Teaching with Anger and Outrage in the Archives

[Vasundhara Mathur] Just a content warning for this, there are images of police brutality in this presentation so anyone who would like to avoid seeing those images, you’re welcome to look away or leave the auditorium for the course of this presentation. Thai Jones is the curator for history at Columbia University’s archive. He teaches critical research and history of radicalism and is the author of several books, including More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives and New York’s Year of Anarchy, 2014, and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground. One Family’s Century of Conscience, from 2004. He served as historical consultant and co-writer on the award-winning podcast Mother Country Radicals, from 2022. His writing has appeared in a variety of national US publications, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation and The Occupy Wall Street Journal.

[Thai Jones] Alright, well, thank you so much to Vasundhara and everybody here for inviting me to participate in today’s conversation. You know, I’m really humbled to see all the work that’s happening here and the project on the mangroves really fits in perfectly with some of the questions I’m hoping to raise in my work. Although I have collaborated and worked on several community-based archives, you know, I do most of my work in a major, predominantly white institution, Columbia in New York City, where the institution itself has a long history by US standards of promoting colonial thought, developing racist sciences. It’s losing people in the communities. And so the challenge that I have faced in this role is to think about how you can work in an institution like that, and create new communities that can benefit from those collections so, thinking about this question of communities and archives and applying it to the context of kind of a traditional, elite institution.

And one experience really encapsulates the challenges and the opportunities of this. A few years ago, I was working with students in a workshop where, you know, I had worked to match each of the participants with a box of archival materials as we were discussing how one goes about doing a research project. And after a few minutes, I noticed that while the other students in this group were going through their materials and engaging with the documents, one student had closed the cover of the box and had to have literally rested her arms on top of the box in a gesture that suggested an effort to keep what was inside trapped inside. And when I talked to her, she explained to me that her feeling of anger at the materials in that collection had made it impossible for her to engage with that project. And this was a student of Native American ancestry who and the collection was a nineteenth-century white anthropologist who had promoted a set of kind of racist ideas about indigenous people. And that experience clashed so sharply with the type of language that you often hear when you think about teaching and learning in archives.

Now in this room, I mean, I think everybody here understands that we’ve moved beyond this but I do think this is still a really common way to think about this experience. There’s a sense that, you go into the archive, you share something ancient and old and the aura of it, the wonder of it will transmit a, an experience, an enriching experience for our students. And often you hear this in the context of the sort of products of Western imperialist ideas, you know the idea of the wonder that students will experience when seeing an early publication of the works of Shakespeare, for instance, you know, no shade to Shakespeare necessarily but the idea that that, that the only way you can experience that would be through awe and wonder and to, you know, completely elide the histories of domination and exclusion that underwrite those documents is still with us in the way institutions celebrate their collections. The New York Public Library has a huge exhibit on right now called The Treasures of the Collection and so this idea of joy and wonder and thrill, this is not really how we engage with these archives, although I think it’s much more appropriate to a lot of these community-based, intentionally created collections that we’ve been talking about today.

Just when you think about a community-created archive, they’re created to fill a gap, they’re created to fill a need by people who are intentionally serving a specific community. And this is true for the colonial office archives or any other imperial archives, they were serving a community that no longer fits our sense of who we want to share our work with. So, you know, we’re talking about re-purposing those archives here. Re-purposing but not erasing them, I mean, we have to sort of deal with the question of how these archives were formed through our work through them and then build new archives with new communities as we work forward. Vasundhara mentioned Yuri Kochiyama at the start of today’s programme, and this is, you know, the one archive that I worked with that fills me with wonder and, and awe, Yuri was a Japanese-American activist, very close comrade to Malcolm X, who ended up being a central person in the movements for Asian American rights, Black Power, Palestinian rights, prisoners’ rights, Puerto Rican activists’ rights, and I’ve worked with her family, we’ve worked collaboratively, we think about how to make this archive available, we’ve digitised some of it, that goes on their website. You know we have an extremely careful and collaborative relationship, although I will say that part of our arrangement was that they would always have access to the materials and this past month or so, Columbia University has been completely shut down because of the protests, and they were not able to get on campus to view their grandmother’s papers.

