Overview

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history. Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Laura E. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.

Full Product Details

9780231212755

Table of Contents

Reviews

Laura Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things is an extraordinary book that chronicles and contextualizes how Black archives and libraries were built, organized, preserved, protected and used in the early twentieth century. Beautifully written, this is a major contribution to Black Studies. -- Elizabeth McHenry, author of <i>To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship</i> Laura Helton’s stellar and timely book reclaims the vital work of black librarians, collectors, and bibliophiles who built the archival infrastructure on which scholars of black history and culture rely. Those long-overlooked men and women are brought back to life with the fidelity that can only come from deep archival immersion by a superb writer. Her exceptional work and that of the brilliant people she profiles reveal a rich world of unexplored archival abundance which continues to serve as a bulwark against both unfounded speculations and outright assaults on black history. -- Barbara D. Savage, author of <i>Merze Tate: the Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar</i> Scattered and Fugitive Things is a methodological, theoretical, and archival tour de force—at once the capstone of a decade of groundbreaking scholarship in Black archives and librarianship and at the same time a call for us to attend to produce more work on these pioneering Black bibliophiles and their institutions. -- Derrick Spires, author of <i>The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States</i> Extensively researched and brilliantly constructed, Scattered and Fugitive Things weaves together the remarkable story of librarians, archivists, bibliophiles, and collectors of Black history. It describes the radical lengths that some went to collect, exhibit, and classify Black books, manuscripts, and ephemera. An essential book for anyone interested in the backstory of Black history. -- Ethelene Whitmire, author of <i>Regina Anderson Andrews: Harlem Renaissance Librarian</i>

Author Information

Laura E. Helton is an assistant professor of English and history at the University of Delaware. She is a coeditor of the digital humanities project “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg.”

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available