Engaging the quiet: Black Matriarchal Archives and pedagogies of listening

• In Event: Composing otherwise: Black Studies and the future of arts-based education research

Abstract

This research advances a pedagogy of listening and explores the question: How does photography act as a methodology of memory and curated identity within Black matriarchal archives? Examining the practice of “quiet photography” theorized by Tina M. Campt in Listening to Images, I seek to be in conversation as to how methods of visual interpretation of the Black archive can expand. As I currently ground my photographic analysis in Campt’s theories, I use her theoretical framework of “sonic frequencies" to understand Black everyday acts of refusal (Campt, 2017). I focus on how refusal emerges not only in resistance to dominant forces, but as generative practices embedded in daily movements often overlooked (Campt, 2017). Framed within a Black feminist lens, my research aims to approach the archive, holding both the precarity of Black life but also the creative strategies we live out to access futurity in spite of it.

Using arts-based (Rolling, 2013) and autoethnographic methods (Ellis & Bochner, 2011) I engage my own photography and the photographic archive my Nana began, looking closely, listening intently and responding to moments across generations. Although my data pertains to the entirety of my family albums, it more specifically presents itself in images I have rushed past myself. These images are ones that are not as loud or clear, they may be blurry or askew, or, not particularly what someone would think to be momentous enough for the flash of a camera. But as the image was still taken, printed and archived it proves to have been momentous to us. I consider these to be images that may exist in the periphery of the archive and our visual perception, but contain significant weight in the telling of the Black narrative.
Going back to these images and exercising the practice of listening, what is heard and felt is the embodied expressions of care and preparation. Though they may be still images, my family was never stagnant, as the archive reveals our access to futurity in the ways we gathered, equipped, clothed and held one another. It is the visual evidence of the daily practices that refuse dominant narratives, limiting Black life. From this I believe that Black matriarchal archives are visuals that realize cross-generational support, planning and presence. This access, both attained in the present but also passed on as an inheritance for future generations like my own.

Centering the Black archive (Campt, 2017), this study deepens understanding of how Black matriarchal archives contain the aesthetic evidence of intention and care. These are not passive objects or family memorabilia alone but active sites that refuse traditional ways of knowing.
Using the photographic archive, Black life challenges normative practices in order to tell our own stories and create pathways to futurity. The scholarly significance of this research is found in being another voice aiming to expand how aesthetic pedagogical methodologies groud and critically interpret Black ways of knowing.

Author

• Sydney Summey, The Ohio State University