As mentioned in class on December 1, some of you may find that in researching your digital project you are unable to find resources to speak to your topic. In the first librarian class visit, we discussed erasure and power relations in terms of whose stories get told, and what gets archived as part of public memory.
Dr. Joyce MacDonald used the poetry of Lucille Clifton as one of several entry points in her recent talk "Flying Home: Blackness and Memory in Caroline Randall Williams’ Lucy Negro, Redux "
“they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.”
– Lucille Clifton
Dr. MacDonald pointed out that memory and knowledge are often in sources controlled by the state, which determines what to archive and who can access that memory and knowledge. She asserts that no one archives black women's resistance, so this creates the need to search for traces of their existence in what others write about them, or, alternatively to freely imagine how we might reconstruct such histories and how these stories might fit into the historical record.
As Dr. Abegunde reminded the class, you should draw on all of these concepts to see these silences in the archive as an opportunity to investigate and discuss this absence of material.
These concepts and methodologies of how to engage with silences in the archive are drawn directly from the work of black studies scholars. You may find the resources below useful in thinking this through (I have highlighted the most relevant passages).