0087 | September 2, 2019
Climate Change: Material Memory
Memory isn’t something that lives only in our minds. Memory lives in objects–in museums, and scrap books, and archives. How can archives help us make sense of climate change? What do we choose to preserve and why?
| C.T. WEBB: 00:18 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, and welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age, and I’m speaking to you from very sunny, very hot, southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:29 | Hi. This is Steven G. Fullwood, and I’m the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivist Project, and I’m coming to you from Harlem. And it is hot, but there may be a bit of rain on the way a little bit later today, according to the forecast. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:45 | God, I hope so. I’m Seph Rodney. I am a Senior Editor at the Hyperallergic blog. I am also a recent author of a book titled Personalization of the Museum Visit which is published by Routledge in May of this year. And I used to be a fencer, and I kind of miss it today. Today’s the kind of day where I wish that I was still doing that. I just read a story– I know this is not apropos to where I’m from. I’m coming to you from the South Bronx. But I read a great story the other day about one of the fencers who won gold at the Pan Am Games who took the podium and kneeled and said that he was kneeling in solidarity with the folks back in the US who were protesting– |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:40 | Gun violence. |
| S. RODNEY: 01:42 | Yeah, gun violence, but he had a list of things. And also the sort of racial animus that is being flogged by white supremacism and white supremacist in chief and the rest of his staff [laughter]. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 01:54 | White supremacist in chief. |
| S. RODNEY: 01:55 | Yeah, and this guy– Race is his name. Race – I’m blanking on his last name – is very principled. And he took a risk, and a risk that may end up costing him something. And I just want to shout him out today. Thank you, Race, for standing up for principle even at the cost of something to you. I appreciate that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:25 | Yeah. Yeah. Standing up by kneeling down. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:27 | Kneeling down. Indeed. Indeed. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:30 | Thank you for that story. We are continuing our conversation on climate change. And as we mentioned last week, we are going to talk about archives, material memory. An archive is a material memory. We have our resident archivist, Steven G. Fullwood, so we’re just basically going to let him kind of take the reigns and talk about things. And we’ll chime in when we have something to contribute. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:02 | I’ve definitely left spaces. |
| S. RODNEY: 03:03 | Yeah, Steven, take it away. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:06 | Take it away. Take it away. So the story actually– my interest in this particular subject today kind of came from a few podcasts back where we were looking at our expertise just sort of unconsciously, and we’re like, “Oh, yeah, Seph, art museums or art. How are they dealing in the content? How are they dealing with climate change?” And I said, “Well, let me think about archives.” Right? And so initially the path I took was looking for collections that focused on collecting resources around climate change and where would they be? What archives or library or what have you? But a lot of the stuff that I found– I didn’t find any collections. And admittedly I didn’t do a massive search, but I did do a search. And most of the things dealing with climate change were specifically how archives, libraries, and museums will deal with climate change externally. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:05 | So there are things that the Society of American Archivists kind of talks about. And the Society of American Archivists is an organization, obviously, of archivists from different institutions, independents, and so forth. What I found most intriguing though was that as I was thinking about archives, the metaphor for, or the microcosm as a society could be the archive. Right? So if we position the archive that way, I thought about how people respond to climate change outside of the archive versus inside of the archive. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:37 | So then somehow Carnegie libraries came to mind. And Andrew Carnegie at the turn of the 20th century built like a serious amount of buildings that were used as libraries and, subsequently, archives in some ways. So at the turn of the 20th century he built over 2,509 libraries internationally, 1,689 in the US alone, 67 in New York City as opposed to 147 in New York state, and that these particular buildings really weren’t built to sustain collections, books, or archival material. They were often very beautiful. There are quite a few of them still left. In fact, Arthur Schomburg’s collection was purchased in 1926 and from the 135th Street branch library which was created in 1902, and that collection ended up building the Schomburg Center as we know it today. That building is still there. And when I was an employee there for about 19 years, 3 months, and 24 days [laughter]– I don’t know why that’s so funny to me. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:51 | About. About. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 05:52 | I tell that joke just for me. I don’t tell it for anybody else. |
