Events

'History must restore what slavery took away': such was the urgent, if haunting, imperative of history as reparations, articulated in 1925 by Arturo Schomburg. At a moment when the very idea of black historicity aroused doubt, Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile in New York, built an unprecedented 'race library' documenting the African diasporic past. This talk examines the contested place of slavery in archival economies at once affective and pecuniary. In tracing how Schomburg bought, and ultimately sold, his library, this talk shows how early African American archives recast the market's devaluation of black lives and letters. Laura Helton is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. Part of the Book History Colloquium at Columbia.