Scraps of the Archive: Race, Theory, Performance

Using a variety of media including critical theory, cultural history, photographs, audio, and digital archives and collections, this course will explore the ways that the act of collecting, and various approaches to collections, have been used to produce contesting ideas of personhood. Focusing on African American collecting and archival histories and using Black Studies methodologies, the course looks to the often overlapping formations of collections and archives to approach intersecting representations of race, gender, class, citizenship, nation, memory, history, and solidarity. For our final project, we will collaborate on building a digital collection in Scalar using Brown’s Special Collections.