| S. RODNEY: 05:54 | But you know it’s funny. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 05:55 | I know it’s funny. Right? And I like to laugh. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 05:56 | So that particular building in order for it– to renovations – and I think this is for a lot of landmarks – you can’t change anything regarding the facade. You can only do internal stuff. You need to be very careful about that. The Carnegie buildings weren’t built for tech, obviously, and they weren’t built for preservation’s purposes, in terms of taking care of things. So I was looking at some things online and some articles where around the country people are either selling the Carnegie libraries to shore up funds for the city or state, or they’re trying their best to maintain them because they’re part of our heritage. Right? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 06:35 | And so but if we go back to the metaphor of the archive as society, archives and libraries have been much more responsive to climate change within the institution. So a roof is leaking. There’s a flood. There’s a heatwave that knocks out the power. Collections are at risk all the time. But for those who are not in the field or haven’t really thought about it, this is a very small part of society captured in its mass-produced materials – its books, films, videos, or what have you – very, very unique materials, raw materials including manuscripts, artworks, and one of a kind three-dimensionals. These things are really important. So it made me think about how to frame a conversation around climate change by using the archive as a metaphor for society. Disaster recovery. You’re on it. Right? You are on it to get it done. It makes me think about how temperature-controlled environments– like there is a library in Copenhagen that was built to withstand not only outside temperatures and whatever was going on, but inside as well. So there was virtually no fluctuation in the temperature or the humidity control because a dry, cool place is where archives maintain the integrity of the materials. |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:05 | The integrity? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:06 | Right. So if there is an acid-free– acid-free boxes are used. Acid-free photos are used to basically stop the corrosion. |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:13 | Time. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:14 | Right, exactly. |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:15 | Yeah, time. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:15 | Yes, time, exactly. Thank you for that. And so then I said, “Well, what about outside of these temperature-controlled places?” So there’s a library in Egypt where the collections virtually are very dry, very air-conditioned, but it’s very hot there. But they’ve been able to, without the use of air conditioning, maintain the integrity of these documents that are extremely old. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:43 | So what the Society of American Archives is trying to do is to look at each institution uniquely as opposed to saying– and right now. And so the idea is to have a temperature-controlled environment. Humidity needs to be this, and so forth. And people are starting to argue against it because they’re saying that it isn’t really helping these things. In fact, if anything, archives when Carnegie was building these buildings– as I mentioned, that wasn’t anything he was thinking of. And I haven’t yet been able to trace whether or not the profession was at a point where it thought about these things. |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:26 | Now what’s the objection again? So that it’s not helping? That it’s not– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:29 | That– |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:29 | –preserving the material integrity of the object? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:31 | One size– |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:31 | Or that it’s– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:32 | –one– |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:32 | –contributing to the degradation of the environment by preserving it? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:36 | It’s a little bit of both in terms of one size does not fit all. So archivists and preservationists are trying to be a little bit more thoughtful in their engagement rather than say, “Every archives needs to do this to be up to speed.” Because Egypt versus Copenhagen are extremely two different environments. And what’s powerful about those stories to me is that we have a lot more to learn how to do this work best. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 10:05 | As an archivist, a preservationist was a special kind of archivist obviously. He or she or they, they were doing things to make sure– and often I would consult with them too. “Hey. This notebook came in. It was in a flood, but we see that it can possibly still be saved. Can it be?” And they can do that work. And they’re specialized when they do that work. And sometimes they do very basic things, sometimes that are not high tech, and other times they have to free something to stop the water from really ripping up the environment. |
