Olive and me in the archive: a Black British woman in an archival space

2021 ◽  
Vol 129 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-137
Author(s):  
Oumou Longley
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Complex I ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Black British ◽  
External Impact ◽  
Therapeutic Space ◽  
Women’S History

This article aims to explore how the archival life of Olive Morris might radically rebuff the devaluation of Black womanhood and identity in Britain. Harnessing a Black feminist framework, I approach Lambeth Archives, where the Olive Morris Collection is found as a therapeutic space. Through an understanding of Olive as complex, I disrupt hegemonic expectations of Black women and propose that within the space of this research, Black womanhood be allowed the freedom of self-definition. In a conglomeration of the documents and voices of the community that remembers Olive, marginalised epistemologies are legitimised. Their sometimes-conflicting accounts generate an unbounded image of Olive as a figure of Black British women’s history that harbours meaning as it is mobilised in social consciousness. Incorporating my own auto-ethnographic reflections, I explore the internal and external impact of Olive and my existence in this archival space.

“Can the Sistas Get Some History, Too?”

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-86
Author(s):  
Cherisse Jones-Branch
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Intellectual Labor ◽  
Women's Stories ◽  
Scholarly Production ◽  
Women’S History

This chapter explores black women’s contributions to southern history by considering the contours and nuances of their intersectional experiences. Jones-Branch highlights the scholarly production that has resulted from often overlooked or underutilized resources that reveal the intellectual labor in which black women engaged as they carefully assessed and navigated the temporal and geographical times in which they lived. This chapter, additionally, demands a reconceptualization of the ways that southern women’s history has been understood and consumed in the absence of black women’s stories. It challenges historians to generate scholarship that elucidates black women by mining and reading traditional archival sources against the grain and creatively finding ways to access nontraditional sources to augment their voices.

scholarly journals In Search of the Black Women's History Archive

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
Black Women's History ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Women’S History

Questions of evidence have sat at the center of black women's history since the field entered the academy over thirty years ago. Historians of black women's lives and labors have filled bookshelves by “mining the forgotten” to render them visible. Scholarship pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s established black women as prominent and indispensable historical actors, and key to understanding such eras as slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement. Subsequent works built upon the bedrock that these initial studies provided, incorporating nuanced gender analyses into the history of black women's thought, experiences, and political action. The past ten years have seen a proliferation of publications that have extended the reach of the field to include such genres and approaches as girlhood studies, intellectual history, and black internationalism. This groundswell of research has foregrounded a persistent methodological quandary for scholars of black women's history: how should they address the paradox of simultaneously finding copious archival records on some black women, while also accounting for the deafening archival silence on others?

scholarly journals Black British Women Filmmakers in the Digital Era: New Production Strategies and Re-Presentations of Black Womanhood

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilie Herbert
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Film History ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
New Production ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
Black British ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
British Cinema

Abstract The story of Black women in British mainstream cinema is certainly one of invisibility and misrepresentations, and Black women filmmakers have historically been placed at the margins of British film history. Up until the mid-1980s, there were no Black female directors in Britain. Pioneers like Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille and Ngozi Onwurah have actively challenged stereotypical representations of Black womanhood, whilst asserting their presence in Black British cinema, often viewed as a male territory. In the 2010s, it seems that the British film industry remains mostly white and masculine. But the new millennium has brought a digital revolution that has enabled a new generation of Black women filmmakers to work within alternative circuits of production and distribution. New strategies of production have emerged through the use of online crowdfunding, social media and video-sharing websites. These shifts have opened new opportunities for Black women filmmakers who were until then often excluded from traditional means of exhibition and distribution. I will examine these strategies through the work of Moyin Saka, Jaha Browne and Cecile Emeke, whose films have primarily contributed to the re-presentation of Black womanhood in popular culture.

scholarly journals An Ode to Black British Girls

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (20) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Jeanelle Kevina Hope
Keyword(s):  
Black Feminism ◽  
Chewing Gum ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
African Immigrant ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Black British ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Dark Comedy

This article delves into Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, examining how the cultural text builds upon Black feminist media discourse, and intimately grapples with the nuances of Black women’s sexuality while explicitly challenging misogynoir. This work illustrates how Coel is helping develop a Black British cultural aesthetic that centers Black women’s liberation, specifically from an African immigrant perspective, by using satire, all the beauty, pain, and struggles that come with #blackgirlmagic, eccentric adornments, and ‘awkward’ ostentatious characters that at times play into racist images and tropes of Black womanhood to expose the absurdity of life in an anti-Black, sexist, and xenophobic society. In sum, this article understands Coel’s work in Chewing Gum to be Black girl surrealism – the intersection of Afro-surrealism, British dark comedy, and Black feminism.

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