Black Radicalism & the Archive

This seminar will focus on theorizing the particular contours of knowledge production among politically radical African diasporic intellectuals in the twentieth century. We will read some of the key texts of the Black Radical Tradition with particular attention to the relations between politics and poesis, and to the ways that the exigencies of revolutionary social transformation have provoked methodological innovation in historiography. The course is not only meant to serve as an introduction to that tradition of thought, however, but more pointedly as a consideration of the implications of black radicalism for theories of the archive. To this end the class will meet in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and students will be expected to pursue their own hands-on research in some of the relevant holdings at Columbia, including the papers of Hubert Harrison, Alexander Gumby, C. L. R. James, Yuri Kochiyama, and Amiri Baraka. While we will use a variety of archival materials (including scrapbooks, manuscript drafts, typescripts, handwritten notes and outlines, diaries, correspondence, audio and video recordings, photographs, etc.) to contextualize these authors’ published work, our main aim in turning to the collections will be to approach these intellectuals as collectors and archivists themselves, in a manner that highlights their archival practice—their own commitment to historical documentation, classification, and preservation—as integral to their political radicalism.