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The Challenges of Care in a Blues and Jazz Archive
The Challenges of Care in a Blues and Jazz Archive
The Rosetta Reitz Archival Collective (Chair: Margaret “Lou” Brown)
We are a multidisciplinary, intergenerational research collective comprising archivists, a professional singer/songwriter, academic research staff with social anthropology and digital humanities expertise, and graduate and undergraduate students from musicology, art history, history, and English. In this paper, we critically examine our process of engaging with the Rosetta Reitz papers, an archive housed at Duke University that holds the materials of a White Jewish feminist activist, writer, and arts entrepreneur. In the late 20th century, Reitz established a music label and organized live performances and lectures to spotlight overlooked Black women performers of early blues and jazz. As we explore the music, art, and writing in this archive, we seek to re-vision the past and generate more hopeful imaginings for the future through our own artistic creations while also making the archive more visible for others to explore.
Following Joan Tronto’s categories of care, we open ourselves to questions not only of how to care for the women whose music has been undervalued, but also of how appropriately to care with them. How do we recover the fullness of their lives beyond Reitz’s song selections and writings? How do we prepare ourselves to recognize the clues in their stories that might indicate refusal of the values that prompted our project, which initially centered repairing economic and political injustice; what if an artist’s embrace of musical performance was primarily about pleasure and nurturing communities of women, with disregard for the value systems of patriarchy and capitalism? As we ask these questions, inspired by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s writing on archival ethics of care, we also focus on reparative strategies to make the archive itself more inclusive and accessible to a broader range of seekers whose engagement might trigger creative, liberatory responses we could not have imagined.
Tift Merritt is a Grammy-nominated recording artist who began exploring archives for lyrical presences as an antidote to life on the road. A Practitioner-In-Residence at Duke for the past five years, the principles of archival care have transformed her approach to both the music industry and creative process.
Annie Koppes is a PhD student in Musicology with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her research historicizes the racialized and gendered body and its discursive representations in twentieth-century American popular music, with the blues as a primary interlocutor.
Craig Breaden is the Audiovisual Archivist at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. He is dedicated to empathetic, iterative, and reparative description; to the ongoing preservation of audiovisual materials; to using analog and digital tools in the service of discovery and access; and to working with colleagues in a team atmosphere where all contributions are acknowledged.
Trisha Santanam is a third-year undergraduate student studying English and Music at Duke University. Her research revolves around how music is at the center of territorialization. She focuses specifically on how sound can translate the experience of migration and provide the listener with an auditory map with which they can interpret their environment.
Margaret “Lou” Brown is a social anthropologist with a commitment to slow research, deep engagement, and learning through relationships. She directs programming for the Forum for Scholars and Publics at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University where she focuses on helping people make connections that help make sense of the world.
Ethan Foote is a composer, performer, and PhD candidate in music composition at Duke University. His research and cross-disciplinary work focus on drawing connections between music and intellectual history.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
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