Archives For Black Trans Living, A Practice For Possibilities.

Abstract: This thesis investigates possibilities for developing an archiving praxis to help Black trans people live. Inspired by recent Black trans thinking and creativity, the research here centres conversations with five Experts working in a range of academic, artistic, and activist archiving practices. The analysis of these conversations focuses on three areas which guide the investigative chapters, motivations for working with archives, encounters with archives and possibilities for developing a praxis to help us live. The need for this work is shaped by the specificity of blackness and transness in the racial capitalism of the West, the writing is framed by the specificity of producing work at and for Uppsala University whose archives house state records of eugenics and racial science.  Looking to how archives shape bodies and how bodies shape archives, the methodologies guiding this work give space for the writing of this thesis to become an archival experiment. Considering and attending to powers of affect and care shapes this thesis as an embodied exploration, a practice manifesting in the work to further inform the praxis that the thesis investigates. Voices from Black feminist thought, Black cultural theory, queer of colour critique and Black trans cultural production and/as knowledge guide this analysis and offer points of reflection for the conversations with the Experts and my own experiences unfolding in the archive.  The thesis evidences possibilities for developing an archiving praxis to help Black trans people live. The analysis also points to capacious and expansive temporalities for this archival praxis. The thesis concludes that there is a need for more time, more voices and more listening to develop this praxis and further explore possibilities that open up with questioning temporalities. Perhaps that work starts in the space where the conclusion of this thesis, this archive, arrives; starts with asking when does the archive happen.