Practice, politics, and publics: Doing public historical geography in a Black archive

Arguing for a 'public historical geography' and focusing on a collaborative research project conducted at Black Cultural Archives in London, England, this paper contributes to a body of geographical scholarship that has in recent years situated the archive as a subject of, rather than source for, geographical knowledge production. Past accounts have provided important evidence of the precarity and financial insecurity that Black archives face. In this paper we shift this focus on to the affordances and opportunities eked out by one Black archive as it negotiated struggles for survival creatively and sensitively, and challenged archiving's history as a Euro-American practice of violence. Providing insight on our participatory approach that involved producing research aids and organising a public event to engage public audiences with the Jacqueline Creft Memorial Collection pertaining to the Grenada Revolution 1979–1983, we situate archival research as a collaborative, affective, and exploratory practice that can impact public audiences in diverse ways. • Black archives produce unique methodological affordances and challenges for historical researchers. • Participatory approaches in historical geography can help support at-risk institutions. • Archival research can involve collaborative and reciprocal relationships between researchers, archivists, and publics.