Everything I know about Sylvia Erike: Recurrence, imagination and the punctum

This article traces the affective resonances of a photograph of Sylvia Erike, a member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group (1973–1989), found in the ‘Papers of Stella Dadzie’ collection at the Black Cultural Archives during doctoral fieldwork. It uses recurrence as a conceptual framework to examine the relationship between the imagination, cultural objects and political demand, arguing that certain cultural objects can be disruptive of stadial historiographical practices which maintain conservative temporal divisions between past, present and future. Following Christina Sharpe’s engagement with Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum, it asks: what is that accident which pricks me?