Preserving the Work of Black Feminists and Continuing the Legacy

Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Photo via New Black Man.

Recently while scrolling through posts on Tumblr I came across a link to an essay called Seek The Roots: An Immersive and Interactive Archive of Black Feminist Practice by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Within the essay, Gumbs describes the painstaking process of researching and preserving the work of black feminists, and discusses why it is important to do so.

"It's a queer thing (and by queer I mean unlikely, magical, and against the current of the reproduction of oppression) that the work of a Black lesbian teacher mother warrior poet is even preserved on a college campus, so I take the event seriously. How does one ethically and effectively engage an archive of morbid thoughts and threatened utterances from the pens of dead Black feminists? What framework allows us to share traces of un-actualized projects, out-of-print masterpieces, and forgotten victories?"

Audre Lorde. Photo via http://cache.eb.com.

Reading Seek The Roots made me appreciate the progress of technology. It has allowed for people to build broader networks around a particular interest or cause, and leveled the playing field in terms of access to information. I remember reading books like Black Feminist Thought, This Bridge Called My Back (which is sadly now out of print), and Home Girls in college when I was on a hunt for feminist perspectives that spoke to my experience as a woman of color. The books themselves were incredible resources, but it would have meant even more to have a dialog around them that was outside the traditional university classroom setting. Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a member of The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, a North Carolina based grassroots project which aims to put theory into practice and engage the community around the ideas of black feminists.