Archival Interventions: Instagram and Black Interiority

Long before I began my research on Black studies and new media, my first encounter with a Black archive was in my second-grade classroom during Black History Month. Sitting cross-legged among a cluster of students, I waited to hold one of the worn artifacts my teacher was circulating to supplement her lesson. The item was a photograph: an image of a bright burning cross flanked by big men in white sheets. Clutching the photo between my fingers, I listened to my teacher explain that in 1963, men like this had bombed a Birmingham church, killing four young Black girls.¹ Her words created an impenetrable shadow. In that darkness, my conception of temporality became increasingly unstable. Time began to seep out from the clock’s careful confines, both expanding and elongating and contracting around my small body, threatening to turn me to ash just like the Black girls in that church basement.

Although white men were the ones dressed up like ghosts, within the academic archives I encountered, it was Blackness that was spectral, legible only through death, generalizations, and perceived offenses. In Black studies, canonical historiographers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson consistently reflect upon the hierarchical circumscription that constitutes historical production.² Much of the work of Black archivists likewise seeks to address a system of valuation in which anti-Black violence subsumes Black humanity.³ While Black archives chart the Black experience, though, we must be careful to expose the multitude of complex power relations hidden under the surface of Black representation. In this regard, Black texts with traditional archival purchase feel deeply conversant with my encounters with contemporary digital archives. In an effort to interrogate the crosscurrents of power, this essay briefly traces the form and function of traditional Black historiographical methods alongside the “alternative” Black and queer repositories of Instagram.

As Lauren McLeod Cramer argues, in the face of political economies that attempt to repress Black life and imagination, scholars need to ask research questions that expose the ethics and ideological commitments of the archives they study and also open up new ways of visualizing Blackness.⁴ Following their lead, I analyze the relationship between Blackness, queerness, pleasure, and value production on Instagram. Specifically, my research on the profiles of Black queer people shows how this community configures queer horizons through the circulation of photographs, captions, and videos, as well as a variety of other media.

Black people in the United States have participated in various forms of archival production since the onset of slavery. From authoring hymns that recounted the brutality of captivity to the Harlem Renaissance and the construction of jazz, performative expressions of Black social life have long constituted a critical modality of Black historiography.⁵ Although Black communities have integrated writing practices into these archival processes, the majority of the Black people who survived the transatlantic slave trade emerge from the oral and improvisational shibboleth of the Yoruba people.⁶ Demonstrative customs such as music, poetry, and theater thus inform past and present modes of Black record-keeping.⁷ In many ways, the legacy of Black archival production reflects a dominant form of Black historiography that refuses to divorce education and ethics from the personal and performative.

While a large part of Black historiography is grounded in a genealogy of performance, written text has accompanied the Black demonstrative tradition from as early as the 1800s, with formally established Black historio-graphic method taking shape in the early nineteenth century.⁸ Du Bois and Woodson spearheaded systematic Black archival theory; they proposed an intimate archival intervention that emerged from the genealogy of Yoruba record-keeping and Black demonstrative tradition, wherein historiography is inextricable from personal and cultural contingencies. In Black schoolhouses across the United States, Woodson helped to institutionalize Negro History Week, an annual holiday akin to Black History Month.⁹ During these seven-day celebrations, students of all ages explored their cultural heritage through the performance of folklore, Negro spirituals, and canonical Black poetry; they were also given the opportunity to showcase original works of art.¹⁰ For Woodson...