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  • Recovering Black Women in the Colored Conventions Movement
  • Denise Burgher

The Colored Conventions archives are vibrant and valuable sources of historical information about Black American community and self-advocacy, especially because, unlike the vast majority of archives, they are Black-authored, Black-curated, and largely Black-disseminated. The fact that the conventions—and hence their archives—were almost exclusively male-dominated, however, means that scholars searching for Black women in those archives must develop new analytical frameworks in order to find them. Black women's intellectual and activist networks were a substantive presence in the conventions, but their appearances in the archives are few and somewhat thin. The limited archival presence of Black women could trick a researcher into thinking that Black women were not deeply involved in the conventions, or that Black women played limited roles. Instead, as I will argue, a Black woman's singular presence in the historical record can in fact signal the presence of many women whose existence and contributions are masked in the archives.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the well-known nineteenth-century intellectual, activist, author, and speaker, was one such woman who skillfully navigated the temporal and material spaces of the Colored Convention archives with good effect. Harper read her poetry at the Delaware Colored Convention of 1873, negotiating the delimiting raced and gendered expectations of exceptional Black women. She seeded this archive with her poetry, depositing herself in the historical record but, in doing so, simultaneously represented a network of Black women activists. She thereby resisted the misremembering and silencing pressures of race, gender, and religious bias in the archives. I suggest that in using the digital archives of the Colored Conventions Movement (CCM), scholars must read Black women, especially leaders like Harper, as complex, synecdochal trickster figures.1 Traditional trickster figures in African American literature wear masks to protect and preserve the individual by redirecting an often-hostile white gaze (Gates 340–41). Black women tricksters in the Colored Convention archives do not wear masks in the expected sense. They appear as themselves, but they also speak, labor, and function as synecdochal mimetic [End Page 256] representations of other Black women whose labor and networks are otherwise effaced.

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) has been developing interventions in digital humanities scholarship that recognize and disrupt political and hegemonic archival biases around race, gender, and data. Specifically, members of the CCP have produced a growing body of scholarship that serves to both critique and model ways to find, interrogate, and interpret traces of Black women in Colored Conventions records. This work has been informed by many theorists, including Michel-Rolph Trouillot's critique of archives as "institutionalized sites of mediation between sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process" (52; emphasis added). The members of the CCP have sought to be transparent about the structure of the CCM archive, the ways this structure and the digital medium can shape and select both what and who is in the records, and, consequently, how stories are told about the events and people they document. Lavanya Mookerjee explores the limitations of popular data visualization programs and methods, considering the politics and critiques of data management, African American studies, and disability studies. A coauthored article by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Mookerjee further interrogates the language, programs, and methods common to digital humanities that replicate and camouflage the violent histories embedded in digital tools, asking, "How do we account for (new, collective) data collection that accounts for haunting imprints and outright absences in the archives upon which we depend?" (12). Refusing to allow the seeming silences of women in the Colored Convention archives to obfuscate Black women, Sarah Ottino tracks and analyzes the intellectual and economic contributions of Black women in antebellum Colored Conventions, building an online exhibit and critique from a single reference to Elizabeth Gloucester. And Samantha de Vera argues that Black women in the CCM used education activism as an avenue to gain and normalize official participation in convention proceedings. In her introduction to the forthcoming collection of essays on the CCM, Foreman contextualizes the critical work of both the scholarship on the CCM archive and the interventional work of the CCP, which "re...

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