This truly expansive, experimental, and politically engaged work reformulated the scope and tenor of Black history, laying the foundations of Black study in and out of the academy.-- "Annulet"
Helton's book provides an intellectual model and history for African American freedom struggles to ensure underground access to censored literature, while her research provides contexts for understanding surreptitious archives as spaces of collective care.-- "SHARP News"
Named a Best Black History Book of 2024 by Black Perspectives.-- "Black Perspectives"
Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.-- "Black Perspectives"
Through in-depth historical investigation, Helton perceptively examines Black intellectual and literary history in the context of establishing Black archives.-- "Choice Reviews"
At a time when the philosophical concept of 'the archive' has become so potent for scholars, the discourse can sometimes sidestep what Michelle Caswell has termed 'actually existing archives.' In this context, Scattered and Fugitive Things is a necessary restorative. The figures in this book, both notable and hidden, spent their entire lives working institutionally to build fortresses of Black history and possibility, materially reframing a historical record designed to ignore Black existence . . . Each figure is presented here in new depth, and in relation to each other and to a wider world of Black inquiry.--Dorothy Berry "Los Angeles Review of Books"
Scattered and Fugitive Things is a methodological, theoretical, and archival tour de force--at once the capstone of a decade of groundbreaking scholarship in Black archives and librarianship and a call for us to turn our attention to these pioneering Black bibliophiles and their institutions.--Derrick R. Spires, author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States
Laura Helton's stellar and timely book reclaims the vital work of Black librarians, collectors, and bibliophiles who built the archival infrastructure on which scholars of Black history and culture rely. Those long-overlooked men and women are brought back to life with the fidelity that can only come from deep archival immersion by a superb writer. Her exceptional work and that of the brilliant people she profiles reveal a rich world of unexplored archival abundance which continues to serve as a bulwark against both unfounded speculations and outright assaults on Black history.--Barbara D. Savage, author of Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar
Scattered and Fugitive Things is an absolute marvel: for anyone who works in Black archives, anyone interested in Black liberation, Laura E. Helton records for us the strategies these Black librarians, collectors, and archivists employed in the first part of the twentieth century. Each page is a treasure to be savored.--Vanessa K. Valdés, author of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
This ingenious study of the quietly radical innovations of African American librarians and collectors transforms our understanding of the documentary impulse in Black history. Helton shows us that archives are not staid and passive repositories, but instead laboratories for experimentation, even insurrection, in the ways that the traces we preserve can intimate and anticipate shared futures.--Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
Extensively researched and brilliantly constructed, Scattered and Fugitive Things weaves together the remarkable story of librarians, archivists, bibliophiles, and collectors of Black history. It describes the radical lengths that some went to collect, exhibit, and classify Black books, manuscripts, and ephemera. An essential book for anyone interested in the backstory of Black history.--Ethelene Whitmire, author of Regina Anderson Andrews: Harlem Renaissance Librarian
Laura Helton's Scattered and Fugitive Things is an extraordinary book that chronicles and contextualizes how Black archives and libraries were built, organized, preserved, protected and used in the early twentieth century. Beautifully written, this is a major contribution to Black Studies.--Elizabeth McHenry, author of To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship