Body of Evidence: Time and Desire in Embodied Archives

Abstract

In this article, I bring a feminist geographic analysis of embodied life and desire into a study of archives. Drawing on my experience as a library and archives professional and feminist geographer navigating the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I use two examples from UNC’s Wilson Library. I argue that archives are lived, messy spaces where history unfolds not linearly, but in proximity to bodies—bodies who physically handle materials before and after they may become “archival,” who make connections between actors or events throughout time and space, and whose lived experience and desires shape how they interact with archives. Archives do not merely exist as “the archive,” but are constantly being made through the interactions and desires of people across time and space. From this premise, we who utilize archives can be attentive to the labor of archival work that is often erased in scholarship and consider how embodied life shapes a non-linear temporality in archives.

Introduction

Theorists in archival studies have pointed to the divide between “the archive”—a hypothetical space theorized by scholars in the social sciences and humanities and “archives”—material collections of records, the institutions and people that maintain them, and the physical spaces and places in which they are housed (Caswell, 2021; Tansey, 2016; Whearty, 2018). This type of divide, where political processes are posed as impersonal, disembodied, or objective, has long been an issue for feminist scholars. Feminist geographers have pointed to the inadequacies in a study of global and state processes that ignore how power functions in everyday life (e.g., Gökarıksel et al., 2021; Longhurst, 2000; McDowell, 1999; Smith, 2020). Furthermore, feminist scholars have importantly highlighted the gendered and embodied nature of knowledge and knowledge production (Grosz, 1993; Million, 2008; Rose, 1993). I bring this analysis of everyday, embodied, and intimate life into a study of archives. Through this lens, archives do not merely exist as “the archive,” but are constantly being made (and unmade) through the interactions and desires of people across time and space. Beginning from this premise, we who utilize archives can be attentive to the labor of archival work that is often written out of scholarship and consider how embodied life shapes a nonlinear temporality in archives when political events, research, and teaching bring seemingly disparate lives and times together. Through this lens, archives are not static repositories of history but embodied political spaces constantly in flux. In this article, I argue that archives should be viewed as webs of relations across time and space bound up in the individual and collective actions of physical bodies both within and beyond archives themselves. Processes of power such as colonialism, capitalism, White supremacy, and patriarchy meet and are reproduced and contested in archival spaces through the actions, interactions, and desires of individual actors, communities, and institutions throughout time. I illustrate with two examples from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library: the decades-long building name debate that brought divergent actors and eras into contemporary conversation around archives and the reinterpretation of dominant historical narratives about women at UNC through undergraduate student curation.

Before I began my PhD in Geography, I worked for 10 years in libraries and archives—the serials department, acquisitions, reference and instruction, special collections, and digital preservation. Over this decade and throughout these different departments and institutions, I came to understand that libraries and archives are not only about the physical or digital materials they maintain or the physical spaces that house them. They are also, mostly, about people. Although these institutions provide the service of maintaining, organizing, and making accessible physical and digital materials, the foundation of their missions and functions is the people who work in them, who donate and create materials, who request and utilize those materials, who live and shape history, and who configure the political landscape in which libraries and archives exist, or fail to. I come to this question about embodied life and archives to consider how uniquely positioned people across time have encountered archives differently—from their own embodied subject positions. They may have purposefully evaded the gaze of institutions out of desire or necessity, or as Audra Simpson (2014) has described, refused to be known and therefore archived. Others, like colonial states or White supremacist elite, may have purposefully curated archival content to create their own version of history and shape the political landscape and therefore the future (Foucault, 1972; Richards, 1993; Stoler, 2002, 2009). To view archives as embodied political spaces allows us to be accountable to the violent histories of colonial and state archives and the varied positions from which people interact with them while not erasing the labor of archivists, librarians, and others who in the present actively work to repair, transform, and create new tellings of history through archives.

Archives and Desire

Eve Tuck writes that “desire is not absence—not something that is blocked or missing, therefore wanting. It is not a hole, not a lacking, but an exponentially growing assemblage” (Tuck, 2009, p. 639; citing Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In this view, desire is not simply wanting but a drive assembled from fragments collected over a lifetime. I draw on Tuck’s theorizations of desire to understand how people interact with archives. Desire in archives materializes in the different ways that objects become or do not become archival, how they are then utilized, considered significant, understood, analyzed, categorized, or discarded. Because desire is assemblage, it manifests in archives differently through differently positioned bodies across time and space. That is why, for example, an archival document might hold greater significance for some people than others or at some times than others. Derrida has also used the framework of desire to discuss archives. In “Archive Fever”, he writes of an “archive desire” which futilely compels us in the present to know and understand that which may have been destroyed or kept secret in the past (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995). Tuck writes that “Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future” (Tuck, 2009, p. 644) and Deleuze has stated that while desire itself is not revolutionary, it creates “desiring-machines” which are positioned in ways that can disrupt existing systems. “Desire, unpredictable, loyal to no one, can interrupt that which seems already determined, and set in stone” (Tuck, 2010, p. 64; citing Deleuze, 2004). While dominant historical narratives can feel natural with predetermined outcomes, individual or community desires that make their way into archival research, teaching, and curation disrupt this process. Tuck (2009) has argued for desire-based research as a counter or “antidote” to what she describes as damaged-centered research. She writes, “desire-based research frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck, 2009, p. 416). While “Suspending Damage: A letter to communities” calls on communities to place a moratorium on damage-centered research that can pathologize Indigenous and minoritized groups, I am drawn to her approach as a way to encounter archives and what they contain that can be responsible to both those who we come to know through archives (or desire to), their descendants and communities, and those who have, do, and will labor in archives.

