The (Re)Search for Archival Goodness: Toward a Black Feminist Archival Praxis in Education

• In Event: "How We Get Over": Methodological Approaches for Black Herstory in Education

Abstract

In my quest to examine the spiritual activism of historical Black women teachers, I utilized archival methods and historical research inquiry (Craig, 2005; Wilson, 2007; Tight, 2019; Ramsey, et al., 2010). Yet, this proved a particularly difficult task given the violence of the archive; more specifically, its marginalization, fragmentation, and erasure of historical Black women’s narratives, revealing power inequities in the production and construction of history (Farmer, 2018; White, 1987; Harris, 1996; Gross, 2015; Hartman, 2007). Forced to reconcile the limits and impossibility of the archive, Black women herstorians—or Black women historians of Black women—have suggested a methodological reorientation for quilting and composing alternative narratives of Black women’s existence.
Farmer (2018) argues that “Black women’s voices are there to be found in the casual omissions, the deliberate silences, their traces left in images, court records, bodily scars, and jail cell confessions” (p. 293). Further, Fuentes (2016) dismantles the notion that new archival sources are required; instead, she encourages scholars of Black women’s history to revisit preexisting sources, discern their richness and diversity, and engage in deep reflection to extract those aspects of their lives that remain untouched. Similarly, Taylor (2008) suggests thinking and theorizing from preexisting documents, not only to recover voices but also to disrupt canonical discourses that have too often rendered Black women invisible. For Hine (1997), reclaiming historical Black women’s stories goes beyond uncovering facts. Baumgartner (2019) suggests such an analytical framework, arguing that Black women herstorians’ methodological reorientation toward historical research of Black women is a method of “archival optimism” (p. 77), which recognizes how racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression continue to shape history and the archive. Simultaneously, it embraces a commitment to utilizing what is already there, available and possible in archival collections.
I posit a methodological reorientation and analytic framework for archival goodness, recognizing the ways that Black women are found in the shadows, interstices, silences, and negative spaces of the historical picture; while at the same time, demonstrating a commitment to (re)member the familiar, breathe new life into the archive and “mine the forgotten” (White, 1987). This Black feminist centered approach to historical inquiry resists the typical preoccupation with documenting pathology and insufficiency in the histories of the U.S. Black educational experiences (Siddle-Walker, 1996). Instead, I engage in what Dillard (2021) has theorized as (re)search, or the ways in which we search again for something about Black heritage that we believe will teach us something new about our history, humanity, and culture, as well as an openness to being changed in the process. The nuance in this (re)search is that it is a quest for beauty in the midst of terror, a “celebration of and in and through our suffering” (Moten, 2017, p. xiii). The (re)search for archival goodness is a communal and ancestral obligation to developing methods of radically loving and (re)membering blackness in a world premised on our historical erasure, with the belief that history, or herstory, is our future.

Author

• Amber Neal-Stanley, Purdue University
  Presenting Author