Performing the Archive in the Americas

The starting point for this special issue was a pre-organized panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture that took place in 2018 and featured m. nourbeSe philip, author of Zong! (Wesleyan 2008), as the opening creative keynote speaker and Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora (Harvard 2003), as the closing critical keynote. Postcolonial performances of the archive in the Americas seemed a compelling subject for discussion for a panel inspired by the work of the conference keynote speakers. In the area of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, in fact, this is an essential area of intervention, as the archive here extends beyond traditional definitions that associate it with an institutional and legislative body of authorized and authenticating documents. Working in and through the archive, artists from this diaspora have turned historical memory away from tropes of resurrection to ones of construction, redefining the archive as a performative site where the boundaries between past, present, and future, public and private, reality and fiction are renewed with each act of access. In the hands of writers, artists, and thinkers, the received archive ceases to be a heritage, an obligation binding us in perpetuity. It becomes rather a source of agency—resourceful and repeatable. To borrow a phrase by Jay Bernard, a Black British poet, archivist, and activist of Caribbean origin, the descendants of the enslaved might be “haunted” by history. And yet when Black artists and writers repurpose the archive, they “haunt it back” (2019, xi).