| S. RODNEY: 10:39 | Degrading. Yeah, further degrading it. Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 10:40 | Eroding the object. Right. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 10:42 | Right, but I want to pull it back to archives. And I wanted to ask you guys a couple questions in terms of how. And it kind of goes a bit off. But I was thinking, like I said, archives is a metaphor for sort of thinking about climate change. What are some of the other ways that we can think about making legible this kind of information to just regular folk? Right? Because, I mean, when I left the library, I mean, I was thinking about– I’ve worked the libraries in other parts of the US. And if there was a leak or a flood, it was considered, “You don’t tell anybody.” It was an in-house kind of thing. Right? Because the public will just imagine the destruction of history. And the more academically mind or the more preservation mind or historically mind or even genealogies would be really, “We want to know what’s happening,” because it is a public institution. Right? And so their dollars go in to make this thing happen, outside of public libraries or private institutions that do that kind of thing. But still, how do we make things more– I hope I’m being clear. Oh, let’s just do it this way. What do you guys think about archives as a point of reference to talk about climate change? That’s the first question I have for you. |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:55 | Yeah. So, I mean, Seph, if you want to jump in. I like the idea of sort of thinking about the society as kind of the receptacle within which it’s material culture is preserved or not preserved. So you talked about buildings and facades. Facades have to be preserved. One of the things that jumped to mind– and I probably will need help pulling it back to climate change, but I do think it is an interesting observation which is that essentially an archivist, or the attempt to make an archive, is a subgroup’s effort to preserve something that the culture wants to forget or will. And want might be too strong– |
| S. RODNEY: 12:47 | Maybe willful. |
| C.T. WEBB: 12:48 | –but is willing. Certainly in some instances wants to forget, and in some instances is willing to forget. And it’s a counternarrative. Right? Because society saved the things that mattered, like they preserved the pyramids at Giza. Right? Because it told a particular narrative about the people in power. It told a particular narrative about the ruling elite that would connect themselves with that. So as an archivist and the variety of archives that might be created in response to a variety of social ills or particular cultures that would otherwise be forgotten, it’s a willful act to maintain what is essentially unstable. So we are accelerating climate change, but climate change is the rule. Right? Just on time scales that are different than are human. And so I like the metaphor of the archive as sort of writ large on the culture and the society. I probably need a little help understanding sort of where you’re drawing in kind of the instabilities in the archive around maintenance and leaks and floods and environments being unstable and things like that. Where are you drawing the connection for those two? I don’t know. Maybe– |
| S. RODNEY: 14:25 | Well– |
| C.T. WEBB: 14:25 | –see if you can [crosstalk] [to?]. |
| S. RODNEY: 14:25 | Yeah, I do want to jump in because I think I’m just going to kind of over– maybe I want to put over in parentheses. I’m going to try to simplify some stuff, maybe oversimplify. The archive is sort of coextensive with my sense of what constitutes the human project on this planet in so far as we are creatures that tell each other stories. The story that we’re constantly telling each other is the story of us. We’re saying, “Oh, we’re humans. We do this. We’re great. We’re wonderful.” We’ve concocted this way to sort of rule over the planet just using the gift of an oversized brain. |
| S. RODNEY: 15:14 | The leaks and stuff come in. We can look around. We can look around ourselves and see where those leaks come in. Those leaks come in politically. Those leaks come in socially. We are always trying to make– I mean, democracy’s essentially an attempt to maintain a kind of political equilibrium where you don’t disenfranchise so many people that you have sort of monthly revolutions. It is a kind of attempt to find a temperature at which most of us can exist. |
| C.T. WEBB: 15:52 | Bottom-up accountability. Because the elites have always been accountable to each other, but it’s about trying to create bottom-up accountability. |
