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

Jean-Christophe Cloutier made headlines in 2017 when Claude McKay’s previously unknown novel, published as Amiable with Big Teeth by Random House, appeared seventy years after its composition. Cloutier unearthed the manuscript as a graduate student at Columbia University and then coedited the recovered novel with Brent Hayes Edwards. As many reviewers and scholars have pointed out since then, Amiable both revises our understanding of McKay’s career and redraws the lines of a transnational black literary movement in the 1930s, as the novel is set largely in the second Italo-Ethiopian War. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature defers the story of that archival discovery to a coda, following an extensive argument that twentieth-century African American literature bears the “invisible hallmark” of an “archival impulse” (2) response to the strictures of mainstream publishing practices. Cloutier advances a compelling case for broad readings of African American literature through an archival lens, as a matter of both historical circumstance and aesthetic practice. Approaching “the archival as a proleptic pastness to come” (16), Cloutier demonstrates the particular relationship to temporality for black authors and audiences, as he concludes: “[F]or African American authors, delay not only is built into the temporality of the archive but is also a structural facet, if not the architectural logic, of freedom and equality across the twentieth century” (14).

Shadow Archives ’ introduction combines a historical overview of the ways that writers, publishers, and archivists have—and often have not—preserved the documentary evidence of their works with the overarching argument that anxieties about production and preservation have been built into African American literature as figural tropes. Cloutier surveys the history of archival collections for black writers, especially the James Weldon Johnson collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the key role Carl Van Vechten played in its development, followed by a series of author-centered investigations of archival problems re-presented as aesthetic imagery and thematic development: the role of historical research in McKay’s novelistic practice, the influence of photographic records in the works of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and a study of comic books as an important if often unnoticed element in Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Cloutier also includes an “interlude” on the history of Ann Petry’s manuscripts at the Beinecke, which serves as a “painful reminder of the many ways— both external and self-inflicted—in which black women writers’ archives are scarce” (210). Cloutier imports the notion of the “lifecycle” from library archival circles, where it “has come to designate the different roles and phases through which documents pass” (6), to think through the “archival turn” as it applies to the precarity of both black lives and black-authored texts.

While Shadow Archives often focuses on the archive in the literal sense, telling stories of documents’ preservation, loss, and recovery, and thinking through the interpretive implications of those documents in relation to published fictions, Cloutier’s study also deploys the term archival in the broader sense it has come to occupy lately. As such, it encompasses a much more expansive range of materials and cultural spaces than those typically associated with university libraries’ special collections. The book’s highlight in the first sense of the archival is surely the chapter on Petry’s manuscripts, which shows, in painstaking detail, how those materials were acquired by Yale and then, effectively, forgotten within the depths of the Beinecke’s holdings, finally to be belatedly discovered and presented publicly (in addition to being cataloged for research). Petry makes for an especially effective case study along these lines, as her literary career has also fallen through the cracks of much twentieth-century African Americanist scholarship, especially beyond The Street (1946). (Nella Larsen’s papers would also illustrate the historical loss of black women writers’ archives, although that would in the end be a much shorter narrative, as those papers never...