Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 1

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Requiems, Reports, Resurrections: Archives and the Alchemy of Historical Inquiry / Tayana L. Hardin, Paul M. Farber, and Grace L. Sanders-Johnson

<1> Writing at the "limit of the unspeakable and the unknown" in her 2008 article "Venus in Two Acts," literary critic Saidiya Hartman demonstrates how the "scandal and excess" of literature productively disrupts and unfailingly reifies the status of the archive as the exemplar of historical knowledge. [i] For Hartman, the facts and fictions of history bear traces of power and violence that are evident in what can and cannot be said about historical subjects like Venus, "the emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world." Despite her ubiquity in "the archive of Atlantic slavery," Venus nonetheless remains unknowable, perhaps unintelligible under the sweep of historical inquiry. Unknowable. Unintelligible. "What," Hartman seems to ask, "is our antidote for an archive that refuses to save? That trades in violence and loss? That, at worst, implicates our participation in-and, at best, makes us witnesses to-the terrors, pleasures, and libidinal economies of the archive?"

<2> This essay sits restlessly, ambivalently, fruitfully with these questions through three narrative voices. As a collective of scholars trained in African diasporic, African American, and American Studies, and invested in archival practice, our present task is not to abandon or disavow the archive. Rather, ours is to explore its reach and its charge through our own creative impulses and affects, and, more precisely, through our capacity to view its losses and precarities as inspiration for fresh, innovative reformulations of or approaches to the archive and its attendant dilemmas. For us, such reformulations take place at the convergence of the practice of writing, the imperatives of historical redress, and the exuberance of imagination. And they are informed by historical sources and accounts of field worker Mary Turner, market woman Extrea Jean Gilles, and poet Audre Lorde, three black women whose lives and deaths hurl us into the history of lynching in the United States, the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and the streets of a divided Berlin. Their journeys and (last) steps-cobbled together from a host of artifacts: unpublished notes and photos, newspaper headlines, U.S. military orders, published collections of poetry-take us into the far-flung worlds of diasporas and the archive, and down their many unpaved, unmarked roads. Tracing their lives and deaths through our questions, methodological quandaries, and imaginative composition, we arrive as witnesses to their archival traces through a creative process that we describe as the alchemy of historical inquiry.

<3> Fueled by the energy of time spent in the streets and in settings of historical encounter, the alchemy of historical inquiry recognizes archival engagement as a decidedly imaginative, corporeal, and intellectual practice. This practice is operationalized through the critical allowances of creative writing and the creative entanglements of (inter)disciplinary training. The archive thus emerges in this formulation not only as a gathering of remains, but as the circulation of those remains through creative, critical intervention-that is, through story and the improvisations necessary to identify, track, and notate the movement of the archival trace across time and space. For us, this means following our historical figures as they move in and out of official registers and narratives, bear the brunt of white supremacist terror, and bear witness to its reign and enactment. As scholars, we thus work in coordination with and inspired by their movement, choreographing our story, our critique from their steps and missteps as they strived to navigate their worlds.

Witness 1:

traffic:

1) v. to concentrate one's effort or interest;

2) n. the movement of vehicles or people along a road.

<4> I am a literary critic. I traffic in words and bodies and images and the stories they tell. My charge: to wrestle stories out of dark places and out of plain sight. Sometimes the stories emerge broken and bleeding, sometimes whole and willing like the perfect pecan cajoled out of its shell. Sometimes they wilt and cry softly in the marks of pen to paper; other times they wail and turn their faces to the wall. But no matter: I am there always, the paid, promotion-seeking scholar come to cash in on the blood, the sorrow, the violence, the pained wonder that brought us-these stories and me-to this place.

Witness 2:

Requiem for Extrea.

Death Announcement/ Accident Report:

<5> Woman was layed [sic] down to wait on ambulance at X¹. X² is position auto was in when driver sighted woman walking at X ³. X⁵ is where auto was when woman left X³ to probably go to house marked +. X⁵ is where driver slammed on brakes and slid to X⁴ swerving to the left to avoid accident. X⁶ after accident, machine rolled to this position, there being a slight downgrade there (from X⁴ to X⁶).[ii]

Witness 3:

I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection.