Although scholars across fields have interrogated archives as sites of power, reproducing colonial and White supremacist knowledge systems, few have sought to understand archives as embodied political spaces across time. Diane Taylor writes of the division between what she terms “the archive” and “the repertoire” (Taylor, 2003). For Taylor, the archive includes material objects and the repertoire the embodied, ephemeral, or oral practices through which history and culture are transmitted. However, this division fails to consider how knowledge transmitted through archives is also embodied, ephemeral, oral, and dependent upon individual and collective decisions, cultural shifts, and the physical and intellectual labor of people. DeVun and McLure write that “. . . the material of the archive is inseparable from the uncategorized bodies with which it engages: the touch of human hands, the impulse of the scholar, an active tide of research wherein these objects, once again, move” (DeVun & McLure, 2014, p. 122). For them, archival objects behave differently in the space of an institution than in their pre-accessioned realities. Their use changes, and they “acquire the weight of history” (DeVun & McLure, 2014, p. 122). Through their artistic intervention into the ONE archives, they ask us to consider how “an archive might have been (or might still be) activated by proximity to flesh, by the tactile currents of unseen bodies, unseen lives” (DeVun & McLure, 2014, p. 123). Belinda Battley argues that accessioning records isn’t necessarily an act of preservation when they are disconnected from their context—the places and people that give them meaning. She writes,

Acknowledging the place of place means that you understand when you move a record into a new place, such as an archival institution, it’s no longer in the midst of its life in the community. As its context has changed, it is no longer exactly the same record. (Battley, 2019, p. 16)

Objects take on new meaning when they are accessioned into archives. They are interpreted and their importance or meaning changes across generations, according to the archivists processing or researchers utilizing, and through teaching and researching with collections.

Ann Laura Stoler writes that colonial archives should be treated “not as sites of knowledge retrieval but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography” (Stoler, 2002, p. 90; Stoler, 2009). In other words, state and colonial archives are more a reflection of state desires than mere repositories of history. The work of archives and historical documentation, preservation, and memorialization in their many forms is about the future, showing or obscuring what might suit specific political objectives. Likewise, divisions between and among archives appear natural. They reflect colonial divisions of humanity and notions of linear progress. Lisa Lowe has shown that the organization of British colonial archives discourages attention to the links and interdependencies between historical and geographical processes across continents. She reads across archival categories to unsettle “the discretely bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized by a national history invested in isolated origins and independent progressive development” (Lowe, 2015, p. 6). Thomas Richards argues that the archives of the British Museum were an ideological construction that projected British control. They were an “epistemological extension” rather than a set of institutions and people (Richards, 1993, p. 15). Richards illustrates that British colonial powers used information—gathering, organizing, and maintaining it—to represent and reify territorial power that was loosely held and barely managed. In the Americas, Diane Taylor (2003) argues that early Spanish evangelists used documentation of Indigenous groups as a tool of elimination. She writes, “These early colonial writings are all about erasure, either claiming that ancient practices had disappeared or trying to accomplish the disappearance they invoked” (p. 41). Taken together, these works highlight the colonial desires invoked through documentation, categorization, and archiving. While these works importantly highlight the colonial origins of modern archival practices, they do not capture diverse manifestations and uses of archives in the present.

Sandra Harvey writes that U.S. state archives of Choctaw enrollment exist “as a historically created set of colonial power relations that forecloses our status as sovereign and complex political subjects even as we often turn to it for proof of our existence” (Harvey, 2020, p. 220). Harvey’s analysis points to the varied ways that political desire changes how people interact with archives. Although the state archives that house tribal enrollment interviews are a document to colonial elimination tactics like blood quantum, they may still be used by Black and Indigenous people in the present to meet specific political objectives. Black Choctaws were categorized and archived as non-Native despite their own declarations of Choctaw heritage and kinship because of how their bodies were read by Enrollment Commission interviewers. The Commission to establish Choctaw Enrollment used interpretation of embodiment, how the interviewer read the body (visually for characteristics that could indicate Blackness), historically (for ancestral enslavement that would indicate Blackness), socially (for social ties that would indicate Blackness), and embodied practices (for language-use that would indicate Blackness) to deny or grant Choctaw enrollment. These interpretations drew on settler-enslaver (Curley et al., 2022) notions that link Blackness with slavery and therefore non-Native, non-sovereign. Harvey’s discussion of the Commission’s archives illustrates both the embodiment and desire captured in the archives themselves. In this case, the archives of the Commission codified settler definitions of Blackness, Nativeness, and sovereignty into U.S. law. They denied or granted enrollment based on state desires to shape and control who may be considered Native and by what means. Like Lowe (2015), Harvey asks us to question how our own accounting of difference through archival interpretation is bound up in the ways that embodiment and desire have shaped the existence of archives themselves.

