The Radical Archive of Preservation: From Acts to Archives in Black Production Culture

The Radical Archive of Performance: From Acts to Archives in Black Preservation explores issues of the archive and preservation in Black performance culture. This research project asks: if today’s professional archival and preservation practices are adequate for the identification, preservation, and accessibility of Black epistemologies materialized through performance; how strategies of resistance and improvisation work with or against notions of access and preservation in archival science; and if Tyler Perry Studios can be considered a radical archive of Black performance. After Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten, and in the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition, I argue improvisation, discordance, and trace as the conceptual reserves of Black epistemologies and demonstrates radical acts of preservation in performance. This project is conceptualized as a way of thinking through archival and curatorial challenges when working with Black performance immateriality and ephemerality. Using archival science, production studies, and performance theory, I illustrate ways Black production cultures, from art exhibitions to Film/TV productions, navigate issues of materiality in the archive. In order to investigate the quality of preservation of Black epistemologies in contemporary Black performance, I use Tyler Perry Studios production culture as a case study to examine objects, rituals, and spaces using a Media Industries method