Fugitive Archives of Spiritual Lives: Re-membering Black Nationalist Women

This paper reflects on what it means to encounter twentieth-century Black nationalist women’s spiritual lives within formal academic archives. Across mainstream repositories, traces of these women often appear fragmented, obscured, and fugitive, rarely foregrounding their religious visions or spiritual freedom dreams. Engaging these materials requires narrative interpretation and ethical, affective listening; i.e. reading for presence within archival absence and lack. Thinking with archival scholar Laura Helton, I ask how scholars might reclaim the genre of the Black archive by attending to the fugitivity of Black nationalist women’s spirituality across dispersed institutional collections. In doing so, I call for scholars to recover Black nationalist women as religious thinkers whose spiritual visions of freedom shaped twentieth-century freedom struggles. By approaching spirituality as a through-line ligamenting fragmented and surveillant archival records, I demonstrate how scholars can re-member the fugitive traces of Black nationalist women’s lives and authorize fuller historical narratives of their contributions.