objective of the Lab is to think through these genres as methodological interventions in understanding what the Black archive is. We do not take the Black archive to be unitary or static but as mutating repertoires in the figuration and preservation of Black experience as well as provocations of what the past and future might look like. But we can also think of the Black archive as endangered, erased, possible as well as made and constrained by the conditions of dispersal that define Africa and the Black diaspora, past and present.
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