<6> On her first trip to West Berlin in the spring of 1984, poet Audre Lorde explored the divided city with an awareness of its historical wounds and sites of transformation. She arrived as an invited visitor and taught as a guest professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University. Lorde's close relationship with Berlin emerged over the course of her three-month stay, and numerous return trips, overseas correspondences, personal images, and text-based reflections. In her own way, she made Berlin home, a space of new encounter and uncanny reflections, profound growth and habitual return.

a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection

Witness 1:

The frontlines: this. place

Southern trees / southern breeze / Bloodied leaves / pastoral scene / twisted mouth / once sweet, once fresh / the Southern crop / of burning flesh [iii]

lynching

<7> During the first three decades of the twentieth century, anti-lynching campaigns were a righteous cause among black civic organizations, artists, and celebrities. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), the National Urban League, and the Commission for Interracial Co-operation were at the forefront of these campaigns. ^[iv] Despite these tireless efforts-as well as the work of journalists, community activists, and artists of all stripes-the almost two hundred anti-lynching bills introduced in Congress by 1951 never made it beyond the House. ^[v] Even in this postwar period when the United States heralded itself as the epitome of democracy, the practice of lynching refused to fade into the U.S. racial past. Although it was in steady decline by the 1930's, lynching maintained its reign in art and life as the most iconic ritual of racial hatred. Artist Jacob Lawrence, for instance, identified the gruesome practice as an impetus for the outmigration of black folks from the South to the urban, industrial North. He captures this sentiment in " Migration Series," a collection of paintings that remains one of the most striking narratives of the black experience in the United States.

Lawrence, Panel No. 9	Lawrence, Panel No. 17

<8> "Migration Series" is a series of sixty panels completed in 1941 in which Lawrence narrates in images and words the many reasons that African Americans quit the South for the Northern Promised Land. Juxtaposing muted and vibrant hues against rich browns and blacks, Lawrence cites ravaged cotton bolls (panel no. 9) and the ill treatment of black tenant farmers by white planters (panel no. 17) as catalysts for the migration of black folks out of the South. Conversely, images depicting the rising death rate from tuberculosis (panel no. 55) and the aloof, even disdainful reception of black Southerners by black Northerners (panel no. 53) illustrate the challenges that awaited the migrants upon their arrival in the North.

Lawrence, Panel No. 15, “There Were Lynchings”

 

<9> Panel no. 15, "There Were Lynchings," tells a crucial part of this story of black exodus from the South, which Lawrence captures in the painting's caption. He writes:

Another cause was lynching.

It was found that where there had been a lynching,

the people who were reluctant to leave at first

left immediately after this .[vi]

<10> Lawrence's explanation conjures the sensation of angst and swift, determined movement. Yet this urgency stands in contradistinction to the agonizing stillness of the painted scene itself. Two forceful diagonals divide the scene into rough thirds, the bottom third a parcel of brown earth running from the bottom right corner to the midline of the painting's left edge. A single noose-bearing tree branch extends into the frame from the right and bisects the upper two-thirds of the painting. A lone, huddled figure sits on a rock, the only point of connection between the dismal sky and the brown land.

<11> In this geographically indeterminable place, the sky stretches as far as the eye can see, but breaks around a coiled rope, the dangling O, that hangs from the tree. The dangling O is bare, but not barren, for it produces in this uncertain time and space an eerie stillness that is both baffling and profound: there are no signs of the makings of a lynching:

no "taut hum" of white men who would have rushed
about
"like ants upon a forage"
no traces of the "shotguns, revolvers, rope,
kerosene, torches" [vii]
that they would have gathered to undertake the
grisly ritual.

The angry mob is not there.
There is no evidence of swift, determined
movement.

Even the body that would have
hanged
on the lonely tree limb
is not there.

Only the O.
The dangling O.

Whose story lingers at the site of that dangling O?

 

Scholar Fantasy: One

<12> There is the fantasy that the brutality of lynching existed only in the states south of the Mason-Dixon line, that the traffic in such violence was the delight and charge of men (and women, too) who lay prostrate before the Stars and Bars. But of course, we know better. Those of us who have consorted with history-that is, with the story making that orders (and is ordered by) our understanding and valuing of past (though never passed) events-know that this kind of violence goes before and beyond us; that it renders this place into no place and every place. The particularity of this place is subsumed by its ubiquity: what happens here has happened everywhere. With no impunity against its reach, its grasp, we flee from the lingering violence of this place only to run right back into it. Once. Twice. Again.