People may also purposefully or necessarily evade state documentation, refusing to be known by institutions and therefore through institutional archives. In Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, Audra Simpson (2014) describes deep historical genealogies of refusal practiced by Mohawks of Kahnawà: throughout their interactions with the settler state at varying scales. She argues that communities of research participants withhold or divulge knowledge in calculated ways that meet political and representational objectives. I draw on Simpson’s theory of ethnographic refusal to consider those refusals that have taken place throughout history and how they might appear as gaps, unknowns, unthoughts, and misrecognitions in archives. J. J. Ghaddar (2016) has considered the role that archival records play in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address Indian Residential Schools. Ghaddar argues that incorporating records by or about Indigenous people “transforms Canadian national shame and guilt into national glory and honour” (p. 3) and points to the case of testimonials by residential school survivors collected through an Independent Review Process (IAP). Some survivors wish for their testimonials to be included in the Truth and Reconciliation archives to document the genocidal actions of the Canadian government and Catholic Church. Others desire that their testimonials be destroyed. Although government and Church authorities may also wish the records would be destroyed for their own protection from legal action, it is not as simple as erasure versus exposure due to the varied and divergent ways people involved approach the records and what they document. Ghaddar writes, “The impulse to destroy the IAP records, articulated by some Indigenous people, including school survivors, is an impulse toward hiding and, therefore, protecting a painful chapter of Indigenous history from being incorporated into the story of Canadian shame-cum-national-triumph” (p. 21). Similarly, Rodney G. S. Carter (2006) has argued that denying archives their records is a tool that many marginalized groups use to exercise power and sovereignty.

The work of Indigenous scholars and community archives demonstrates that inclusion into institutional archives, repositories, or museums is not always a desirable outcome (e.g. Caswell et al., 2017; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). Increasingly communities turn to oral histories, counter-archives, community archives, or as Springgay et al. (2020) describe, “anarchiving” practices. UNC’s Community-Driven Archives program, which provides resources and training for individual or community archivists to document and preserve their own historical materials, describes a traditional top-down approach to collecting and an extractive model for institutional archives. They write, “Some people donate materials to institutional archives and come to feel that their donation benefits the institution and academic researchers more than those in their own community” (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, n.d.-a). This can lead to the frequently cited archival gaps and silences but also to an overrepresentation of particular people, places, events, and ideas. The presence of some historical figures might carry the weight of dozens of linear feet of documentation in archives, others appear to have never existed at all. This unevenness may indicate both shifts in collection priorities and also a desire—or lack thereof—to be archived and therefore possibly incorporated into an institutions progress narrative. Jake Hodder has identified an irony between the focus on absence, incompleteness, and silences in archives when abundance is what is often the great challenge for those researching with historical documents (Hodder, 2017). While Hodder argues for biography as method for scholars working through an excess of materials, his analysis also highlights the issue of overrepresentation and another type of erasure present in scholarship on archives—the labor and theoretical contributions of archivists and librarians.

Library and archives professionals have increasingly drawn attention to the “invisible labor” of archives (Tanya Zanish-Belcher, 2018) and their associated underfunding (Tansey, 2016). Paul Griffin has written about the labor of archival work, highlighting the economic precarity to which libraries and archives are increasingly subject (Griffin, 2018). He argues that archival labor is integral to “the making of usable pasts” (p. 501), but is largely disregarded in academic work on archives. Cheryl Thompson (2018) highlights the importance of both communities of archivists and shifting cultural and historical narratives in repairing archival silences and erasures. She describes differing experiences researching historical Black Canadian beauty products in US and Canadian archives. In the United States, Thompson encountered archivists knowledgeable about Black history collections, whereas in Canada, despite the presence of materials that document Black history, unknowledgeable archivists and national cultural narratives around race made those collections difficult to access. Hayden Lorimer writes that archival research is often portrayed as “. . . the lone researcher, sequestered in the archive, can ‘just get on with things’; and, in so doing, renders reflexive commentary on practice as superfluous” (Lorimer, 2010, p. 251). Lorimer goes on to argue that as the practicing community in archival spaces, archivists should be historical researchers’ key informants. When researchers find “undiscovered” connections or materials in archives, they might ask themselves “undiscovered by whom?” (Taylor, 2003, p. 54) since those materials have been created, acquired, processed, and handled sometimes over generations. Rather than “undiscovered,” we might consider those new insights to be a result of these varied desires that researchers bring into their work. To view archives as embodied political spaces not only allows for an engagement with archival labor in our analyses but also deepens our understanding of historical records and the events and processes they attempt to capture. Archives can fracture, creating divisions that reify colonial categories and make them appear natural or predetermined (Lowe, 2015). However, archivists, librarians, and researchers actively make connections between collections, categories, and materials through teaching, exhibits, finding aids, research guides, and scholarly or public writing. Those connections are always transforming as contemporary political events unfold, new collections are acquired, and differently positioned bodies ask questions of and interact with archives and institutions. What archives reveal or obscure is a multiplicitous process involving the everyday political decisions, actions, and desires of people across time, both within and beyond archives themselves.

