Ulteriori informazioni
Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of the Black collectors who dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south.
Sommario
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Value, Order, Risk: Experiments in Black Archiving
1. Thinking Black, Collecting Black: Schomburg’s Desiderata and the Radical World of Black Bibliophiles
2. A “History of the Negro in Scrapbooks”: The Gumby Book Studio’s Ephemeral Assemblies
3. Defiant Libraries: Virginia Lee and the Secrets Kept by Good Bookladies
4. Unauthorized Inquiries: Dorothy Porter’s Wayward Catalog
5. A Space for Black Study: The Hall Branch Library and the Historians Who Never Wrote
6. Mobilizing Manuscripts: L. D. Reddick and Black Archival Politics
Epilogue
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Info autore
Laura E. Helton is an assistant professor of English and history at the University of Delaware. She is a coeditor of the digital humanities project “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg.”
Riassunto
During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.
Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.