(Rest)

Witness 2:

The frontlines: U.S.-occupied Haiti

Obituary.

<13> Born May 20, 1922 on a thin sheet of paper, progeny of a sketch pencil and U.S. military order no. 11093, market woman Extrea Jean Gilles had a short life. Conceived through the spontaneous collision between the left side of her body and the right side of a Ford truck, she came into the world at the end of her teenage years-an age of revolutions in industry and blue prints for empire. Birthed full grown she walked before she was brought to her knees, crawling, one leg dragging behind the other. Her career as a mama sara over. Her life unknowingly about to be set free put into a box. Extrea died in a box on May 15, 1922. She is survived by all of the others combatively breathing an occupied life. [viii]

You mean she was born after she died?

Yes, life and death in the archive is a tricky bit of circumstances.

Witness 3:

The frontlines: divided Berlin

<14> The outcomes of Lorde's first trip to Germany were impressive: she drafted dozens of poems that would eventually be published in her collection Our Dead Behind Us, and sparked the growth of a nascent Afro-German women's movement toward public recognition and collective awareness by encouraging and contributing to its first collection of writing Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German women in the footsteps of their history). Already a cancer survivor, Lorde treated a likely return of the chronic illness with new homeopathic remedies that soothed her and allowed her to continue working at a prolific pace. She returned to Germany in 1986 and then each year afterward until her death in 1992. She discovered and helped bond a community of women writers around her - including German publisher and translator Dagmar Schultz, Katharina Oguntoye, and May Ayim. With these women and others, she explored her theory of learning through "connected differences," a strategy of diasporic thinking she wrote about before her arrival by asking "where do our paths intersect as women of Color….and where do our paths diverge?"[ix] While in Berlin and in years following, together, they summoned and sustained collectivity across lines of division.

<15> Another feat of her first trip can not be read in her immediate or published output per se, but in the methods of historical inquiry she pursued and left as legacy for others. Lorde's historical study of the city was fueled by intrigue, but also by a relentless refusal to turn away from the wounds that had festered there or opened anew, especially around matters of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Navigating the landscape of a city pockmarked with bullet holes and legacies of violence, and bisected by a militarized border became Lorde's way of learning and listening. Silence and absence were instructive, as were her personal ghosts, which she combed for meaning. Around West Berlin's Free University, an institution built with support from post-World War II U.S. projects of diplomatic power, and along streets named for American Presidents and Generals, she built lasting relationships through diasporic poetry and critical geopolitical imaginings, connecting transnational narratives of apartheid, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and queer belonging. At the city's Amerika Haus, another postwar U.S. institution, she read poetry and protested NATO deployments of Pershing missiles during the Cold War. Through her navigation of these sites and others on both sides of the wall, she performed historical alchemy in the ways she mapped the city, looked toward sites of deep-seated violence and prolonged U.S. power, and shaped them into incubators of her creativity and longevity.

<16> In a published journal entry from her first trip in Berlin, Lorde writes, "For the first time I really feel my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me….I have done good work. There is a hell lot more I have to do. And sitting here tonight in this lovely green park in Berlin…[with] the smell of new-mown grass enveloping my sad pen, I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all, on whatever terms I'm dealt, timely or not. Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-dozed pieces…" Lorde, who began her trip unable to consume solid foods due to her sickness, re-imagines her own methods in terms of nourishment, from the vantage of a city and its streets that provided a generative pivot between poetic thought and political action.

Witness 2:

Eulogy:

<17> Here lies Extrea Jean Gilles, between X³ and X⁴- a black woman buried in the acute space between routine violence and cataclysmic casualties. Her resting place: the middle of a manila folder in the middle of L Street, Cap Haitian, Haiti. The street is no place for a 19 year-old girl with Good Neighbors. There is no room for her at Arlington and the streets are already crowded with bodies. There will be no flags draped over her box. History can only afford to give her an X. She is a casualty of an undeclared war on the Black Nation, a gangrene that spread to her black body. Her black body that cannot be raped because her lips spill over the edges of the paper and her hips don't fit in the folder.

"Does the map accurately depict the scene of the accident?"