Body of Evidence

Here, I illustrate my argument with two examples from UNC’s Wilson Library. Wilson Library holds the official records of the university, along with archival collections related to the history and culture of North Carolina and the U.S. South more broadly (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, n.d.-b). I highlight how archival materials and their associated historical imaginaries can shift overtime as new materials are acquired, collective memory shifts, and numerous differently positioned bodies in both time and space handle, interpret, and make visible archival sources—always in relation to desires for the future.

Hurston and Saunders

When I first set foot on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017, I stood under the looming, historic, three-story building that houses Geography and Religion departments. A window on the top floor beamed with a homemade sign that read “HURSTON HALL.” I would come to hear students and faculty refer to what was officially, on the books “Carolina Hall” as “Hurston Hall” in conversation, email signatures, and as a subtext when referring to Carolina was logistically necessary. Until 2015, Hurston or Carolina Hall was Saunders Hall—named for William L. Saunders, UNC class of 1854. Saunders was NC Secretary of State, UNC-Chapel Hill Trustee, editor of the series Colonial Records of North Carolina, Confederate veteran, and leader of the Ku Klux Klan (Fryar 2018). For generations, campus and town communities, led by Black students, organized to pressure administrators to remove Saunders from the building and change the name to honor Zora Neale Hurston, Black author, anthropologist, and filmmaker known to have been active on Carolina’s campus as a collaborator with theater professor Paul Green in the 1940s (Fryar, 2018; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2019b). However, activists struggled to find archival documentation of both Saunders’ KKK leadership and Hurston’s participation at UNC prior to integration. Although the figures of William Saunders and Zora Neale Hurston lived nearly a century apart, their lives and legacies met in contemporary debates that took place around UNC’s archives. Through this example, I highlight the varied and often non-linear ways that events, people, or details of their lives may be submerged or surface through documentation in archives and how competing political desires may create different meanings and significance of archival materials.

Saunders’ leadership in the KKK was well-known, but actual text linking him to the organization was difficult to locate. The KKK was known as the “invisible empire” in some states and eras, thought to be ubiquitous and powerful but untraceable, undocumented, and unknowable through official sources (Martinez, 2007). “I decline to answer” inscribed on William Saunders’ grave calls back to the over 100 times he invoked the fifth amendment when interrogated about his KKK involvement in his lifetime (Find a Grave, 2007; Meekins & Putt, 2020). What can be known archivally about early state history of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began with a collection of documents curated by William L. Saunders himself. Saunders collected public and private collections of papers throughout the state following the Civil War to create the 10 edited volumes Colonial Records of North Carolina (Documenting the American South & University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, 2004). The report of the Historical Commission to Governor Charles B. Aycock (1903–1905) reads,

It will thus be seen that the Historical Commission is expected to do for the entire history of the State what Colonel William L. Saunders and Chief Justice Walter Clark, by their monumental labors in the editing and publication of “The Colonial Records” and “The State Records” of North Carolina, did for the period prior to 1790. (North Carolina Historical Commission, 1904, p. 9)

The Historical Commission was the earliest predecessor to the State Archives of North Carolina. They took Saunders’ lead to document and preserve NC history, using him as a model for historical documentation for the state. Saunders worked to shape a historical account of NC that fit his White supremacist vision. This included denying the existence of the KKK to ensure its continuance but also physically curating the very first archives of the state.

Archival priorities have transformed since the beginnings of the state historical commission and archives. UNC Libraries and the Center for the Study of the American South have collected and made available materials and stories of activists and Indigenous and Black scholars and work to provide documentation of campus histories of slavery, colonialism, and segregation (Center for the Study of the American South, 2021; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2021). Professor Paul Green’s papers were accessioned into university archives between 1975 and 2018 (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2019a). His interviews and letters describe Zora Neale Hurston’s time at Carolina but also the strategic methods they had to employ to keep it secret (Fryar, 2018; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2019b). Jim Crow segregation persisted throughout the U.S. South for over a century, and UNC-Chapel Hill did not admit any Black students until 1951. The university’s first Black female undergraduate student, Karen Parker, was not admitted until 1963, and the first Black faculty, Hortense McClinton in Social Work (The Carolina Story: Virtual Museum of University History, n.d.-a), was not hired until 1966—over 20 years after Hurston’s unofficial attendance. Zora Neal Hurston was listed as a student in Green’s Radio Writing and Production course in the newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel in March 1940 but the course was not in the official roster and Hurston, who earned her bachelor’s in 1928 from Barnard, never appeared in a list of enrolled students (Fryar, 2018; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2019b). Letters and interviews suggest that Hurston was not a student but that she and Green were actually collaborators while she was a drama professor at the nearby North Carolina Central University between 1939 and 1940 (then, North Carolina College for Negroes). (Fryar, 2018). The class met on Sunday evenings at Green’s house possibly after complaints from White students (Fryar, 2018; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2019b). Racist laws and accounts of harassment and complaints leveraged at Hurston illustrate the high stakes of keeping her participation in university activities a secret. Embodied life and desire influenced how Hurston, students, and faculty interacted with the institution from their different positions in their time and how those actions come to reflect how we might be able to later capture, or not, these events through archives.

