A centennial celebration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and its vital role in the development of Black StudiesIn 1926, the Afro–Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Schomburg’s collection of four thousand books, pamphlets, papers, and prints arrived at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. The collection contained works in many languages and formats, offering an unparalleled look into the richness and global reach of Black hi...

The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional colle...