Histories That Haunt Us: Exploring Presence and the Black Feminist Archive

This research will explore how dynamics of presence and absence relate to the representation of Black British women in a set of London-based Black history archives. The aim of this focus is not only to challenge bodies of work that understand Blackness as exclusively erasure and suffering, but to interrogate the makings of presence, and develop a practice with which we might connect to the humanity and existence that underlines Black women's archival representation.

By exploring Black British archives, I present this research as an opportunity to engage with Black women's historical existence, pulling together moments in which Black women are represented in photographs, articles, artefacts and oral histories, to explore how presence is made in archival material.