Ruthie Block

This project examines mid-to-late twentieth-century Black women who stewarded rare collections of early Black texts within their homes. Centering collectors whose domestic repositories constituted sites of literary activism outside institutional frameworks, it reorients conventional historiographies of the Black feminist literary renaissance and the Black ‘archival turn’. Combining print history, Black geographic thought, and Black feminist theory, select antiquarian texts are traced from their initial circulation, through their extended stewardship within these collections, and into their varied afterlives—revealing how these women developed aberrant theorizations of the value of the Black textual record and transformed the trajectory of Black material history. Bringing Black feminist theory to the ‘biography of the object,’ this study recovers alternative information landscapes forged within the Black woman’s homespace, surfacing dismissed sites of textual mediation and historical production.