THE HOUSE ARCHIVES BUILT & OTHER THOUGHTS ON BLACK ARCHIVAL POSSIBILITIES

A preeminent archivist blends memoir, archival theory, and Black history in this nonfiction book.

“Archives are an unfulfilled promise,” Berry writes, adding that despite their centrality to understanding our past, they’re rife with “silences, gaps, [and] missing records.” This is nowhere more apparent than in the way leading archival institutions have treated African Americans “as footnotes and ledger entries in the documents of those with more money and time.” In this genre-defying work, Berry blends her own story as a Black woman and archivist with a larger commentary on archival theory and Black history. Born in the Missouri Ozarks to a Black father and Jewish mother, the author grew up in a region whose historical identification was defined by its whiteness (more than 40,000 African Americans fled the region in response to Jim Crow violence). While the area’s notable historians and archival repositories erased the history of Black communities, businesses, and culture, Berry’s father—who never graduated high school—ran a local museum that preserved this marginalized history. This history is retold in the book through powerful visual archive of photographs and scans of documents that defy standard archival categorization (such as a poem scrawled on an envelope). In addition to retelling her experiences in the Ozarks, Berry also centers her career as a Black archivist in a field dominated by white librarians and historians. “Black archivists are conspicuously absent from conversations about Black archives,” she emphasizes. These vignettes from her personal experiences center the ways “those who should be our allies,” including academic historians who write on Black history, sideline and demean the efforts and perspectives of Black archivists as if being the user of archival material as a scholar is more important than the role of the archivist in compiling, organizing, preserving, and acquiring the material. A digital curator, Berry is among the leading archivists of the 21st century. What makes this book special is not only her deeply personal connection to Black archives, but her learned discussion of how archival theory intersects with Black history.

A powerful, poignant, reflection on the past and future of Black archives.