Laura Helton
Collections and Collectivities:
Race Consciousness and the Practice of the Archive, 1916-1945
Prompted by Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay’s 1937 call to form a black writers’ group as a “living counterpart” to Arthur Schomburg’s book collection on the African diaspora, this paper contemplates the relationship between textual collections and social collectives. By examining collectors’ artifacts—correspondence, prefaces, bibliographies, catalogues, and advertisements—it traces collaborations and disagreements between five bibliophiles, book dealers, publishers and anthologists.
Their practices speak to the intertwined nature of African American print culture and political mobilization between 1916 and 1945, a period in which race emerged as an object of intensive documentary engagement in government, literary, ethnographic, and historical projects. In considering the divergent motivations that led black and white collectors to accumulate Afro-Americana and the blurred categories of American nationality and black nationalism marking the era’s anthologies and bibliographies, the paper argues for the need to examine the practices of knowledge production that make the archive a site of contestation.