“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”
- Audre Lorde[1]
Audre Lorde’s words challenge belief in the liberatory possibilities of the archive. The archive has been undeniably a tool of the racist patriarchy—the records that constitute the archive’s holdings a means by which human lives were turned into disposable commodities. As Sadiya Hartman says, “The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence.”[2] Acknowledging the truth of this statement means we must also contend with Lorde’s assertion and interrogate the archives’ utility in dismantling the master’s house.
Doing so compels me to revisit a paper I wrote five years ago, in which I argued that archivists, through their work, have the ability to influence the enactment of reparations. Inspiration for this paper came initially from two sources: reading Verne Harris for the first time and emerging news from Georgetown University, where a discovery in the archives documenting the university’s sale of enslaved persons led to the establishment of a commission to award reparations to descendants of these persons. Articles by Harris such as “The Archival Sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa” suggested that archives could open the door for a reckoning with racism, if archivists were willing to “hear the calling of justice.”[3] When writing my paper I hadn’t yet encountered another article by Harris, this one from twelve years after “The Archival Sliver,” in which he bemoans the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as mostly a failure, “an expression of…a need by particular global interests to have experts who can claim a social scientific ability to conjure new democratic life from the corpses of authoritarian politics without giving any space to revolutionary transformation.”[4] The Georgetown example also proved a disappointment, as the university has yet to award any of the reparations promised in the wake of their archival “reckoning”.[5]
Sadiya Hartman, like Lorde, could have predicted this failure. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman writes of her “agnosticism” on the cause of formal reparations: “I had grown weary of pleading our case and repeating our complaint. It seems to be there is something innately servile about making an appeal to a deaf ear or praying for relief to an indifferent and hostile court…”[6] These words point to the futility of expecting the master’s tools—in this case, the court system—to dismantle systems that continue to perpetuate harm. If we dismiss the possibility, or even desirability, for reparation via the archive, where does that leave the archive? What can it offer? Hartman suggests that the answer might be found in grappling with the very inadequacy of the archive. She writes that the “silence in the archive” when combined with the constraints of an episteme focused on quantifying violence, results in a sense of loss that suggests, “it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive.”[7]
The stories that Hartman longs to tell are not afforded by the archives and its evidence, but rather are told in an effort to push against “the limits of the sayable dictated by the archive.”[8] These limits have been set when it comes to telling the stories of the enslaved, but can they be negotiated in the present? If we understand the futility, as Harris says, of attempting transformation from a past that has not actually past, is it possible to construct an archive that imagines a future where the injustice is in the past? Is there an archival future that bridges the gap between the incommensurability of the experience and the facts of the record?
My desire for an affirmative answer to these questions has subconsciously motivated my work as an archivist. For example, upon taking a position at a university archives, I was dismayed to discover that the repository held almost no records documenting the history of student struggles at the institution. The only evidence of the discontent that frequently manifested in hunger-strikes, sit-ins, and labor stoppages was administrative memos and reports. Such records are unlikely to ever bring about a historical reckoning. My archival response was to begin filling this silence by conducting oral histories with past and present student organizers, interviews which now reside in the university’s online archive, alongside university leaders’ oral histories. While the silence I identified may have been partially filled, there is a different discomfort in seeing stories of struggle against the institution’s racism and patriarchy couched so neatly within the confines of the institutional archive. There is an incommensurability between the story-as-record, compliant with oral history best practice and tidily described, and the persistence of the struggles being conveyed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that this incommensurability will be recognized and named, that future storytellers will continue to transgress the archive, creating their own tools for dismantling the master’s house.
[1] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984): 111.
[2] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008):10.
[3] Verne Harris, “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa,” Archival Science 2:1-2 (2002): 85.
[4] Verne Harris, “Antonyms of Our Remembering,” Archival Science 14, no. 3–4 (October 2014): 26, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5.
[5] Susan Svrluga, “Georgetown students renew push for reparations to descendants of enslaved people, Washington Post, December 9, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/12/09/georgetown-reparations-slavery-students/.
[6] Sadiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007): 166.
[7] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4.
[8] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12.
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