BLACK WOMEN’S SCRAPBOOKS: A LOOK FROM WITHIN

Abstract

With lives and communities excluded from and misrepresented in dominant narratives, self-articulation takes on powerful resonances for Black women. Black Women's Scrapbooks: A Look from Within examines how twentieth-century Black women utilized the domestic craft of scrapbooking as a means of information management, self-expression, and political documentation. Moving beyond examining Black women's public-facing works, which carry the weight of satisfying a public gaze and its prescriptive narration of Black womanhood, my project posits scrapbooks as an entry point for accessing Black women's expressions of interiority. Theorized through a Black women’s intellectual history framework and drawing on archival research and visual, material, and rhetorical analysis, I analyze the scrapbooks of Pauli Murray (1910–1985), civil rights attorney and priest; Louise Alexander Gunn (1900–1995), beauty queen and philanthropist; and Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995), writer and cultural worker. These personal assemblages reveal how Black women documented political ideologies while preserving mementos of pleasure and leisure, offering narratives that extend beyond the traditional framing of Black women's experiences as solely rooted in suffering and pain. I argue that scrapbooking invites Black women to claim creative autonomy, find reprieve from unwelcoming public spaces, and renegotiate the terms of their representation.