Close Encounters of the Archival Kind: Affect and Transnational Solidarities in African Diaspora Archives

Recent explorations of affect in the archives have focused on the experiences of users and particularly the distress archival collections could possibly cause them. Perhaps because they have, until recently, been trained to think of themselves as engaged in objective and neutral work collecting and preserving memory, archivists rarely reflect on or talk about their work, how they engage with the materials they manage, and how they personally feel about what they encounter in the course of their professional lives. Using an autoethnographic conceptual framing, this article uses four archival encounters in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to reflect on affect in the archives invoked by archival work. Through these encounters, the article seeks to demonstrate archives of the African diaspora as both a locus of transnational African diasporic identities and solidarities, as well as a critical site for the (re)building of the same. Finally, it also hints at how such affective experiences can, in fact, further the cultural and political work of Black archivists and archives.