So, you know, when you are in one of these institutions, you are always navigating these challenges. You know, Yuri was a natural born archivist, and her speeches, her flyers, her photos, her guest books were central to her work as an organiser, on the right here, your left, you’ll see just one completely characteristic daybook entry from a month in 1974 where every day has four activist activities and six things related to taking care of someone in the hospital, or babysitting or cooking dinner for somebody. And so people asked, when we’re working with Yuri’s papers, this is supposed to be a wonderful place to work and, you know, to be around these materials and the answer is yes, when you’re working with these materials, but so much more of what we do involves much more kind of complicated, conflicted and kind of painful feelings. So it’s really the exception.

You know, most of the time we work with students, and researchers, people in the community, public school students, we are reading the collections at the institution against the grain, we’re often identifying cast away materials that archivists historically did not find important, or looking again at things with new questions in mind, re-examining the records of imperial powers and state power to understand how those mechanisms work and to identify moments and opportunities of resistance. So the way we’re looking at them, these archives at Columbia and other institutions are providing essential information about gentrification, white supremacy, over-policing, gender discrimination, and we are going into these archives in an attempt to build new movements, generate knowledge. But to do so, we’re venturing into these institutions themselves so it’s not fun, it’s, it can be exhausting, it’s shattering, there’s a satisfaction in revealing a truth or confirming a hunch or a hypothesis but really, the balance of this effort requires attention to one another, to self-care, when we’re working with students we’re always building in opportunities to reflect, journals, spaces to discuss these experiences and discussing the limits of what people want to do with a given moment, so if someone does need to close the box and step away, understanding that that’s, you know, an absolutely necessary response.

So when we think about sort of the materials that are cast away and were not valued this is a really amazing example. Here is something called ‘The Record of Fugitives’. This is actually a list of dozens of enslaved people who came through New York City on the Underground Railroad, has long interviews with each of these people. This is a one-of-a-kind document, you would think it would have an honoured place at Columbia, but in fact the archivists shoved it into the last box of a collection under ‘Miscellaneous’, and it sat within twenty feet of the reading room for a hundred years until someone found it. You know, using archives related to fugitivity, for escaping people: one of our students used archives and digitised newspapers to find all of the, you know, what is a runaway slave as placed by Columbia professors and trustees in the eighteenth century, and found dozens of these things, often selling people to one another and this student’s work really uncovered a whole economy of pain that had been created by Columbia affiliates. This is a collection of high school student essays from the year 1965 that were gathered for a contest on the topic of ‘New York’s Future, As I View It’. So we’ve talked a little bit about futurity here, but just this is an archive of what that generation believed their future held, what opportunities they still possessed and for students today to look back and see what was on their minds, what they thought was possible, and compare it to their own experience is a really powerful tool. This is something we’ve digitised and put on this map here but this was, these were boxes that I literally tripped over one day. You know, they just piled up on the floor, they had never been opened. So again and again, the things that the institution saw as expendable turned out to be the ones that we were most fascinated by.

And the power of all of this practice was just on full display recently at Columbia during the protests on campus. So, this was the Instagram page for the protesting students and from the very beginning they were thinking about 1968, which was the last, previous, great protest moment on campus. These students were in the archives, you know, many, many, many of the people who were most deeply involved had studied in the archives, understood the records of student activism that shaped their work around Columbia’s traditions. You can see Liberated Zone, Liberated Zone, okay this is the this is the police brutality Vasundhara, so this is the students being arrested, April 30th 2024, this is them being arrested April 30th 1968, the same exact day. And just the history just was permeated in their movement, the idea of divestment from Israel was rooted in the fact that Columbia had been the first American institution to divest from South Africa in the 1980s because of student protests so they were very carefully and brilliantly using the university’s own history against it.

And if we want to think about power and the archives this is really the, for me, one of the most important demonstrations of that, after the police came and tore down the students’ encampments, they immediately sent in a team of people to make sure that every last shred of evidence of the student encampments have been destroyed. So students found what it was to see them kind of piled up at one time but here you can see them again. A team of people came through and made sure that they could destroy the evidence of this and make sure another archive cannot be created from this moment. Unfortunately for them, the students who led this movement were so archivally minded that they had been constantly self-archiving and actually were clearing the encampment every day of materials and taking them to a secure storage facility so that when the police did come through and destroy this encampment, 99% of the materials had already been preserved, so. So this is why the, you know, the understanding here of powers of records allowed students, you know, to train themselves in the methods of researching these histories that were sort of captive in these institutions and really placed archives at the centre of their politics and their practice, and the sort of power of that and the fear of that is really demonstrated here. Thank you very much.