In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath.
Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through an attention to the transformative powers of African diaspora cultures, Sharpe examines how the visual art of Frantz Zephirin and Edouard Duval-Carrie, and literary writings of M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite rework the conventions of archival knowledge. Through these works,
Immaterial Archives explores silence as a black female space, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity. Organized around the categories of "Silence," "The Invisible," "Word Holes," and "DreamStories," which are derived from the creative works themselves,
Immaterial Archives contends with our understanding of the archive as written record, visual image, sound recording, and digitized copy. This book is essential reading for scholars and students in black cultural studies, Caribbean studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies.
About the AuthorJenny Sharpe is a professor of English, comparative literature, and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of
Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women's Lives and
Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text.
Book InformationISBN 9780810141575
Author Jenny SharpeFormat Paperback
Page Count 216
Imprint Northwestern University PressPublisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 285g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 23mm