By 2015, students had instituted their own name change, calling the Saunders building “Hurston Hall,” while undertaking organizing, protests, petitions, and research to support their demands. At this time, in the minutes from the Board of Trustees meeting which dedicated Saunders Hall, student activist Blanche Brown found “Head of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina” in plain text listed among his allegedly honorable accolades (Fryar, 2018). Trustees in 1920 put into print, what everyone knew—Saunders was a Klansman. Citing this as “new” information, members of the Board of Trustees renamed the building “Carolina Hall” and placed a 16-year moratorium on campus building name changes (Fryar, 2018). Members of the Board of Trustees specifically cited the documented evidence of Saunders’ KKK leadership as a qualifying factor for renaming the building in 2015. Sallie Shuping-Russell stated, “there was no record to be found, at least at the University, of his leadership in the organization [of the Ku Klux Klan]” (Fryar, 2018). However, in 1975, a Daily Tar Heel article pointed to the exact location of the documentation of Saunders’ enrollment in the KKK. Elizabeth Leland wrote,

Saunders, a patriot, a devoted North Carolinian. Or Saunders, the emperor of a racist organization. As you walk through the 62-room building named for this man, the choice is yours. The university made its opinion known upon dedication of the building 53 years ago. (emphasis added; Fryar, 2018; Leland, 1975)

Furthermore, in 2007, during a campus history tour historian and archivist Nicholas Graham pointed to Saunders’ “I decline to answer” as evidence of his knowledge of and involvement in the terrorist organization (Fiedler, 2007). Later in 2014, Omololu Babatunde described an anonymous alumna arriving at a protest to provide students with an envelope of evidence about Saunders and the KKK (Feminists Liberating Our Collective Knowledge, 2017).

A lack of documentation of “strong connections” to the university was cited for denying activist demands for Hurston Hall (Hodge, 2015). However, in 2017, Trustees cited total ignorance of the struggle for Hurston Hall. In a letter to the Daily Tar Heel, Trustee Alston Gardner wrote,

The Trustees never considered the possibility of renaming Saunders Hall in the spring of 2015 for Hurston for two obvious reasons. First, the students never proposed it to us. Second, the petition with hundreds of student signatures supporting the removal of Saunders’ name never mentioned naming the building for Hurston. When support for naming the building for Hurston surfaced after we had renamed the building Carolina Hall, I researched the issue and found no evidence to support Hurston ever having taken classes at UNC. (Gardner, 2017)

The struggle for Hurston Hall and the associated discourses around historical truth and documentation reveals UNC’s archives not as a disembodied space of evidence and erasure but as a political site bound up in the everyday actions of people across time. Both Saunders’ atrocities and Zora Neale Hurston’s contributions to campus life existed in what Gilliland and Caswell have called an “archival imaginary” (Gilliland, & Caswell, 2016). To them, archival absences can acquire an “aspirational nature” and function similarly to actual records (p. 56). The archival imaginary is,

. . . the dynamic way in which communities creatively and collectively re-envision the future through archival interventions in representations of the shared past. Through the archival imaginary, the past becomes a lens to the future; the future is rooted in that which preceded it. Through the archival imaginary, the future can be conceived through kernels of what was possible in the past. (Gilliand & Caswell, 2016, p. 61)

I draw on this concept to highlight how political desires about the future, rooted in archives and past possibilities, might in some instances supersede what archives actually contain. In the case of Saunders and Hurston, the campus community who coalesced around the Struggle for Hurston Hall had desires, stemming from their own embodied experiences of campus life, that differed from the Trustees responsible for making decisions about the future of the campus landscape. The same material evidence resulted in different conclusions for activists and administrators. For campus activists, the common knowledge of Saunders as a White supremacist and conflicting evidence of Hurston on Carolina’s campus, combined with the swell of momentum across student groups for Hurston Hall were enough to champion a name change to transform the campus landscape in their own visions. For administrators, however, common knowledge was “no record” and documentation of Hurston’s ties was “no evidence.” One line of posthumous mention from the Saunders Hall dedication held a greater weight for the trustees than newspaper documentation, oral histories, and the other evidence of Hurston at Carolina. Furthermore, as evidenced by Gardner’s letter to the editor, Trustees took it upon themselves to research Hurston’s ties to Carolina to prove lack of evidence. Despite several actors across generations pointing to the exact location of Saunders’ KKK leadership mention, trustees were not compelled to do the same research about Saunders.

