What is the Black Archive? Reflections on a Theme

I think a lot of researchers have had the following experience:

After some time buried in an archive, searching for something, anything, that aligns with your aims for the day (or even week) of your visit, you discover something—perhaps hidden somewhere unexpected; perhaps plain but thus-far, in the bodies of work that you know, unremarked upon—that reorients your perspective. Maybe it contradicts something you’d long thought was true. Maybe it confirms something you’d long expected but couldn’t evidence. Possibly it throws your whole field into disarray. Often, more intimately, it just moves you in a way you didn’t anticipate.

            My interest in archives as a topic begins with an encounter like the one(s) above. Specifically, it was in the University of Texas’s Ransom Centre, the item a curt note to the Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon from his publisher. The revelation it contained wasn’t wild—it was far from field-shifting or destroying—but it confirmed something I knew I knew about the author and his work that I couldn’t find the evidence to prove. This object, a little letter in a comparatively small archival collection, made it plain: my hunch was correct. I was elated.

Similar encounters have happened for me, since, again and again. Some recent work on the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris revealed his publishers to be as baffled about his writing as everyone else in a way that made me laugh out loud. Another encounter showed another author I find fascinating, Edgar Mittelholzer, in his simultaneous rigidity and extreme vulnerability and extended the path forward through his work I’ve been slowly cutting over a decade.

I’m currently at work on a book reassessing the Caribbean Artists Movement of England’s volatile ‘60s and ‘70s. I’ve spent more time in archives than I have ever before—taking lifts into sub- sub-basements, shaking my head over user-unfriendly opening times, mouldering on delayed trains and staying in hotels of varying quality across the country. In the fantastic, vast Andrew Salkey collection at the British Library, I spent weeks and weeks reading correspondence with the famous, field-shaping Jamaican writer, and saw again and again the same arc: writers contacting Salkey when they were young, passionate, full of life and hope and talent; those same writers growing old, losing their sense of promise, weighed down by new job and family responsibilities; then, in their final letters, freed of the many strains of middle age—children grown, debts paid, jobs mastered or left—and energetic, before their letters thin out, very old age arrives, and life, again, surprises with its grace and challenges. Reading multiple versions of this day after day, rewinding and fast-forwarding, was strange, sublime, often painful.

I’m a Black scholar and the archives I work within, those that carry the materials of Caribbean and Black British writers, are, compared to the archives of the mainstays of English literature, relatively untapped. That makes my work, for me at least if not my readers, thrilling; but, along with the excitement of sometimes discovering things that few of my contemporaries will have ever seen, the alignment of my research area with my embodiment—or at least the symbolic weight given to my embodiment—brings uncertainties. What are my responsibilities to the writers I read about? How can I support the often vastly under-funded archives where these collections are contained? How do I address the contradictions in the stories I find? What do I do with complexities, failures, lies?

I’ve carried these questions with me for years, and found, in 2024, in the former Director of Black Archives at the British Library, Kamara Dyer-Simms, a very interested interlocutor. We both wondered about the why, where, and how, of Black archives, especially Black British archives, and were supported and encouraged by the head of the Eccles Centre at the British Library, Polly Russell, to extend our particular interests into an event series. From that interest and encouragement, with the generous support of TORCH funding, What Is the Black Archive? was born.

The series went through a series of draft structures, but has become a sequence of events exploring all the questions thrown up by archival encounters and designed to centralise all of the unique problems faced in research into Black lives in—and connected to—Britain. The first event, held at the British Library on 26 January 2025 launched the series and brought together scholars, students, heritage professionals, publishers, artists and writers to discuss their experiences with Black archives. It opened space to consider the ‘archive’ expansively, focused on cultural forms of remembrance that offer alternatives to formal archival collections, zoomed in on questions of presence and absence, featured talks on archives past and present and located across the world, and offered presentations from artists who reflected on the counter-archives created by their work. The second event, held at TORCH on 22 May, took the form of a special seminar, again open to anyone interested, on Saidiya Hartman’s landmark essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’. ‘Venus’ both foregrounds the particular traumas contained with Black archives and sketches a radical alternative to looking away. With interventions from three scholars who use the archive with methods both close to and distant from Hartman’s—Dr Nicole King of Exeter College, Oxford; Dr Asha Rogers of the University of Birmingham; and writer/scholar Joanna Brown of Roehampton University—those present were encouraged to think through the possibilities and limitations of Hartman’s approach and consider its implications.

There remain two final events in the series. The next will be a reading and discussion with the Ugandan poet, researcher, and founder of the Obsidian Foundation, Nick Makoha on his archive-based creative practice. Returning to the question of artistic works as archival alternatives, Nick will draw the audience into a discussion of how archives function, and fail to function, and how poetry, in particular, can respond. The last What Is the Black Archive? event will return to the British Library on 29 November and carry the theme ‘Reparations and Transformations’ to consider how archives work on us as we work on them. Bringing together presenters from across the series, and featuring a keynote from Kennetta Hammond-Perry, its aim is to unite a broad collective in consideration of the responsibilities and possibilities for curators, scholars, students and readers of Black archives.

Many names have been conjured in our conversations so far— Sylvia Erike, Stuart Hall, Kathleen McKittrick, Charles I, Heidi Mirza, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, William Gladstone, Diane Abbott, Erna Brodber, Jessica Huntley, Jacques Derrida, Kamau Brathwaite, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Eric Roach, John La Rose … to name just a few. Through the invocation of forebears and forerunners, of inspirational figures and instructive thinkers, it’s become clear that the question of the Black archive is by no means a new one. It’s also clear that practice in this arena has been animated by sense of urgency and threat. The study of Black lives has waxed and waned as a public priority. Institutional interest in preserving the words and works of Black Britons has faded and flared. Nonetheless, through this, small groups have continued to collect, present, and preserve materials for those living and for those to come. It’s been exciting to play a small role in this generations-long project, and my hope is that the series will inspire others by showing how much more can be thought and done.

What Is the Black Archive? Is a year-long series of discussions that have considered the ‘What’ of Black archives in two ways: what sites and spaces should we consider archives for Black Britons, and what can we do with those archives to transform our understanding of the communal lives they contain? Our final two events are in November 2025: 

The Author in the Black Archive: An Evening of Poetry with Nick Makoha

Monday 10 November, Curio Books, Oxford [rescheduled from the spring]

A reading and discussion with the Ugandan poet, researcher, and founder of the Obsidian Foundation, Nick Makoha on his archive-based creative practice. Circling the question of artistic works as archival alternatives, Nick will draw the audience into a discussion of how archives function, and fail to function, and how poetry, in particular, can respond. 

What is the Black Archive? Reparations and Transformation

Saturday 29 November, British Library

Bringing together artists in all media, researchers,  heritage professionals and the general public, this all-day event explores how Black archives shape—and are shaped by—their readers and act as spaces of creativity, confrontation, and repair. It is the final event in the What Is the Black Archive? series and seeks to strengthen and expand networks, enhancing understanding of Black study in a time when it is, again, under threat.