| S. RODNEY: 16:01 | Well, right. Just so that we don’t have violent revolution regularly. So I think of this sort of archive as being a useful analogy or way of thinking about the entire species in so far as we’re always trying to preserve us. Really just I think ultimately to preserve our story, to preserve our idea that we are at the “top of the food chain,” and that we belong here. And the sort of threats that we’re seeing ecologically to that order makes us take quite seriously the idea that we can die out. Not that it’s just that we’ll die, but that we can die out. So I feel like– is this making sense? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:00 | It is to me. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:01 | It does. It does. The only complication I would add in is the effort at the preservation is– the leaks aren’t just political, but the actual effort at the preservation is also political. Right? And, I mean, and socially constructed and where the preoccupations with the culture lie. And so in some ways the effort to preserve what is inherently unstable, I think – I am 100% on board with you Seph and Steven as well – that is what we are doing. That’s what we do when we build cities and mastabas and pyramids and Eiffel Towers and all the rest of it. We make monuments to invisible things to make them manifest in the world. And [crosstalk]– |
| S. RODNEY: 17:50 | Or we make monuments to ourselves to make ourselves manifest in the world. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:55 | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the archive as an effort, again, often by a subgroup – right? – to preserve that at least in the way that we were talking about. You’d talked about the Schomburg collection and whatnot. I mean, this is clearly something that the ruling elite in the United States at that time would have preferred to forget. The history of how we treated black Americans– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:23 | Treat. |
| C.T. WEBB: 18:24 | –is something that– yeah. Thank you, treat. Well, but I’m talking about in the sense of slavery as an institution. Right? I mean, clearly it’s contiguous with our current history, but the institution itself is in disrepute at least. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:36 | Oh yeah, was willing to [crosstalk]. Yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 18:38 | Yeah. We would love to– I mean, there is a very powerful cadre of people in this country that would love to forget that history as a willful act to be rid of it altogether. So as far as the climate change piece of it though, I guess I would have– you said in your kind of poking around you really didn’t see a lot as far as what institutions may be doing to preserve the record of climate change. And I do wonder. Most of our concern around climate change is of course with ourselves, as Seph I think rightly pointed out, but it’s with the disappearance of the polar bear and the emperor penguin and the animals that suffer from the rapid change in the environment. How would one even go about archiving these kind of things? I mean, are these like DNA banks? Would a DNA bank be considered? Could you have like a chromosomal archive? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:43 | Oh no, definitely. You can have a chromosomal archive. You’ve definitely got a seed archive. You have all kinds of archives. Absolutely. And so, like I said, I didn’t do what I should have done, or I didn’t have time to really do it the way I wanted to do it to find those archives to broaden the conversation about what an archive is. What I stuck to was selfishly– is the stuff that I’ve typically been doing and continue to do around saving material culture and knowing that it’s always endangered in some way politically, socially, physically, through a certain kind of I think the word is fiat. I wanted to look that up. Right? I was like, “Not that cute little car.” I am actually looking for something else. |
| C.T. WEBB: 20:37 | That’s funny. That’s funny. That’s funny. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:39 | But it’s the idea of– one of the workshops I like to give – and I like to frame it for whatever institution or whatever group of people I’m talking to – is around the idea that we’re always building an archive in our homes. We’re carrying around archives on our phones, but that it’s still largely something where we’re not thinking about it. And I tried to, early on when you guys were talking– to link up this idea of forgetting as the national narrative– and how archives fight against erasure in that way, but that, obviously, archivists are quite clear that we can’t save everything. We’re so clear about that. We’ve been clear about that from the beginning of the field. And it largely became an archive at that point, these different movements of archives of people who did it. A celebration of the empire largely. But then there were all these other different archives that came in and said, “No. No. No. That’s part of a story, but that’s not the story.” And so socially, politically, these other archives came up and to this very day defend themselves against erasure. And it’s very hard to because economics, and then there’s a public that’s not that particularly aware of what the importance of archives until you need them. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:01 | And not particularly aware or– |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:02 | It’s– |