We can also see competing desires in both Saunders’ and Hurston’s times. Saunders desired to keep his involvement in the KKK a secret to elude criminal prosecution and allow the racist organization to continue. He also created and curated an archive of North Carolina history to shape a White supremacist future for the state. Through creating the earliest state archives and evading documentation of his KKK involvement, what is known archivally of his time is made to appear like a natural representation of history. Hurston, Green, and others in the campus community also purposefully avoided the gaze of documentation in their time so that they could continue to learn and collaborate despite racist laws and actors. When Green’s papers were accessioned into university archives, they also shaped the political and historical landscape in ways that continue to resonate and inspire students and the campus community. I was not yet in the Geography Department at Carolina when the events around Saunders and Hurston transpired, but Geography students, faculty, and staff continue to refer to the building as Hurston Hall and teach the history of the building and its names. Students have imbued Hurston’s presence at UNC with meaning through the Struggle for Hurston Hall, their embodied experience on campus travels through time to connect with both Hurston and future generations of students on Carolina’s campus—including myself, when I first saw the Hurston Hall sign hanging in Professor Altha Cravey’s window in 2017. When we view archives as simply a container or disembodied site of power, we lose our ability to analyze the how human desires materialize or dematerialize, often in non-linear ways, within and around them.

Cornelia Phillips Spencer

In 2019–2020, I worked with a group of undergraduate student curators, history faculty, and archivists and library staff to create an archival exhibit about women in the history of UNC-Chapel Hill. Preparing for this project, we faced what Hodder (2017) has described as the challenge of abundance—both in actual materials and scope of our subject. Wilson Library staff worked on several student-curated exhibits in the past. However, this was the first that would span all collections. So that student curators could finish their exhibit in the Spring semester timeline, we chose to do preliminary sorting, reading, and thematic categorizations of materials. Due to the physical layout of the proposed exhibit space, a temporally linear exhibit would not be possible. Therefore, we chose a thematically organized exhibit, grouping materials into 10 categories that would speak across eras and collections. To prepare, we created lists of potential collections, boxes, folders, and individual items that students may want to explore to create their exhibit cases. Students were organized into five groups, each responsible for curating a large and small exhibit case with objects around two themes. The themes were pre-decided between archivists and teaching faculty based on prior exhibit experience, known events in UNC history, collection knowledge, and the availability of display-able archival materials. At times, we met a disjuncture between the story students desired to tell through their exhibit, the availability of materials, and the reality of how historical events may have manifested. Student curators made connections across time periods and collections to transmit their own narrative about women at UNC that often deviated from dominant depictions of university history.

Very few women were documented in the early archives of UNC-Chapel Hill. White women were not admitted to the university to study in any capacity until 1897, over 100 years after the university’s founding (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019). The first Black woman student, Gwendolyn Harrison, was not admitted until 1951 (Graham & University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2017), and the first Native woman, Genevieve Lowry Cole, was not admitted until 1952 (Sheehey, 2019). Gerda Lerner (1975) has argued that early archives systematically excluded women, and UNC’s archives are no different. Although we can be sure that women factored importantly into the very foundations of the university (for a discussion of slavery at UNC-Chapel Hill see Kapur, 2021; McMillian, 2014; Slavery and the Making of the University, n.d.; on women’s unnamed contributions to early academic work see Oakley, 2021) through the first 100 years of archival documentation, it seems that few women existed at all. This absence presented a challenge for the team working to prepare for the archival exhibit about women in UNC’s history. Surveying the materials before 1900, we had the first woman graduate’s diploma, a handful of objects like dance cards—which suggest women were around in some capacity—and a large collection of materials about and by the so-called “woman who rang the bell” Cornelia Phillips Spencer. The plethora of published texts and unpublished manuscripts by and about Spencer point to the paradox of abundance, that some actors, events, and subjects are overrepresented in archives. Spencer, a White woman, could not enroll in or teach classes at UNC-Chapel Hill because in her lifetime only White men were permitted at the university. However, Spencer’s role in university and town life is very well documented. Spencer was the daughter of UNC mathematics professor James Phillips, wife of lawyer James Monroe Spencer, and a prolific author and political influencer in her time. She wrote a weekly “Young Ladies” column for the Presbyterian paper, countless poems and hymns, and numerous books including the Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina and First Steps in North Carolina History (The Carolina Story: Virtual Museum of University History, n.d.-b; Wright, 1997). Like Saunders, she worked to influence not only her contemporary political and social landscape, but its remembrance.

