To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Theories of the Archive

The importance of archives lies not only in the ways in which their contents can be used physically to mark history; as Jacques Derrida shows, the archive also creates within it implications extending to the exercise of power and social control. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, he explains that the term archive "coordinates two principles in one": "commencement" and "commandment." Beginning with the Greek arkhē, Derrida joins the first principle, "there where things commence," the "physical, historical, ontological principle," with the second, the legal valence "there where men and gods command," which is also importantly "there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given" (1). The historical and social implications of the making of the archive are thus always contested. In their work of the 1950s, African American poets Langston Hughes and Melvin B. Tolson intervene into the construction of the archive of U.S. history, using their poems to comment upon the making of national identity. As African Americans situated under the historical weight of the state using the entire force of its various apparatuses—religious, economic, and legal—to destroy the history and culture of people of African descent in order to preserve the institution of slavery, Hughes, in "Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem" (1951), and Tolson, in Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), "write back" by using the poem form to archive African American accomplishment. Hughes and Tolson write into the voids in official records, making their own histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of the archive—of memory—must constantly be tended. "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory," Derrida reminds us; "[e]ffective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation" (Archive 4n1). Combating potential effacement by the social and legal conditions of daily life for black men in mid-twentieth-century America, Hughes and Tolson present a revisionist agenda constituted not only by the conscious, assertive action of writing people of African descent into the historical record, but also by a palimpsestic writing onto, an action of overwriting. In doing so, each overwrites accepted narratives of American nationhood.

Exploring further the origins of the meanings of the archive (or the archive of meaning), Derrida asserts that the initial meaning of archive derives from the Greek arkheion: "a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded." The archons are not only entrusted with guarding the documents in the archive; they are also charged with interpreting them: "Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law" (Archive 2). The "dwelling" of the archons and the archive importantly "marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret," a process that has significant implications for assigning and consolidating meaning (2–3). "By consignation," Derrida writes, "we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs" (3). Further, "[c]onsignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration." Centering African American history within the narrative of an American history that ignored people of African descent, as both Tolson and Hughes do in their poems, disrupts the unitary system of belief necessary to cohere national identity in the 1950s.

The process of gathering and classifying that Derrida describes is not neutral; it contains—and conceals—within it the power to assign and interpret meaning, to "speak the law" (Archive 2). This power is played out in the institutionalization of the archive: "A science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization, that is to...