Fragmented Encounters: Reconstructing Black Women’s Lives from the Archive

This conversation invites participants to consider how archival materials can be used to piece together aspects of a person’s life—not as a neutral act of recovery, but as an engagement with contested infrastructures shaped by power, access, and historical violence. Which stories rise to the surface, asking to be told? Which ones retreat into shadow, withheld or forgotten? And how do we learn to listen for both?

Drawing on Sojourners for Justice Press’s publication Searching for Joan, Neta Bomani and Mariame Kaba will explore how they engaged archival records to illuminate a constellation of moments from the life of freedom fighter and revolutionary Joan Bird. Moving beyond extraction, they will reflect on archival practice as a form of transformation: a way of participating in the making of collective memory, counter-record, and self-determined narratives.

In a moment emerging from a long history of censorship and rising authoritarianism, this conversation positions archival work as a necessary political act—one that asks us to see ourselves not only as subjects of archives, but as active participants in shaping what endures, what is remembered, and how.

This program is co-organized with Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP), an abolitionist feminist micro-press behind the Black Zine Fair in New York City. Founded by Mariame Kaba and co-directed with Neta Bomani, SJP publishes short-form print—zines, pamphlets, chapbooks, broadsides, and other DIY publications—by people working within the margins of independent publishing.

Photo: Kedrick Walker