Literary scholars work at the mercy of the print archive, and for centuries, the coloniality of this archive has shaped both our reading practices and the parameters of our received knowledge. Critical scholars of race have particularly had to learn to read archives against the grain, attending to and imagining beyond their limits to fashion new kinds of knowledge and narratives.1 In the present day, in digital space, we are able to access what feels like a boundless stream of textual evidence that, while still mediated by power and capital, falls outside the grasp of immediate state control. Three recent articles address the urgent question of how to read and archive the explicitly oppositional, grassroots body of online communications protesting racist police violence. How do we read and analyze these texts? How might we collect, preserve, and frame them for the future?
In “Black Lives and Justice with the...