Shadow Archives - by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

About the Book

Cloutier brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. He also provides a nuanced view of how archives shape literary history

Book Synopsis

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts--including Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth--to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.

Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors' archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

Review Quotes

Shadow Archives is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the "scenario" of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics.--Stephanie Browner, Eugene Lang College-The New School "Textual Cultures"

A very timely addition to the contemporary discussion of "the archives" among scholars of African American literature, culture, and history and in literary studies generally.-- "Modern Philology"

Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an "archival sensibility."-- "The Columbia Review"

Jean-Christophe Cloutier's excellent Shadow Archives reminds us that scholarly archives, especially literary archives, are always a sort of interpretation.--James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst "Modern Philology"

Most compelling is Cloutier's overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists--Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison--approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies.--Steve Nathans-Kelly "New York Journal of Books"

Though the subject is narrow, this study succeeds at being both masterfully scholarly in tone and at the same time easily comprehensible. Valuable to those in the fields of library science, history, and African American literature, this rich volume should not be overlooked...Highly recommended.-- "Choice"

Shadow Archives is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers--Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison--actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large.--Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination

As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration, Shadow Archives demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the "archival sensibility" of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier's book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang--an exhilarating reminder of the "belated timeliness" and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete.--Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms "archival sensibility." Grounded in Cloutier's astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections, Shadow Archives reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry; Shadow Archives is a welcome addition to literary criticism.--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

No novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is--hands and laptops down--one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In Shadow Archives, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who's who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship.--William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis

About the Author

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) and editor of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d'hommage (2016).