The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities

As cultural heritage institutions across the nation grapple with the realization that their collecting histories have captured an incomplete picture of history, curators and archivists like Dorothy Berry have been drawn into complicated conversations. The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities brings together years of those conversations from their origins in conference halls, webinars, and reading rooms to open them up to the public. The labor and theory that upholds archives has been obscured, but our understandings of history and ourselves rest on those invisible foundations. This book clarifies those foundations while offering new possibilities for imagining archival futures in and outside of institutional holdings.

Dorothy Berry is an archivist and writer whose work can be found in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Public Domain Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her writing is informed by archival methodologies from a range of cultural heritage institutions, where she continues to implement creative methods to make archival collections related to Black life available more broadly.

Author(s):  Dorothy Berry

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Paperback , We Here Press , 2025
89 p,  6 × 8.375 in.