Tuesday, December 3, 2024

5:00 – 7:30 pm
Lehman Suite, International Affairs Building 406

Scattered and Fugitive Things tells the stories of a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. Laura E. Helton (Associate Professor, University of Delaware) chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick.

Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, VA. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.