(All blog posts had to be pre-approved by my LiA supervisor.)
Hi everyone!
This week, I was lucky enough to spend time researching and interacting with the archives of Jayne Cortez at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division in Harlem (135th St!) Jayne Cortez is featured on the Self-Published Women Writers calendar that I am copy-writing and editing for Sojourners for Justice Press. She was a poet, spoken-word performance artist, activist and publisher -- and from Arizona!
I was really excited to get this assignment because with both my experience and love of archives coupled with my lack of awareness of Jayne as a person and artist, I was happy to get to know her through her own voice in the archival collection of her work.
I love working in archives because it creates a much more personal and introspective relationship with the subject (person or topic) that more common forms of research cannot access. Usually, most personal archives will include work from the artist as well as things like ephemera (clothing, artwork, small things, etc), notebooks/journals, letters and photographs. To be able to spend time with someone's things that they once held and spent time collecting and creating makes the work you're doing have more meaning. It doesn't allow for the creation of separation or objective analysis because you know have so much more insight. Your conclusions are stronger, punchier, more assertive than they would be otherwise.
Most of my academic work includes some form of personal narrative from a person I am including in my analysis. I love working with interview transcripts and personal writings especially because you are able to connect with someone's words in an intimate way. I think a lot of times, even though most academics and scholars come to their studies from personal interest and experience, those reasons can be lost in the sea of academic language, rubrics and editing. By putting someone's words at the forefront of your analysis and research, it makes it much more difficult for your work to become sanitized, less accessible and purely analytical. Most importantly, it puts people who were purposefully excluded or removed from academic theory and conversation back to the forefront of a subject.