| S. RODNEY: 22:02 | –particularly interested. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 22:04 | Yeah, because they’re like, “Well, I got to eat. What are archives?” And I don’t mean it to make it that flat because it’s not really that flat because people who do have something to eat and have the choice of choosing what they want to eat still think of archives as, “So what do you do again?” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t know what version to give you just yet because I’m offended by the question.” I have to move my ego out of the way, and then go, “This is what I do.” And, “Are you really that interested? Shall I waste my breath?” That kind of stuff. |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:27 | That’s funny. That’s funny. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:33 | Right because the question is actually trying to get you to justify your existence. Right? They’re saying like, “Really who are you? Like why is that important?” |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:33 | [crosstalk]. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 22:40 | It’s like coming out of the closet twice. I mean, it’s just like, “What nonsense is this?” |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:41 | I– |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:47 | So I have a kind of a question of definitions as a prelude to a second question which is, so is the difference between an archive and a museum the public component? So in a museum the idea with that you would get sort of public engagement, kind of a layman’s engagement? And is an archive primarily designed for specialists? Or what’s the distinction between the two? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:13 | So a museum could be an archive in the fact that it is a building and it is a edifice that contains collections. Whether or not the archive that they have within that institution is available to the public is it really up to that museum. |
| S. RODNEY: 23:26 | But– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:27 | Go ahead. |
| S. RODNEY: 23:28 | Go ahead. No. Go ahead, Steven. I’m sorry. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:29 | And so an archive is– I’m just going to read off the internet. The collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people. But then it’s also just a place where you store things. In the context of what we’re talking about, archives– it’s funny because now I’m like, “I’ve lost your question.” |
| S. RODNEY: 23:49 | No. No. Let me answer it. Let me answer it. I got it. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:51 | Perfect. |
| S. RODNEY: 23:51 | Essentially the question is what’s the difference between a museum and an archive, and the sort of– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 23:59 | Also [that’s fair?]. |
| S. RODNEY: 24:00 | The sort of explanatory clause was, “Is it about the public component? Is it about allowing people in to see stuff?” No. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 24:08 | No. |
| S. RODNEY: 24:08 | The primary difference is that museums are display spaces. Archives are not necessarily about display. That’s the key difference. Museums do have archives or have an archival function and have collections, but primarily they are split down the middle by having this collection. And they have an entire– I mean, essentially they’ve spawned, birthed an entire cadre of professionals known as curators who take the thing and then publicly present it. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:41 | Doesn’t the display imply a public though? |
| S. RODNEY: 24:47 | Right. Right. Right. It does, but that public can be limited depending on what kind of museum you’re talking about. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 24:52 | Museum it is. Absolutely. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:54 | Yeah. Yeah. No, I didn’t mean to say the publis, like every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the culture. But I just more meant that to put something on display is to invite a kind of space in which people can walk through and peruse, and the others involve a kind of more specialized– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 25:17 | Protecting. |
| C.T. WEBB: 25:18 | –storage. I mean, storage is helpful, and– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 25:22 | And storage and agents who can understand what is in that storage and can pull things out of storage when they need to be pulled out. |
| C.T. WEBB: 25:30 | Right. Right. And so is there not a sense in which archives are also aspirational/museums are aspirational, in that we would all like to visit the car museum that displays when automobiles were still a thing? Right? And in a sort of after-the-fact way– right? So you would not have a museum on slavery and the history of black Americans prior to Juneteenth. Right? Prior to emancipation, you wouldn’t have had that. So there is a sense in which the archive itself is an aspirational project. And so– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:13 | A certain kind of archive. |
| C.T. WEBB: 26:14 | Oh, I’m sorry. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:15 | I just wanted to verify that. A certain kind of archive– |
