Includes bibliographical references (pages 173-189) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: the shape of immateriality -- Silence: the archive and affective memory -- The invisible: Haitian art and a vodou archive of slavery -- Word holes: spirit voices in the recording machine -- Dreamstories: the virtuality of archival recovery -- Afterlife.
Summary:
"'Immaterial Archives' addresses the absence of documentary evidence concerning the lives of black people who were immaterial to the archiving process. Unlike other literary studies, it does not present black Atlantic art and literature as an alternative archive. The creative works of this study embrace silence, fragments, and the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams for confronting loss with forms indebted to the inventiveness with which slaves remade their shattered world. Afro-Caribbean poets M. NourbeSe Philip and Kamau Brathwaite, artists Frantz Zéphirin and Edouard Duval-Carrié, and fiction writers Erna Brodber and George Lamming break the categories defining archival knowledge and their accompanying descriptions of "the human." "Immaterial" refers to the degraded status of black vernacular culture within colonial archives, as well as the diminished status of the humanities in today's information-based society. The term is also gendered as the book tracks a female gendering and re-gendering of the elusive, silent, and invisible spaces of immateriality. "Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss" should be of interest to scholars and students of black cultural studies, Caribbean studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and anyone who is interested in the transformative powers of the imagination"--Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.