'Seething With Our Presence': Method and Blackness in Law's Archive

Over nearly three decades of award-winning scholarship, Prof. Dylan Penningroth has located African American civic wisdom, precarity and possibility. His methods have illuminated the transatlantic making of blackness and the often unseen struggles preceding some of our most storied freedom movements.

For this event, Prof. Penningroth will discuss the modern American legal archive and share some of the methods he has used to challenge its presumed interpretive limits. He will close the event in conversation with Prof. N.D.B. Connolly of Johns Hopkins University.

This lecture and conversation are part of the first public event organized by the Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place working group, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and supported by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy.

, co-directed by Brandi T. Summers (Columbia University) and N.D.B. Connolly (Johns Hopkins University), is a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collective of scholars who consider critically and recasts responsibly narratives about how the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces.

Black archipelago, for us, describes islands of affinity and belonging as well as islands of predicament. The Black Archipelago also describes both Black people’s shared encounters with white supremacy as well as, more crucially, how Black people stay connected to each other, to place and to notions of blackness. Through Black Archipelago, we seek to advance collaborations and, hopefully, methodologies grappling with the many threads of domination and insurgent innovation constituting historical patterns of the Black experience. To be sure, these patterns, regardless of capitalism’s various twists and turns, have ensured certain continuities of colonial administration and have tethered imperial cultural norms to modern-day racial and gender formations among Black people.

A Black archipelago is an answer to the question of how to think about enduring crises and enduring people in the Black World. This framework allows us to pay closer attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation.

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Host or Publisher Black Archipelago Working Group