Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth—to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.

Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors’ archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

"A very timely addition to the contemporary discussion of “the archives” among scholars of African American literature, culture, and history and in literary studies generally." - Modern Philology

"Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s excellent Shadow Archives reminds us that scholarly archives, especially literary archives, are always a sort of interpretation." - Modern Philology

"Though the subject is narrow, this study succeeds at being both masterfully scholarly in tone and at the same time easily comprehensible. Valuable to those in the fields of library science, history, and African American literature, this rich volume should not be overlooked...Highly recommended." - Choice

"Most compelling is Cloutier’s overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists—Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison—approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies." - New York Journal of Books

"Shadow Archives is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the “scenario” of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics." - Textual Cultures

"Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an “archival sensibility.”" - The Columbia Review

"[This] monograph promises a historically and theoretically grounded account of the archival practices that informed the writings of McKay, Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. . . Generally, Cloutier’s book is highly recommended to anybody interested in African American literature of the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, any future history or theory of the archive in African American letters will have to grapple with Shadow Archives." - African American Review

"With Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s scholarship in hand today, we are now better informed and poised to protect the integrity of African American archives for tomorrow." - New England Quarterly