"Yes, as best as I can tell it does."

So she died alone on busy street of forty or fifty people.

Where did she die?

At X¹

What happened between X² and X³:

<18> There are many yards between X² and X³. Many reems of paper and official reports. Narrative restraint, Gaps must be left open, windows must be left ajar-no closure.[x]

Is this a math problem?

X¹ = Body - Limbs = Lost in the archive, dead. The violence is calculated. There is a right and a wrong answer to the blood haphazardly running in the street.

It was a premeditated accident by Woodrow and Jim and Crow.

What do animals have to do with this?

<19> They move about the streets like herds of cow. Monkeys? Cannibals? They are erratic, sporadic, emotional, unintellectual, miseducated. They must be hunted, shot down, driven over by Ford trucks.

Hit.

Hung.

Witness 1:

(Rest)

I am a literary critic. My charge: to wrestle stories out of dark places and out of plain sight. My quandary: I don't see so well and I'm afraid of the dark.

(Rest)

Reprise: Whose story lingers at the site of that dangling O?

<20> Mrs. Mary Turner was lynched on Sunday, May 19, 1918, on the border between Brooks County and Lowness County, Georgia. Mary's death was among numerous others in a lynching spree that had lasted one full week. Aside from headlines reading "Negro Woman is Hanged" and "Georgia Huns Lynch Negro Woman," readers are given little additional information about the young lynch victim other than the fact that her husband was lynched only twenty-four hours prior.^[xi] Her singular story as a young black woman lynch victim is largely consumed by the homogenizing effects of violence, and by racially motivated violence particularly: because the majority of lynch victims in the period following the Civil War through the first half of the 20th century were male, and because public discourse was subsequently shaped around that fact, the singularity of her story was subsumed by the conventions of lynching discourse. Such conventions typically constructed lynching as a sordid relationship between black men, white women, and white men. In this triangulation, black men were presumed and subsequently depicted as a dangerous, oversexed threat to white female virtue (and, by extrapolation, to the South and to the nation). White women were characterized as frail targets of black male sexual aggressions, while white men were depicted as the ultimate avengers of white female virtue through their capacity to restore justice and civil order via mob law. Thus a headline reading "Negro Woman is Hanged" gives pause to readers because it disrupts the conventions of mid-century public lynching discourse.

<21> In "The Work of a Mob," a September 1918 investigative report published in Crisis, the official journal of the N.A.A.C.P., Walter White relays the events that led to the Turners' deaths.^[xii] The death of Hampton Smith, a local white farmer and plantation owner, and the shooting of his wife were the cornerstone of the lynching spree. ^[xiii] Mary and Hayes had a fraught relationship with Smith, and news quickly spread that they and other workers on the Smith plantation were complicit in Smith's shooting death on May 17. A mob of men and boys soon captured Hayes, and carried out their own extrajudicial death sentence. When Mary spoke out against the lynch-killing of her husband, she then became the object of the mob's wrath, and met her husband's fate less than twenty four hours later.

<22> White's journalistic resolve quakes under the weight of Mary's story. "The murder of the [other] Negro men [who were murdered in this lynching spree] was deplorable enough in itself," White writes, "but the method by which Mrs. Mary Turner was put to death was so revolting and the details [so] horrible that it is with reluctance that the account is given" (222). So revolting. So horrible. With reluctance. Through the fog of his own incredulity, White reminds the reader, and perhaps himself, that what follows is the result of methodic and meticulous investigative work. ^[xiv] Clearly, White's reluctance stands uneasily in the face of journalistic duty and, more important, his commitment to antilynching activism. But the imperatives of the latter two insist on the abolition of the former, and White plunges into Mary's story. Perhaps emboldened by her own fear, anger, and terror, she spoke out against Hayes' death by lynching, claiming that if she ever found out "the names of the persons who were in the mob that lynched her husband, she would have warrants sworn out against them and have them punished in the courts" (222). The irony of her remarks is all too obvious and at the same time all too tragic.

Mary fled, but was captured by the mob at noon the following day, Sunday. Grief stricken and terrified,

Mary

was taken down a narrow road.

