Published by Columbia University Press in September 2019, Shadow Archives explores on the archival investments of midcentury African American novelists and engages with several newly-discovered primary texts as it sketches the troubled history of black special collections in the U.S.
Reviews appear in Modernism/modernity, Textual Cultures, African American Review, American Literary History, The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, Journal of American Studies, Modern Philology, The American Archivist, New England Quarterly, MELUS, Journal of Cold War Studies, Choice, Archives & Manuscripts, The Journal of American History, NY Journal of Books, The Columbia Review, Americana, and elsewhere.
“An essential and elegantly written continuation of the archival turn that has dominated literary studies since the mid-1990s, Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature redefines our understanding of archives by analyzing how African American lives and literature have struggled to find their way into accessible collections. With remarkable attention to evolving archival practices, Cloutier illuminates the lives of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry to make those lives synonymous with the notes, journals, letters, photographs, comics, and unpublished manuscripts they read, produced, and revised. Based in part on his groundbreaking discovery of McKay’s novel Amiable with Big Teeth—published seventy-six years after its completion—Cloutier’s painstaking research “retrieves the sunken record” in each subject’s oeuvre, revealing how these authors both resisted and encouraged the archival imperative. Cloutier compels us to reconsider in the twenty-first century how African American lives matter.” — Citation, Fifth Annual Matei Calinescu Prize winner, Modern Language Association (MLA)
“Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier is an original exploration of the creation, silent waiting, and spectral existence of African American writers’ archival legacies. The author delivers on a great number of levels, recounting a suspenseful scholarly story of his excavations within archival collections. These led to the discovery in 2009 of Claude McKay’s once-lost satirical novel Amiable with Big Teeth (written in 1941), which Cloutier then co-edited and published in 2017 and, later, of the uncatalogued manuscript for Ann Petry’s The Street (published in 1946). Cloutier’s description of the precarious trajectories of letters, notes, and manuscripts through time, in turn, leads to a powerful argument about African American authors’ archival sensibilities and their own inherent understanding of their fragile legacies. A significant contribution not only to modernist studies but a number of constituencies in the humanities, Shadow Archives enacts and argues for immersive engagements with archival labyrinths as a way to forge new disciplinary futures.” —Citation, First Book Prize winner, Modernist Studies Association (MSA)
“Jean-Christophe Cloutier is the 2020 recipient of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) for his book, Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, published by Columbia University Press in 2019. The award is given for writing of superior excellence and usefulness in the fields of archival history, theory, and practice. In Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, Cloutier uses a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. The book traces the development of Black special collections in mid-twentieth-century America, exploring how archival methodology, acquisition, and access shape literary history. As an archivist and a researcher, he studies how leading twentieth-century African American authors carefully preserved their individual writing, as well as the African American experience in their novels. Cloutier provides an enlightening account of the unique challenges that many Black writers faced when trying to establish collections, which either clarified or reconfigured their legacies. Cloutier adeptly employs a cross-disciplinary model in his examination, skillfully moving between the archival and the literary. “Based on a deep understanding of archival history, theory, and practice, Shadow Archives is a compelling analysis of the power of archives for truth-telling and scholarship that suggests future paths for research,” noted the nominator. “Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival.” —Citation, 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award, The Society of American Archivists
“In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms “archival sensibility.” Grounded in Cloutier’s astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections, Shadow Archives reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry; Shadow Archives is a welcome addition to literary criticism.” — Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
”Shadow Archives is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers―Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison―actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large.” — Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination
”No novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is―hands and laptops down―one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In Shadow Archives, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who’s who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship.” — William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis
”As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration, Shadow Archives demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the “archival sensibility” of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier’s book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang―an exhilarating reminder of the “belated timeliness” and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete.” — Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
“Moving beyond the single lost text or isolated instance of nonpublication to address a collective experience, Shadow Archives provides the most sustained consideration to date of the meaning of unpublished writing. Scholars of the unpublished should consider the ways in which its insights—such as the claim the Wright’s and others’ efforts to ensure that, if not published, their work was preserved in the archive represent an “Afrofururist pledge”—resonate in other periods and with other writers and practices.” — American Literary History
”A very timely addition to the contemporary discussion of “the archives” among scholars of African American literature, culture, and history and in literary studies generally.” ― Modern Philology
“Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s Shadow Archives ushers in a new lifecycle of African American archive studies. The text’s deep sense of history and its careful archival excavation make it a cornerstone text of this burgeoning field of study.” — The Bibliographical Society of America
“Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s excellent Shadow Archives reminds us that scholarly archives, especially literary archives, are always a sort of interpretation.” — James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst
”Most compelling is Cloutier’s overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists―Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison―approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies.” — Steve Nathans-Kelly ― New York Journal of Books
”Though the subject is narrow, this study succeeds at being both masterfully scholarly in tone and at the same time easily comprehensible. Valuable to those in the fields of library science, history, and African American literature, this rich volume should not be overlooked... Highly recommended.” ― Choice
”Shadow Archives is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the “scenario” of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics.” — Stephanie Browner, Eugene Lang College–The New School ― Textual Cultures
”An astute reader and expert researcher with an inspiring imagination, Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers a captivating work of literary history in his monograph Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature … Amongst his other impressive skills and qualities, Cloutier’s unique brand of interdisciplinarity makes him stand out among a talented generation of early-career scholars trained in the wake of the archival turn… From the very outset of the book, one witnesses Cloutier’s remarkable capacity to shuttle between disparate scholarly discourses, expressive mediums, theoretical frames, and interpretive modes. This capacity enables him to give a rich account of archivism as a central tenet of the African American literary tradition.” — Nijah Cunningham, Journal of American Studies
”Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an “archival sensibility.”” ― The Columbia Review
”With Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s scholarship in hand today, we are now better informed and poised to protect the integrity of African American archives for tomorrow.” ― New England Quarterly