Archival Interventions: Instagram and Black Interiority

Abstract

Long before I began my research on Black studies and new media, my first encounter with a Black archive was in my secondgrade classroom during Black History Month. Sitting crosslegged among a cluster of students, I waited to hold one of the worn artifacts my teacher was circulating to supplement her lesson. The item was a photograph: an image of a bright burning cross flanked by big men in white sheets. Clutching the photo between my fingers, I listened to my teacher explain that in 1963, men like this had bombed a Birmingham church, killing four young Black girls.1 Her words created an impenetrable shadow. In that darkness, my conception of temporality became increasingly unstable. Time began to seep out from the clock’s careful confines, both expanding and elongating and contracting around my small body, threatening to turn me to ash just like the Black girls in that church basement. Although white men were the ones dressed up like ghosts, within the academic archives I encountered, it was Blackness that was spectral, legible only through death, generalizations, and perceived offenses. In Black studies, canonical historiographers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson consistently reflect upon the hierarchical circumscription that constitutes