“Hush Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word, Mama’s Gonna Give You a Way to Interpret the World”
This project aims to bring together all of the examples of archives I found throughout the course of HUM 103/4. The idea came from my research paper, in which the compact disc serves as a way of archiving horrible images of torture for soldiers at Abu Ghraib. I decided to make a mobile out of C.D.s, each representing an example of an archive, along with a quote from class material relating to the theme. The image of the mobile, in reference to a baby mobile, invokes the pedagogical potential of archives– to teach, re-inscribe narratives, and create worlds. It is in this potential that the archive is permanently yoked to the idea of justice. Here, I break down each of the CDs and the themes they depict.
Trials
“Nuremberg has had an important place, first,by having brought forward an extraordinarily vast body of documentation- “evidence” far exceeding that previously presented to any tribunal in history,” as Sir Hartley Shawcross pointed out” (Marrus, 569).
Kinship
“In the sister circle, and in the broader set of relations held by the school and The City, we queered kinship and forms of intimacy—we were the vessels of repetition with a difference, teaching each other how to be with and for ourselves” (Shange 50).
Scripture
“Law as Torah is pedagogic. It requires both the discipline of study and the projection of understanding onto the future that is interpretation” (Cover 13).
Museums
“I have found that one of the primary objectives of those working with museums is to have the exhibition not only serve as an important site of “knowledge making and remembering” for their own communities, but also to challenge the commonly held stereotypes about American Indian history and culture that are predominant in our society” (Lonetree 306).
Music
“By 1964 a new body of freedom or protest songs (the terms are used interchangeably) written by artists such as Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, James Collier, and others came to reflect these shifts, serving as documentation of the evolving political identity of young black America” (Kernodle 296).
Choreography
“Despite the limited archive, it is obvious that their cultural world in the South Bronx, as a forgotten minority three times over, had bearing on how they moved through the world, and that mobility in turn shaped breaking” (Kai Johnson, 64).
Language and Oral Tradition
I am less interested in the reparative account of slavery and freedom that Barracoon promises and more interested in what we can learn from Hurston’s inability to ever really get ahold of Lewis and his story…Slavery, it seems, can only ever be evidenced in fragments: ephemeral artifacts, shards of wood, and fish vertebrae” (Womack).
Media
Blacks don’t really look like that. So why is it so appealing to people to think they look like that, and pretend they look like that, and to like to look at icons that look like that. You look at [ethnic caricatures] often enough and black people begin to look like that, even though they don’t. Um, so that they’ve had a great impact in our society” (Levine, qtd. in Riggs, 3:40).
Bibliography
Cover, Robert. “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term — Foreword: Nomos and Narrative.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 97, no. 4, 1982.
Kai Johnson, Imani. “Battling in the Bronx.” Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: The Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Kernodle, Tammy L. “‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’: Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s.” Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 2, no. 3, Aug. 2008, pp. 295–317, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080097.
Lonetree, Amy. “‘Acknowledging the Truth of History’ Missed Opportunities at the National Museum of the American Indian.” The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations, University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Marrus, Michael R. “The Nuremberg Trial: Fifty Years After.” The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 4, 1997, pp. 563–70.
Riggs, Marlon. “Ethnic Notions.” California Newsreel, 1987.
Shange, Savannah. “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship.” The Black Scholar, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 40–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1548058.
Womack, Autumn. “Contraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.” The Paris Review, May 2018, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/07/contraband-flesh-on-zora-neale-hurstons-barracoon/.