The trees touch at their tops

at this lonely and secluded spot.[xv]

Reprise:

Southern trees / southern breeze / Bloodied leaves / pastoral scene / twisted mouth / once sweet, once fresh / the Southern crop / of burning flesh

lynching

<23> A Footnote:

Mary Turner was eight months pregnant when she met her husband's fate.

So revolting. So horrible. With reluctance. [Insert details of Mary Turner's death here.] [xvi]

<24> Julie Buckner Armstrong writes in Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching that "Turner is one of the countless black women whose stories have received insufficient attention in a history of racial violence that for too long has been triangulated between white men, black men, and white women."^[xvii] Yet her story is one of many others that lingers at the site of Lawrence's dangling O. Mary Turner's lynched and castrated body, broken and robbed of its vitality and vigor, emerges out of this traffic in bodies and stories as that which "can-and cannot-be said about lynching."^[xviii] Her fitful emergence and disappearance mime her movement in and out of official registers and discourses, and, subsequently, in and out of my sight and hearing. But I follow as best I can: in and out of silences, in and out of the shadows, where what can and cannot be said become the world I now navigate. It is into this abyss, this failure of language, this consort with fleeting figurations, that I plunge once, twice, again as I try to carve the contours of such stories of a past, always here, never passed.

Mary don't you weep. Martha don't you moan.

Scholar Fantasy: Two

<25> I am a scholar. I traffic in intellectual quandary and disciplinary methodologies. There is the fantasy that intellectual work liberates us from the violence of this place. Our quest for justice, for peace, for rest reassures us that our encounters- once, twice, again-with the many violences of the past via images, artifacts, words are just necessary though temporary discomforts that, under the chisel of will and intellectual rigor, yield stories that perhaps move us, but certainly affirm our credibility as historians and critics. Here, this fantasy asserts, the violences of this place are named through intellectual prowess, mastered by pen and keystroke. Through discourse, this place becomes but a character in a story, a packaged, knowable, palatable, now contained idea arrested by our good will, shut down on the side of a busy highway.

<26> But this place is not contained. Against all logics of scholar fantasies, this place often refuses the side of the road, its violence refuses the margins. Instead the violence of this place lingers in a terrifying, arresting observation:

Against my own desires for peace, remembrance, and rest, maybe I, too, am participating in and reproducing this violence even when I refuse to look away, even when I dare strive to speak its name. Perhaps the violences that bring us to this place-to this page, to this story-are indeed rendered new, fresh with each writing. And if they do, is there any place for rest? Any place for relief and renewal?

Witness 2:

<27> X² is position auto was in when driver sighted woman walking at X³. The driver fulfilling his duty to his country. A soldier. He and his wife upholding peace, justice and their noses as they kissed gently in the sea breeze of the night. Laughing loudly to muffle the hum of native tongues passing by. Bright stars align and he sees her. Extrea. Oh my! She is big and dark and look at those hips, thighs, breasts. She is hot. Hottentot. Venus Noir.

Do the black people know each other? No. Do the white foreigners know each other?

Yes. Yes they do. They have a plan and Extrea got in the way of the machine-an assembly line of conquests: Haiti, Phillipines, 9 girls, Puerto Rico.

Words of Comfort: Repass/Repast to follow immediately after she is re-filed.

Witness 3:

<28> Many of the traces of Lorde's experiences on her first trip to West Berlin appear in the abstracted, symbolic language of her poetry, as well as in the more concretely directed language of her prose essays and speeches. However, the Plötzensee Memorial, one of the first sites dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust in divided Berlin (re-opened as a memorial in 1952), provoked Lorde in ways that bridged her poetic and documentary impulses, and signaled readers toward her historical process of inquiry: a practice of critical reading, visitation, and extended reflection.

