Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss
ISBN: 9780810141599
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Northwestern University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter



In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.
JENNY SHARPE is a professor of English, comparative literature, and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women's Lives and Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text .
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