The majority of Spencer’s papers were donated to Wilson Library by her granddaughter, Cornelia Spencer Love (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Libraries, 2021) in the mid-20th century. Her legacy is that of a great proponent of education in North Carolina due to her writings and influence with political representatives of the time. Most notably, she is known for pushing politicians to reopen the university after Civil War Reconstruction, ringing the bell atop the administrative building on campus to signal its reopening (Cravey & Petit, 2012; Wright, 1997). In 1924, the first women’s dormitory was named in her honor, and between 1994 and 2004, there existed an award for undergraduate women called “The Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award” (Cravey & Petit, 2012; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill General Alumni Association, 2004). However, Spencer’s published works and unpublished papers donated to university archives reveal her to have been a White supremacist who was against women’s coeducation (Wright, 1997). Spencer set out to write an official history of North Carolina’s early years—entitled First Steps in North Carolina History (1892). Throughout Spencer’s writing and the organization of her text, there is an insistence on the natural, destined way that White settlers came to call North Carolina “Our State.” The first chapter “Our State. –Its first inhabitants” describes Indigenous people who made their lives with the land that is now North Carolina as “wild and savage” (p. 2) war-obsessed, lazy, and destined to destroy themselves had White settlers not arrived (p. 5). She writes that the land in North Carolina was so abundant and fruitful it “seemed as if the Creator had intended it for the abode of a great and prosperous Christian people” (p. 9) and beginning from her description of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the continent, she describes a state history that all but prophesizes its future. Of the enslaved Black people forcibly brought to the continent, she writes that although they were enslaved, they were “certainly much better off here . . . than they would have been in Africa; for there they were in a dreadful and bloody slavery to other savages” (p. 43). In this analysis, Spencer predetermines slavery for those enslaved in the Americas, believing that “the Creator intended to do them good when he brought them to America” (p. 43). Furthermore, Spencer was recruited to write a positive account of the Confederacy by Democratic politicians following the Civil War (Chapman, 2004). In her monograph, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (Spencer, 1866), she described what she considered the great sacrifices of the people of North Carolina for the service of the Confederate cause—writing in detail about the University of North Carolina and the village of Chapel Hill. Her historical works serve to naturalize White supremacy in the state and illustrate her desire to ensure its continuance into the future.

When undergraduate students curating the exhibit about women at UNC learned about Spencer, they made the decision to put her under the exhibit theme called “Barriers to Women’s Education.” Rather than regurgitating the oft-repeated celebration of Spencer, student curators sought to provide a corrective to dominant depictions. They did not see Spencer as a proponent of women’s education when her own writing illustrated that she sought to uphold only a space for a particular White womanhood rooted in patriarchy, colonialism, and anti-blackness. To illustrate how Spencer was a barrier to women’s education at Carolina, students chose a printed 2005 email exchange between her great granddaughter, Spencie Love, and student activist John Kenyon “Yonni” Chapman to display. In the correspondence, Chapman explains why their activist organization has identified the Cornelia Philips Spencer Bell Award for undergraduate women to be disbanded, citing the leading role Spencer played in “the White supremacist movement to suppress black freedom during Reconstruction” (Chapman, 2005; Climbing the Hill, 2020). Love expresses her belief that Spencer has been used as a “scapegoat” for the numerous male racists and enslavers whose names decorate the campus landscape. Yonni Chapman was an activist and organizer in the Chapel Hill area. His graduate research and activism focused on civil rights and historical accuracy, hoping to document both institutional racism and anti-racist activism at the University of North Carolina and in Chapel Hill (Fryar, 2018). He founded the organization, Campaign for Historical Accuracy and Truth, which led, among other ventures, a successful campaign to retire the Cornelia Philips Spencer Bell Award. Chapman’s dissertation examines the processes by which historians of UNC have buried both the University’s ties to slavery and the contributions Black students, staff, and faculty have made to campus life (Chapman, 2006; Fryar, 2018).

Not unlike the discrepancies between political desires on either side of the debate over Hurston Hall, competing political desires around the interpretation of archival materials also manifested around the Bell award. Spencer’s great-granddaughter Cornelia Spencer “Spencie” Love was a historian, earning her PhD from Duke University in 1990 and studying Black history throughout her tenure (Southern Oral History Program, n.d.). About her great-grandmother, she asserted that her “contributions outweigh her racial views. I think she was like most people of the time” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill General Alumni Association, 2004). University Chancellor James Moeser canceled the Bell award after Chapman’s campaign. However, he made this decision only so that they could “spare her (Spencer) from being put on trial year after year” (Swofford, 2005). He continued that “We cannot hold people of the past to contemporary standards” a practice which he called “self-righteous.” Of course, Spencer was not like most people of her time—no one at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill was. During her time, the university itself was open only to very few wealthy, White men from prominent families who represented the Confederate cause, many of whom brought enslaved Black people with them to campus (Kapur, 2021). In fact, Spencer’s own brother was a prominent opponent of North Carolina’s secession during the Civil War who fought for Black rights, most notably as part of the legal counsel for Plessy in the Plessy v. Ferguson case (United States Department of Justice, 2014; Wright, 1997). Chapman and student activists held the belief that Spencer’s racism was not only abnormal and unacceptable in her time or any other but also that she was particularly politically influential during Reconstruction. Spencer led a boycott of the university after the South lost the Civil War—persuading wealthy Whites not to enroll their sons and forcing its closure while Republicans held power (Chapman, 2004). Harry Watson, historian and former director of the Center for the Study of the American South, called this narrative a misinterpretation of the historical events, claiming that the university closed simply due to lack of funds, unrelated to Spencer’s boycott (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill General Alumni Association, 2004).