| C.T. WEBB: 26:16 | Oh please, please. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:17 | –because what I wanted to draw a distinction with – say the Schomburg versus the Met – is that the Schomburg works in this liminal space where it has exhibition space and is often called a museum versus a research center. But the collections themselves, in terms of their programming, put those materials on the wall or in cases and so forth. So it serves that kind of thing as well, but its main point is research. For example, in Europe a lot of people– a lot of the kinds of archives you’ll run into in Europe and even in Africa and other places– and it’s starting to change slowly. You’re going to find records management for an institution but that families often keep their archives. Very different from the US. Very different, even though families here do keep their archives of their money. They’re keeping their stuff in their home. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 27:10 | But I wanted to say something about the archive itself in that it really depends on the archive. They are aspirational. And they’re almost in some ways, I think, for me, not no-brainers, but they fill a need for memory work. They fill a need for someone who wants to know what happened here or how it happened. And then I won’t– I was going to say I wasn’t going to get in the politics of what’s collected and what archives collect and what they don’t collect and what’s considered of research value and what’s not, but all those things factor into a robust archive. One archive that’s hyperaware of itself– and it needs to be because times are constantly changing about what’s valued as research-valuable and what’s not based on the Academy, based on genealogists, based on historical records in general. But it’s a fascinating field. It feels like it’s a lens through– you can look at almost every subject on earth and learn something. Right? |
| S. RODNEY: 28:10 | So– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 28:11 | [Collecting the material?]. Sorry. I’m getting off a bit. |
| S. RODNEY: 28:13 | So– no. No. Not at all. It’s just that I want to circle this back towards climate change and say that it’s specifically addressing the query Travis put forward regarding whether or not archives are aspirational. I was thinking of the international global seed vault in Svalbard. I was thinking, “Yeah. In some ways it is aspirational. Isn’t it?” I mean, I just want to be clear to our listeners what this is. It’s on their website for croptrust.org under the need there’s written, worldwide there’s more than 1,700 gene banks that hold collections of food crops for safekeeping, yet many of these are vulnerable, exposed not only to natural catastrophes and war but also to avoidable disasters, such as lack of funding or poor management, so on and so forth. It was recognition of the vulnerability of the world’s gene banks that sparked the idea of establishing a global seed vault to serve as a backup storage facility. The purpose of the vault is to store duplicates, i.e., backups, of seed samples from the world’s crop collections. So essentially the idea is that if all hell breaks loose and we lose that biodiversity that is essentially– |
| C.T. WEBB: 29:49 | Continue to lose our biodiversity. I mean, it’s happening. |
| S. RODNEY: 29:52 | Fair enough. No. No. Right. Right. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 29:52 | Right. It’s perpetual. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 29:54 | But specifically with regards to sources of food, sources of nourishment for us, that this place can sort of– it’s a sort of backstop against that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 30:08 | It’s like an intervention. |
| S. RODNEY: 30:09 | Right. We can go to this space and we can get most of it back. That is aspirational. Right? But it is specifically aspiring to that dystopian vision – right? – of the end of the world that we talked about last episode. Right? Because essentially this is where we go when it all falls apart. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 30:31 | I like that word, aspirational, though because I think it’s anticipatory obviously of what might happen but also in the past we’ve missed this kind of thing, and we were searching for it. And to go back to the whole story, so it feels like it’s trying to save more stories and reckoning with those stories. So this particular collection has this information. This collection has this. What does the comparative analysis come out to be looking at different ways of thinking about climate change, for example? Even looking at the different kinds of archives, as you suggested earlier, Travis. For me thinking about those things broadens the idea of an archive as a way to think about climate change for people by introducing them to the different kinds of archives. I’m glad you read about the seed archive because those are awesome. When I first heard about it, I was like, “That’s a no-brainer. That’s great.” I wasn’t thinking necessarily about dystopian. I was thinking, later on, we might want to do some splicing and think about ways to make better food, not in a Monsanto way, the evil corporation, but in a way that we get better food, or we have better nutrition. Just the science of it is wonderful to me. So that’s my brain on that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 31:55 | Yeah. Yeah. It’s a big category with which to think with, our archives and [crosstalk]. As much as they’re a preservation of the past, they’re so intimately connected with hope and the future and– |
