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9780810141575

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Immaterial Archives offers a brilliantly informed examination of how a number of Afro-Caribbean writers and visual artists 'disrupt, bend, and break categories of archival knowledge.' Sharpe astutely explores these works to celebrate their creative use of dreams, spirits, visions, silences, and music to form 'a disquieting re-creation of immaterial Caribbean archives.' This volume is a fascinating and important addition to the critical literature. --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of And Still I Rise: Black America Since MLK The question underlying Immaterial Archives is: how do Caribbean writers and artists attempt to give shape and form to immateriality, to what appears to be missing from the physical archives? The book's implicit thesis is that their attempts to do so have provided some of the most compelling contributions to Caribbean literature and art over the last quarter century or so, a thesis Jenny Sharpe goes on to prove through a series of meticulous readings, often stunning in their originality. --Peter Hulme, author of The Dinner at Gonfarone's: Salomon de la Selva and His Pan-American Project in Nueva York, 1915-1919 Jenny Sharpe's Immaterial Archives pushes us to resist the archival impulse to connect fragments and close silences. Instead, she counsels us to follow the lead of the Caribbean literary and visual artists she reads. Through literature and art, we discover new ways of engaging with our collective pasts--and to appreciate the aesthetic imagination of enslaved human beings who invented their own futures beyond the epistemological frame of their European oppressors. As relevant for reading the social past as for producing the social and political today. --Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

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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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