Shadow Archives: The Lifecyles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier (review)

In 1990 Fisk University's Dean of the Library Jessie Smith cautioned against histories of black archives that focus on loss. "Some uninitiated Americans have assumed", she wrote, "that black studies and supporting collections began with the advent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s" (Smith 1990, 59). She continued, "That is a 'civil wrong', for as long as black people have lived they have preserved their history and culture" (59). Indeed, black archives were built, and primarily by black bibliophiles and librarians and at historically black colleges and universities. Early organized efforts include the 1911 founding of the Negro Society for Historical Research, whose constitution called for collecting books "written by Negroes", and the 1915 creation of the Negro Book Collectors Exchange, dedicated to contacting "all Negro Book Collectors" across five continents, by John Wesley Cromwell, Sr., Henry Proctor Slaughter, and Arthur Alonso Schomburg while attending the American Negro Academy (Sinnette 1989, 43; Wesley 1990, 10). The year before, Howard University's Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Kelly Miller persuaded alumnus and trustee Reverend Jesse Moorland to give his alma mater his six-thousand-item collection, and ten years later, Schomburg sold his to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Twenty years after that, Howard University purchased, at the behest of head librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley, Arthur B. Spingarn's private library, and Atlanta University acquired Slaughter's.

Though Jean-Christophe Cloutier does not cover this early history in detail, he recognizes that it was foundational to the mid-century rise in building repositories of contemporary black writers' papers. A master at archival sleuthing, Cloutier has two interests: (1) how twentieth-century black writers' collections came into being; and (2) an "archival impulse" he calls the "invisible hallmark of twentieth-century African American literary practice", and, in particular, the "underappreciated archival sensibility" in the writing practice and fiction of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry (2, 12).

Devoting his first chapter to chronicling the fate of a wide range of writers' papers, Cloutier gives pride of place to Yale University's James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection (JWJ), founded in 1941, and underscores that its founder Carl Van Vechten was assisted by many, including Harold Jackman, Dorothy Peterson, and Walter White. He recognizes that not everyone was enamored with Van Vechten's outsized role. Early on Ellison contributed a few items to the JWJ Collection, but ultimately chose the Library of Congress, believing the nation's library was the right place for his papers. McKay also contributed to the JWJ Collection, upon its founding, but three months later wrote to Van Vechten that both Slaughter and Schomburg were also interested, and coyly wondered what the "Negro intelligentsia" would think if he were to give "two or three manuscripts to a white person and none to colored collectors" (quoted in Cloutier, 48). Meanwhile, HBCUs were also collecting contemporary black writers' papers. Atlanta University received three hundred titles from Jackman's private library. Fisk University librarian Arna Bontemps secured the Jean Toomer Papers (later moved to the Amistad Center at Tulane University, and then to Yale) and Charles W. Chesnutt's papers (beating out Van Vechten, who five years earlier claimed they were coming to the JWJ Collection).

For context, Cloutier reviews the aggressive mid-century acquisition efforts of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Though famous for paying top price for the papers of twentieth-century writers, the Ransom Center rarely used its ample funds to purchase the papers of black writers. In a 1964 celebratory exhibition of one hundred writers in the collection, James Baldwin was the only black author represented. Yale, despite its commitment to the JWJ Collection, also seems to have been reluctant to dedicate much of the library's sizable annual budget to acquiring the...