| S. RODNEY: 32:10 | Or thinking of the future as being a dead end. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:15 | Yeah. I meant that even assuming that, which I think you were right to point out, there’s still the gesture of hope to preserve the seed for some Skarsgard seven-foot-tall scientist with blonde hair that can replant the world or whatever. So even in spite of however bleak the future that’s being imagined, there is the hope and gesture that this should be preserved. And so I think archives are a beautiful category to think about. |
| S. RODNEY: 32:53 | Yeah. And maybe they’re ultimately just– |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:55 | Those things were– |
| S. RODNEY: 32:56 | I’m sorry, Travis. But maybe they’re– |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:57 | No. No. No, please. |
| S. RODNEY: 32:58 | –they’re really ultimately hopeful? I mean, that’s– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:01 | I think so. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:01 | –what you actually just convinced me of that. But they’re hopeful in more ways than just a seed vault is hopeful. It’s also hopeful ultimately– Steven, I think you were kind of getting at this, that it’s hopeful in terms of– there is a part of us that wants to preserve this memory, these events, these significances, in spite of the fact that most of us are quite willing to forget. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:29 | Absolutely. That’s a wonderful way to put it. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:31 | We’re saying, “We’re going to give these guardians” – right? – “a few stories that are really precious to us even though we forget them.” And we’re not really cognizant of how precious they are. But we’re going to say, “You know what? You ignore all of us when we go about worrying about Beyonce and what’s happening with the Beyhive. And you preserve this stuff for us and remind us, when we’re ready to listen to you, how important it is.” |
| S. FULLWOOD: 34:00 | I never knew what archives– I fell into archives like I fell into librarianship. But it fulfills so much of my own interest around storytelling, around story preservation, about finding stories, their letters. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 34:16 | There’s a woman by the name of Alice Childress who the CIA could not figure out how old she was. Her FOIA files in her archives, her Freedom of Information Act files, and her archive at the Schomburg are amazing. They tracked her. They tried to figure out things. But this woman had this amazing career as an actress with the American Negro Theater that used to practice at the Schomburg, the 135th Street branch library, in the basement through– I think she was in her 50s when she wrote A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich about a 13-year-old heroin addict named Benny. And this was around the time that people just wrote a lot of letters. So letters and their manuscripts and photographs– and you just get– I was enchanted by her. I’m still enchanted by her. Learning her story just set me off. It was one of my first major collections that I processed at the Schomburg, and I will always be indebted to my boss allowing me to overwrite the finding aid. And finding aids are guides to the collections, but they’re not supposed to do the work of an academic or a historian or anyone else. We’re just supposed to go, “Just the facts ma’am. Just the facts,” so to speak. And it was a joyful experience. A very hard experience but a very joyful one around thinking about how to frame someone’s life so that you’re respectful of what– not just the who, what, when, where, and why of them, but the– I made a decision to collect– or to keep, rather, the material that was turned over around bills because this woman was a black woman in the– who was also– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 35:49 | I’m sorry. I totally skipped over this. But she was a successful playwright. She made her living as a writer. And there aren’t that many archives at that point that were just keeping things that gave a sense of what her daily life was like. Or what her other life was like. This sort of noncreative life was like, this mundane life. And so I wanted to hopefully offer researchers of the future an opportunity to kind of think about what was she writing. What were her bills like? What was she paying? She was a single mother at that point. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 36:21 | So there are all these wonderful things that my boss gave me information and ways to think about what an archive can do for the culture, not just the academics, but other people who just wanted to find out what Alice Childress was like. Your regular person, so that– I fell in love with archives, and it won’t let me go. And I’m glad it’s hugging up on me, and it will for the rest of my life, so. |
| C.T. WEBB: 36:48 | Yeah. Well, we’re glad too. |
| S. RODNEY: 36:50 | Indeed. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 36:50 | Thanks. |
| C.T. WEBB: 36:51 | Thanks very much for the conversation, and we’ll talk to you guys next week. |
| S. RODNEY: 36:55 | Okay. Take care. |
| S. RODNEY: 36:56 | Take care. [music] |
References
**No references for Podcast 0087*