Sankofa Imperatives: Black Women, Digital Methods, and the Archival Turn

Abstract

This essay takes up the archival turn—what the author is calling the “sankofa imperative”—in digital spaces, using the work of the Colored Conventions Project to ask broader questions about the recovery of Black women’s life stories and organizing efforts. Does a collective, distributed model of recuperative history in a digital, digitized, database age change both the equation and the ways in which scholars grapple with the argument that “the violence of Atlantic slavery was so great, and the limits of the archive so absolute, that no amount of historical recovery could properly describe it, let alone undo its damage,” as the editors of Social Text’s special issue “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom and the Archive” put it? Do historical calculations of slavery, Black unfreedom and its afterlives, and their accompanying archival violence function differently when recovery methods extend beyond the temporal limits that analog intellectual production demands? How does conventional (or pre-digital) scholarship in print formats differ from non-analog timelines that enable additional materials to be recovered, uploaded, and aggregated collectively and over time? This essay examines collective digital practices that can piece together scattered Black women’s archives and historical shards.

Keywords:

• archives
• digital repositories
• Black women
• archival violence
• recovery

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Many of the first novels published by the authors Christian would teach and write about had been published in 1970, the year she earned her PhD. She recounted this history to graduate students, including myself, in the late 1980s.

2 I would like to thank Takiyah Franklin for her correspondence and for her research on Barbara Christian. My recollection as a former graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a mentee of Dr. Christian is that Dr. Christian and Dr. Sherley Anne Williams were the first two Black women to be promoted to associate and full professor across all of the University of California campuses, but there is no ready documentation as to who broke which barrier. In an email of 26 October 2019, Franklin affirms that “every person I spoke to believes without doubt Professor Christian was the first Black woman to earn full professor in the UC [University of California] system. Barbara was promoted to full professor step II in 1986 after receiving tenure in 1978.” Christian’s promotion papers, housed at the Bancroft Library, do not mention that she was the first Black woman at the University of California, Berkeley to be promoted to associate or full professor, or that she was the first to be promoted to full professor across all of the University of California campuses. They do not note or celebrate this achievement, or calibrate the cost of it. See “Promotion Files.”

3 Thanks to Frances Smith Foster’s careful scholarship, scholars|readers now know about fiction featuring Black women protagonists from the earliest Black newspaper Freedom’s Journal through Frances E. W. Harper’s serialized novels in the Christian Recorder. Pauline Hopkins published three novels in the Colored American and Julia Collins also wrote a serialized novel. When Christian’s scholarly interests were rebuffed, even recent classics such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig had not yet been accepted as Black women’s texts, or rediscovered.

4 Helton et al., “The Question of Recovery,” 5.

5 ibid., 2.

6 This work of course builds on earlier foundational work on nineteenth-century Black women by Elsa Barkley Brown, Frances Smith Foster, Martha S. Jones, Carla L. Peterson, and many others.

7 Another piece could be written about our cousins and community in Black digital humanities, but the second annual volume of Current Research in Digital History (2019) asks its authors to highlight historical arguments and interpretations.

8 De Vera, “‘We the Ladies,” 2.

9 Patterson, “Toward Meaning Making,” http://commonplace.online/article/toward-meaning-making-in-the-digital-age-black-women-black-data-and-colored-conventions/. Accessed July 8, 2023.

10 Colored Conventions Project, “Colored Convention Project Principles.” See Principle 2. https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/

11 Colored Conventions Project, “Instructor Memo of Understanding.” For more on calls for formal protocols that help ensure accountability, see Foreman, “A Riff.”

12 Foreman, Casey, and Patterson, The Colored Conventions Movement. See also Ali, “Muslims in Brooklyn.”

13 Williams-Forson, “What Did They Eat?” Two digital exhibits inspired by that essay significantly expand from Williams-Forson’s essay and also map and visualize what they uncovered. See Lacy and Briggs, “What Did They Eat?”; De Vera, “Black Women’s Economic Power.”

14 See Peterson, “Reconstructing”; Spires, “Flights of Fancy”; Fagan, “‘The Organ.’”

15 Burgher, “Recovering Black Women,” 259. The likelihood that Black women’s organizing was deeply involved in this educational push and Harper’s involvement in the convention is strengthen by Edwina Kruse’s involvement during this early period of her thirty-year leadership at Howard High School.

16 See Colored Conventions Project, “Colored Convention Project Principles.”

17 For more on this incident, see Foreman, Casey, and Patterson, “How to Use.”

18 Qtd. in Foreman, “Black Organizing, Print Advoacy, and Collective Authorship,” 37.

19 For examples, see Jordan, “A Song.” Jordan composed a poem in honor of Truth’s successful 1864 campaign to desegregate the trolley cars in Washington, DC. Much has been written about Ida B. Wells’ 1884 legal suit against the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad, which she won before it was reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court a year later.

20 “Report of the Proceedings.” For more on Sydna Edmonia Robella Francis, see her entry in the exhibit by Sinkinson, “Prosperity and Politics.”

21 Transportational is not technically a word, but in the struggle for Black civil rights, transportational justice should be.

22 “Report of the Proceedings.”

23 De Vera, “‘We the Ladies,’” 7.

24 Johnson, “4DH + 1,” 665.

25 Patterson, “Toward Meaning Making.”

26 Foreman, “What Is Missing?”

27 Johnson and Neal, “Introduction,” 1.

28 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

P. Gabrielle Foreman

P. Gabrielle Foreman, is the founding faculty director of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and the inaugural co-director of Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk. She is the author of five books and editions including The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (2021) and Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake (2023).