No Touching in the Archive

At C19 in 2016, Carla Peterson stated that nineteenth-century scholars should stop engaging the visual archive of the satirist EW Clay because Clay’s satires present a common scenario, that of a white man representing... [ view full abstract ]

At C19 in 2016, Carla Peterson stated that nineteenth-century scholars should stop engaging the visual archive of the satirist EW Clay because Clay’s satires present a common scenario, that of a white man representing blackness through racist imagery. This scenario, using Diana Taylor’s term, has, to Peterson, become calcified such that Clay has regained a position of authority through the scholarly act of critique. I bring up Peterson’s caution because, perhaps against her urge, I argue that EW Clay’s racist spectacle performs anew when queerly read. I suggest that Clay’s racism is pitched through linking blackness to queerness - a gesture I call homophobic racism. Signaling anew and queerly, this is perhaps the promise of Diana Taylor’s archival repertoire. What I want to think through in this seminar is not necessarily how archival objects can indeed perform anew, but how they can do so amidst scholarly calls to action or inaction. That is, when looking at EW Clay’s image, I am still listening to Peterson’s call to turn away, to Saidiya Hartman’s call to resist reproducing racist spectacle, to Kyla Wazana-Tompkins’s call that “we must look” at racial kitsch, to Heather Love’s call to listen to the queer subject in the archive who whispers “don’t touch me,” and to the archivist who told me EW Clay’s image was not queer. I want to think through these impositions to look, to not look, or to handle with care as possible forms of not only the archival repertoire, but also the postures of civil and incivil behavior in the archive. Taylor asks, “What is our role there” - there in the archival space? How do these roles differ according to one’s sociopolitical positionally? When is it civil to look and when is it not?