Liberating Archives: Remaking History through the Arts

This Focus course examines how Black writers and other artists approach archives, historical documents, and data to seed new works in dialog with the past. The idea of a historical record poses a particular problem for African and Black diasporic peoples whose histories have been omitted, erased, and distorted by racist ideologies. In response, artists imagine alternative formats and uses of 'the archive' conceived broadly. We will study works that use databases of fugitive slave ads, oral histories, and colonial photographs as instigation for poetry, music, and visual arts.