<29> In June and July1984, she journaled initial thoughts, and began drafting a poem to reflect on the "bland lack" of responsibility and "obscure circumlocutions" present on the site.[xix] She held onto an official distributed pamphlet, and kept that ephemera in her papers. She adapted her observations in several revisions, and eventually in a poem she later published in Our Dead Behind Us. The outcome, the poem "This Urn Contains Earth from German Concentration Camps: Plotzensee Memorial, West Berlin, 1984," mimics the inscription of a dedicated vessel at the reopened former site of a Nazi prison that she struggled to comprehend. Throughout the poem, Lorde reads historical displays, textured surfaces, and social cues in this reformed space, but most powerfully lays bare the inscription on the memorial urn. "Earth/ not the unremarkable ash," she writes to trouble the historic atmosphere with its stand-in gesture to mark catastrophic violence and incinerated bodies. She ends her poem with rebuke: "careful and monsterless, this urn makes nothing/easy to say."[xx] Like other like-minded practitioners of historical memory in the 1980s - among them filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (Shoah) and author Toni Morrison (Beloved, "The Site of Memory") - Lorde's creative process sought the elusive traces of historical pains through critical readings of their associated contemporary landscapes and estrangement due to the passage of time. At Plötzensee, she documented what she called a deafening silence and formulated connections between the endurance of anti-Semitism with the modern emergence of anti-Black and anti-Turkish assaults in Germany.

<30> Lorde's time thinking through Berlin, and Plötzensee in particular, was part of a multi-pronged critical mapping of history, which is legible to her readers through her published works; but also traceable through materials in her archives, unedited journal entries, revisions of poems, collected images, and collected ephemera, that also retain her process as compelling with or without points of transference, coherence, or closure.

<31> For Lorde, a public figure who made much of her writing open, including letters, journal entries, and intimate poetic thoughts, the notion of an archive in which scholars may depart on their own historical narratives both challenges and enhances her formulations of identity, through reflections on the past that illuminate, heal, and cohere through fragments.

<32> I have found myself, a queer Jewish white scholar, moving between the powerful sway of her public statements and the encoded fragments found in her archives: the official pamphlet to Plötzensee Memorial; a series of loosely sorted snapshots of Berlin's cobblestone streets and views from her window out into the wooded areas around Free University; and the multiple thoughtful revisions of her drafts of poems in which she worked closely with a phrase and the language of geopolitics - adding or subtracting "West" as in "West Berlin" to accentuate perception across epochal time or space, or experimenting with the juxtaposition of cities which she connected in diasporic constellation toward mapping global communities of struggle and solidarity. [xxi]

<33> The fact of Lorde's journey from "Sister Outsider" to a central and canonized historical figure in cultural studies, can be read, in part, through her place within archives and projects today that present her legacy as evolving - and her findings across a prolific body of work as vital and volatile in confronting violent histories. Archival holdings of her poetry and other legacy materials function, once again, as the sort of "skeleton architecture," as Lorde wrote in "Poetry is Not a Luxury," for new formations made possible through an enduring afterlife of her words, networks, and commitments. Currently, Lorde's materials are held in significant archival collections at Spelman College, others at the Free University in Berlin collected by Schultz in association with her award-winning documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, and collections including as I Am Your Sister Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde and Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies (the latter of which I am a contributor). Across these sites of memory, contemporary readers of her work may consider her as a historical figure but also a historical thinker, with a honed mode of inquiry intimately tied to her creative process.

<34> Lorde's archive of poetry and prose, those published and those collected for preservation, are lasting artifacts, and may contribute toward an understanding of her role as a historical subject and source. But her archive beckons, too, in other ways that present her role as a poet and critic of historical method: to see her notes, revisions, pamphlets, letters, snapshots, or as Lorde wrote of herself in a journal entry while living in Berlin, as a series of resurgent traces: "I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency." [xxii]

Requiems. Reports. Resurrections.

<35> Turner, Gilles, and Lorde haunt and shape records of the past. Our recollection of their stories occurs at a historical moment in which archives as an institution and organizing principle are undergoing a profound shift. The very status of the archive as an epicenter of historical sourcing is under question as home archives, digital platforms with cloud storage, and artist projects that make public those often closed off gestures of historical storage delineate the promises and limitations of what constitutes an archive. Such innovations offer greater access to tools of historical thought, yet guarantee no certain pathways for its uses or forms of critical redress.

<36> The alchemy of historical inquiry thus serves as an intervention into this impasse by providing a way to think deeply and critically about these issues. Turner, Gilles, and Lorde teach us that if the archive continues to be a site in which violence is traded and loss is fully pronounced, it must also be imagined as a site to regenerate, reorganize, occupy, grieve, seek, embody, challenge, summon, and inspire. From fragments to coherence, historical witnesses to violence and scholars of such traces pivot between sites of recorded struggle and stories that were carried forward against the currents of possibility.

Notes

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