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The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities
As cultural heritage institutions across the nation grapple with the realization that their collecting histories have captured an incomplete picture of history, curators and archivists like Dorothy Berry have been drawn into complicated conversations.
The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities brings together years of those conversations from their origins in conference halls, webinars, and reading rooms to open them up to the public. The labor and theory that upholds archives has been obscured, but our understandings of history and ourselves rest on those invisible foundations. This book clarifies those foundations while offering new possibilities for imagining archival futures in and outside of institutional holdings.
The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities brings together years of those conversations from their origins in conference halls, webinars, and reading rooms to open them up to the public. The labor and theory that upholds archives has been obscured, but our understandings of history and ourselves rest on those invisible foundations. This book clarifies those foundations while offering new possibilities for imagining archival futures in and outside of institutional holdings.
Unknown Binding
First published October 16, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 31, 2025
not sure if I have a misprinted copy—some content seems to be missing from pages 21 and 35? following up with We Here Press to be sure
May 12, 2026
"The archive--which is somehow different from archives, a true ivory-tower shell game--the archive? That's all of history, all of memory, all evidence of things past. As a theoretical concept, taking the ephemeral and solidifying it with a symbolic institution, the archive is potent. All of this theorizing, however, sets archives and archivists up for failure. How can one's physical holdings, being finite, measure up to the imagined whole of memory? How can the descriptive standards of one's profession, no more or less flawed than those of most industries, answer the whispers of ancestors?" (7).
"Frankly, I don't know the detailed history of how the archive trickled down from Derrida to Foucault to the professorate to graduate students to curious thinkers with no interest in academe but with large social media followings. I do know that it is impossible to silence the ringing echo of theory's bell and draw a strict line between material archives and post-modern the archive" (7).
"In the face of this guilt-inducing backlog, special collections have turned towards digitization as a solution, prioritizing getting images of Black people online and hoping that will be enough. I’ve commiserated with colleagues about demands to streamline digitization with the feeling that getting things online will increase access--even without full description or detailed metadata, the things that guide digital discovery. Digital collection development has been presented as a liberatory access provider, with the idea that reparative access is primarily a workflow adjustment" (18).
"Archival labor is some of the easiest to render invisible because it is unseen by the end user" (66).
"[Black archivists] are often, excluding political periods of racial awareness, forgotten by other members of our profession. We are just as often forgotten by Black scholars, professors, journalists, and writers who comment on the racial limitations of the archive and never seek out impressions from the archivists. There have been powerful pieces written about the alienating experience of being a Black researcher in the cold, dry space of a reading room. Now, imagine working there" (68).
"Memory, however, does not function as an acid-free archival box inside one's mind and body, waiting for the right opportunity to call for a particular folder and unveil a specific story stored within" (69).
I am a Black archivist, but I am not a Black archive. What I am, at a deeper level, is a Black woman, a type of history maker and keeper that is incomparable to an archive, not because of a lack of institutional approval, but because I am so much more than an archive. Any human, by nature of being human, holds a multidimensional degree of memory that outweighs a stack of letters, ephemera, photos, account books, government records, and report cards by a thousand tons" (73).
"While archives and special collections are currently quite eager to acknowledge new directions in collecting and description that expand their holdings beyond those representing White upper-class families, their interests, and business developments, they are less likely to (or, depending on the institutional context, to be able to) candidly describe the hows and whys of their holdings and to discuss the values represented therein. I have habitually responded to the concept of archival silence by saying, "Archives do not have silences; they say exactly what they mean" (78).
"No one is louder about the present and future of Black archives than those who have never been Black while working in archives, let alone been Black while working in Black archives" (82).
"Frankly, I don't know the detailed history of how the archive trickled down from Derrida to Foucault to the professorate to graduate students to curious thinkers with no interest in academe but with large social media followings. I do know that it is impossible to silence the ringing echo of theory's bell and draw a strict line between material archives and post-modern the archive" (7).
"In the face of this guilt-inducing backlog, special collections have turned towards digitization as a solution, prioritizing getting images of Black people online and hoping that will be enough. I’ve commiserated with colleagues about demands to streamline digitization with the feeling that getting things online will increase access--even without full description or detailed metadata, the things that guide digital discovery. Digital collection development has been presented as a liberatory access provider, with the idea that reparative access is primarily a workflow adjustment" (18).
"Archival labor is some of the easiest to render invisible because it is unseen by the end user" (66).
"[Black archivists] are often, excluding political periods of racial awareness, forgotten by other members of our profession. We are just as often forgotten by Black scholars, professors, journalists, and writers who comment on the racial limitations of the archive and never seek out impressions from the archivists. There have been powerful pieces written about the alienating experience of being a Black researcher in the cold, dry space of a reading room. Now, imagine working there" (68).
"Memory, however, does not function as an acid-free archival box inside one's mind and body, waiting for the right opportunity to call for a particular folder and unveil a specific story stored within" (69).
I am a Black archivist, but I am not a Black archive. What I am, at a deeper level, is a Black woman, a type of history maker and keeper that is incomparable to an archive, not because of a lack of institutional approval, but because I am so much more than an archive. Any human, by nature of being human, holds a multidimensional degree of memory that outweighs a stack of letters, ephemera, photos, account books, government records, and report cards by a thousand tons" (73).
"While archives and special collections are currently quite eager to acknowledge new directions in collecting and description that expand their holdings beyond those representing White upper-class families, their interests, and business developments, they are less likely to (or, depending on the institutional context, to be able to) candidly describe the hows and whys of their holdings and to discuss the values represented therein. I have habitually responded to the concept of archival silence by saying, "Archives do not have silences; they say exactly what they mean" (78).
"No one is louder about the present and future of Black archives than those who have never been Black while working in archives, let alone been Black while working in Black archives" (82).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews