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Archival Interventions and Agency: Irma McClaurin in Conversation with Emily Ruth Rutter about the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive

2021; University of Tulsa; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tsw.2021.0011

1936-1645

Irma McClaurin, Emily Ruth Rutter,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Archival Interventions and Agency:Irma McClaurin in Conversation with Emily Ruth Rutter about the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive Irma Mcclaurin Ph.D. (bio) and Emily Ruth Rutter (bio) Keywords Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive, Irma McClaurin, Black women's writing, archives, Black activism, Black feminism, African American women, African American studies, women's writing, women's and gender studies I was first introduced to Irma McClaurin's impressive body of work through the inaugural episode of the podcast Cite Black Women, which my friend and colleague Kiesha Warren-Gordon recommended.1 Particularly germane to this special issue on "Women and Archives" is the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive housed in the Special Collections and University Archives at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.2 The Black Feminist Archive is a trailblazing initiative founded by McClaurin in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections and University Archives and the W. E. B. Du Bois Center and designed to ensure the collection, preservation, and safeguarding of Black women's lives. McClaurin kindly agreed to speak with me over the phone about her Black Feminist Archive, and the following is the rewarding conversation that unfolded. Emily: I know you began your career as a poet with a substantial body of published work and then became an anthropologist, publishing groundbreaking works such as Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America (1996) and Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (2001), which was recognized by Choice magazine as an "Outstanding Academic Title" in 2002. How does your background in poetry inform the work you engage in as an anthropologist? Irma: In some ways, I see myself as possibly a reincarnate of Zora Neale Hurston in anthropology; she began her career in literature and then moved into anthropology. I think she was able to synthesize these fields and create what I consider some of the first examples of interpretative anthropology. Similarly, my creative writing has probably become more ethnographic, and my ethnographic writing is probably influenced by stylistic things I've borrowed from literature. For example, my first field notes in Belize were poems. Also, in Women of Belize, I included a poem I wrote in the field called "A Mother's Day Blessing" that was a powerful success among Belizean women who immediately connected to it. A colleague doing fieldwork in the United Kingdom also shared it with women who were advocating for fair housing, and they used the poem in their activist work. In other words, the poem, which began as field notes, ended up honoring women's experiences in a universal sense. [End Page 119] Emily: Right, and in the same way that the poem "A Mother's Day Blessing" is an homage to mothers everywhere so the Black Feminist Archive is a tribute to women across the African diaspora. Irma: That's a good point in terms of the way I define the concept of the Black Feminist Archive, which has a dualistic meaning for me. It is a repository, so my mission at this point—and I really feel like I'm on a mission—is to collect and preserve the contributions of Black women in the United States but also globally. I see myself as building a "home" for Black women. If we think about home as a place of comfort, safety, and security, I am building that for Black women. The Black Feminist Archive is also about legacy because we don't have a lot of legacies of Black women in the United States. This is my legacy that I will leave and that will endure. The only time we pay attention to Black women in this country is when they are famous, but what about everyday women? How do we preserve their experiences? The only way that can happen is if we do it ourselves. My archive will be a way that I can enshrine my mother's life. She was born in Peachtree, Alabama, and there was no birth certificate. She was delivered by midwives. My father had to find his birthdate in a Bible. He had a second-grade education. We need to...