<aside> ✨ #black-writers #speculative-mapping #immersive-art #multimedia #DC
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Jacques Derrida’s concept of archival violence espouses the inherent violence enacted by the archive through the imposition of unnatural order via institutional power. This concept is foundational to understanding how value is constructed and thus power is rearticulated and reinforced through archival processes. For marginalized communities, and particularly African diasporic peoples, the erasure of cultural conceptualizations of spatial, corporeal, ethereal, communal, and temporal epistemologies has material consequences on the historical record and thus our lived experiences. With specific concentration on literary production, the Mapping Black Literary DC (MBLDC) storymapping project seeks to transform archival records into interactive objects that resist white Western notions of temporal linearity and recontextualize the archives of Black writers and communal literary spaces in Washington, DC. A sibling to the digital archival initiative Black Women Writers Project, MBLDC pushes beyond conventional spatial notions by using cartography as an experiential mnemonic device. Heavily inspired by Solange Knowles’ Seventy States interactive artwork and Naima Green’s Skin Contact, MBLDC seeks to use visual art and design as an anchor to explore archives across multiple emotional and intellectual registers as well as interrupt dominant cultural understanding of temporality and the archive as “static.” MBLDC uses primary sources from institutional and community archives to elucidate material culture and evoke non-material cultures of Black literary and creative communities from 1980 to 2010.
DC’s rich history as a bastion of literary creativity is often overshadowed by its lineage as the seat of political and governmental power. As the demographics of Chocolate City shift and the Black population steadily declines due to gentrification-induced displacement, contemporary Black history is at high risk of loss and erasure. Firmly rooted in the cross section of digital archival/curatorial practice, visual arts, and digital humanities, Mapping Black Literary DC seeks to preserve the city’s rich African American and Afro-Atlantic histories by combining data from archival records spread across the city’s repositories. Data from ephemera, digitized publications centering Black and LGBTQ+ communities, oral histories, and photographs will be used to plot coordinates on a story map and serve as the basis for an immersive and interactive digital experience.
<aside> 🧭 instagram @blackwomenwritersarchive
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keondra bills freemyn is a writer and archivist whose work centers digital archives, social movements, and Black cultural production. keondra is founder of the Black Women Writers Project, an independent digital initiative highlighting the legacies and archival collections of Black women and gender-expansive creatives. keondra is author of the poetry collection Things You Left Behind and is a contributor to the anthology Black Librarians in America: Reflections, Resistance, Reawakening. An alumna of Fordham University (BS), Columbia University (MPA), and University of Maryland (MLIS), keondra is an SAA Digital Archives Specialist and holds a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Harvard University.
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