Towards a Method of Black Feminist Archival Bricolage: Memory-Keeping within, beneath and beyond the Archive

Abstract

This essay considers the erasure and visceral laceration of Black women’s herstories from white, masculinized archives, timelines, and cartographies of the past. It simultaneously centers the identity-oriented and historically anchored ways everyday Black women collect, curate, and pass down personal archives for the purpose of intergenerational survival and uplift. In centering the life writings and oral narratives of three Black women in the author’s immediate family, this essay disrupts archival silences around the movements, mobilities, and resistance strategies of everyday Black women; rather, it reveals how Black grandmothers, mothers, and othermothers continue to sustain Black women’s viability and visibility through their work as memory-keepers and family historians. By centering the life herstories of her grandmother, mother, and aunt, the author engages in a process of Black feminist archival bricolage, weaving together fragmented pieces of distinct yet overlapping life narratives that—when put together—tell a more complete and complex story of Black women’s movements, resistances, and archival pedagogies. In doing so, archival fissures are collaboratively challenged in order to reclaim, recover, and recenter the invisible cartographies of everyday Black women.

Keywords:

• Black feminist thought
• memory-keeping
• archival research
• resistance
• mobility

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge and thank my mother, grandmother, and aunt for contributing their candid, heartfelt stories to this piece. I also want to give a special thanks to my Aunt Wanda, who shared her story with me before her untimely passing in July 2021. We began this writing journey together back in 2018 and, although she is not around to see her words published in print, I know that she is in the ancestral realm beaming with pride, knowing that her story will finally be told.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Gladden, “These Stories.”

2 Emswiler, “‘Conditions of Possibility’”; Gordon-Chipembere, Representation and Black Womanhood; McClaurin, Black Feminist Anthropology.

3 Shockley, “Oral History”; Lykes, “Discrimination.”

4 Ghaddar and Caswell, “‘To Go Beyond’”; Cooper, “Digital Demands”; Haberstock, “Participatory Description.”

5 Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand, “Critical Archival Studies”; Ramirez, “Being Assumed”; Cifor and Wood, “Critical Feminism.”

6 Ndlovu, “‘Body’ of Evidence”; McClaurin, Black Feminist Anthropology.

7 Hunt, “Feeding the Machine”; Davis, Women, Race, and Class.

8 Nishikawa, “Morrison’s Things.”

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History.”

12 Morrison, “Behind the Making of The Black Book.”

13 Ibid.

14 Collins, “Learning.”

15 Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus.

16 Nishikawa, “Morrison’s Things.”

17 Mitchell, “Representation and Black Womanhood”; Kalua, “Venus Reconfigured.”

18 Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus; Gordon-Chipembere, Representation and Black Womanhood.

19 Nash, “Practicing Love.”

20 Pérez and Williams, “Black Feminist Activism”; Matandela, “Redefining.”

21 Collins, “Black Feminist Thought.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tiera Tanksley

Tiera Tanksley is an Assistant Professor of Equity, Diversity, and Justice at the University of Colorado Boulder. Broadly, her research examines the intersectional impacts of race, gender, class, and age on the experiences of Black women and girls in media, technology, and education.