These events surrounding Spencer, her legacy and influence, and the Bell award illustrate how historical documentation, in archives or otherwise, can create or fracture connections when they suit differing political desires. Spencer’s descendants and university administrators deny the connections between the University’s institutionalized racism and the actions of Cornelia Philips Spencer or between past racial violence and the experiences of students today. Inadvertently exposing those connections, Spencer’s family threatened to rescind funds donated to the university following Moeser’s decision on the Bell Award (McMillian, 2014). The funds were slotted to improve the building that houses the Center for the Study of the American South—the Love House where Cornelia Phillips Spencer once resided. Lisa Lowe writes about archival categorization that obscures intimate connections between continents, institutions, and people. She writes that state archives and the historical discourses that come out of them work to naturalize narratives of progress and modernism, all while forgetting or smoothing over violent encounters (Lowe, 2015, p. 2). By bringing an encounter between (the memory of) Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Spencie Love, and Yonni Chapman into one category—Barriers to Women’s Education—students curating the exhibit used categorization to reveal that which historical progress narratives surrounding the university have obscured. Students make an intergenerational connection with Yonni Chapman, other student activists, and the numerous community and campus organizations and actors who, as Chapman writes in his letter to Spencie Love, desire to “understand and honestly reckon with histories of oppression to create a more just society and more inclusive commemorative landscape” (Chapman, 2005; Climbing the Hill, 2020).

Work performed by countless differently positioned people across time and space made it possible for students curating the exhibit to make these connections in 2020—including generations of student activists, librarians, researchers, and the student curators themselves. Yonni Chapman’s Campaign for Historical Accuracy and Truth stemmed from Students Seeking Historical Truth (SSHT), a group formed by Black student Kristi Booker when she learned Saunders Hall was named for a leader of the Ku Klux Klan (Fryar, 2018). SSHT held several performance art actions over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, displaying KKK banners and nooses on and around Saunders Hall. The group brought reminders of the physical, bodily, and psychological, violence for which Saunders was responsible into the campus landscape to disrupt liberal progress narratives university administration pushed forward. Yonni Chapman’s papers, which contain the email correspondence between himself and Spencie Love, were donated and accessioned into Wilson Library between Chapman’s death in 2009 and 2018. Archivists and librarians who work with these materials daily knew to point students to Chapman’s collection and dissertation for materials and analysis on both activism at Carolina and the important roles of Black women and student activists in university history. Furthermore, librarians and archivists knew where collection gaps were most prominent and worked with students to help them make connections across collections to tell the stories that both reflected their own embodied understandings of campus history and worked to repair erasures in Wilson’s archives. The “Barriers” theme under which student curators chose to position the correspondence over Cornelia Philips Spencer was eventually titled “Breaking Barriers” and included materials from across time periods, collections, and issues to show the continuity of women’s ongoing struggles on Carolina’s campus. These included documents that told the story of Pauli Murray and Gwendolyn Harrison’s denials from UNC’s graduate school in 1951 because of their race, a 1970 protest for child care on campus, the 2013 fight for gender-neutral housing, protests over Black professor Sonja Haynes Stone’s tenure denial in 1979, and a documentary made in 2015 about widespread sexual assault on UNC’s campus (Climbing the Hill, 2020).

Conclusion

In 2015, members of a student activist group, the Real Silent Sam Coalition, invoked the performance art of Students Seeking Historical Truth nearly three decades earlier (Lamm, 2015). A photograph from the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper shows six Black students on the steps of Saunders Hall. They are wearing nooses around their necks and holding signs that read “THIS is what SAUNDERS would do to ME” to use their bodies as “reminders and eulogies” (Fryar, 2018; Lamm, 2015). Student activists in this moment remind us of the embodied and material effects of historical narratives and how we come to understand them—through archives or otherwise. Sylvia Wynter, drawing on Fanon, has argued that humans are both a biological species and a storytelling one (McKittrick, 2015). In other words, telling stories is part of what makes humanity. Colonial and state archives have historically been used to tell curated stories, making humanity for White wealthy men all while unmaking humanity for Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized people through their erasure, misrepresentation, objectification, or capture. Scholars have increasingly pointed to the ways that memory, representations, and histories have real effects on what is considered possible for the future (e.g., Davis & Todd, 2017; Gökarıksel et al., 2021; Gilliland & Caswell, 2016). Drawing on engagements and critiques of biopolitics, Smith and Vasudevan ask, “What is the role of anticipatory thinking in the biopolitics of White supremacy and anti-Blackness?” (Smith & Vasudevan, 2017, p. 212). They push readers to consider how the death of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other non-White people are made to seem ordinary or inevitable in the service of White futurity. Much of the of scholarship on archives importantly highlights this exact process. White, wealthy, male, and colonizing subjects have curated specific representations through colonial and state archives to prefigure the type of worlds they wish to create. However, people in the present continue to use archives to tell their stories—be it to reckon with the violences experienced through colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, and White supremacy or to make connections across time periods, actors, and events to envision desirable futures.

I have argued that scholars view archives as a lived, messy space where history does not unfold linearly but only in proximity to bodies—bodies who physically handle materials both before and after they become “archival,” who make connections between actors or events throughout time and space, and whose lived experience shapes and influences how they interact with institutions and archives, real or imagined. Drawing on my own embodied experience as both a librarian and feminist geographer navigating the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill and scholarship on desire, archives, and refusal, I push scholars to consider the embodied and intimate nature of archives to be accountable to both the labor of archivists and librarians and the lived realities of those who we may come to know and those we cannot know through archives.