An astute reader and expert researcher with an inspiring imagination, Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers a captivating work of literary history in his monograph Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature, which draws together two worlds that tend to see each other only at a distance. “[P]erhaps without realizing, literary scholars and archivists have been moving in similar directions through their mutual shift away from an understanding of archival records as product toward a sense of them as process,” Cloutier contends (33). Firmly situated within this shift towards archival practice, Shadow Archives guides its readers through the complex field of operations that have given rise to black special collections in the United States and explicates what he aptly refers to as the “archival sensibility” that mid-century African American authors – namely Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison – cultivated through their respective modes of keeping (and not keeping) record. Focussed on the centrality of archival practice in the black intellectual tradition, the book presents authors as collectors and appraisers of value while novels appear against the backdrop of unpublished manuscripts, journals, letters, photographs, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, ledgers, calendars, invitations, and lists. What emerges from this amalgamation of figures and objects is a new orientation towards literature and history that is not only alert to the activities and ideas that persist in the figurative shadows of the archive but also is attuned to the visions and expectations that emanate from that hidden domain and give rise to unexpected insights and innovative ways of reading black writers today.

Amongst his other impressive skills and qualities, Cloutier's unique brand of interdisciplinarity makes him stand out among a talented generation of early-career scholars trained in the wake of the archival turn. Such is on display when he borrows the “lifecycles” concept originally formulated in archival theorist Theodore Schellenberg's 1956 field-defining manual Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques in order to address the “afterlives” that accompany the various phases that documents go through once they enter the archive. From the very outset of the book, one witnesses Cloutier's remarkable capacity to shuttle between disparate scholarly discourses, expressive mediums, theoretical frames, and interpretive modes. This capacity enables him to give a rich account of archivism as a central tenet of the African American literary tradition. “African American authors,” he argues, “developed a unique relation to preservation and archiving, one that hoped for release but planned for delay” (17). This entanglement of hope and delay highlights the overlapping temporalities of the archive that give rise to the “spectral poetics of anticipation” that Cloutier tracks through McKay, Ellison, Petry, and Wright (ibid.). From the opposing attitudes towards the power of photography in Ellison's photo essay and Wright's photojournalistic piece about the Lafrague Mental Hygiene Clinic in Harlem, to the ways scrapbooking dramatizes an ethical ideal of black self-reliance in McKay's fiction, to Petry's insistence that young writers keep a notebook as a “kind of record of reactions” and “not a diary” (231), there are subtle expressions of futurity that Cloutier excavates and expertly deploys as lenses for reading and rethinking the work of the novel form.

The book's organization is where the intimacy across disciplines that animates Cloutier's writing is perhaps most apparent. The first chapter is a historical survey of the emergence of twentieth-century African American literary papers that underlines the importance of Carl van Vetchen, white patron and member of the Harlem Renaissance, and his championing of the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University while also foregrounding the importance of historically black colleges and universities as repositories of black materials and the invaluable work of black librarians such as Dorothy Porter Wesley, chief librarian at the Howard University from 1940 to 1973. What follows is a series of literary case studies on the archival sensibilities of McKay, Wright, and Ellison and two methodological sections: a “first-person archival quest” driven by the mysteries surrounding Petry's papers and a coda reflecting on Cloutier's earlier discovery and subsequent authentication of the Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance writer and activist Claude McKay's novel Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) in collaboration with his adviser-turned-coeditor Brent Hayes Edwards. In contrast to the interpretive tone of the case studies, these sections effectively foreground the intensive intellectual and physical labor as well as the particular brand of serendipity that comes with working with literary archives. This hybrid organization is held together by Cloutier's rigorous engagement with philosophical reflections on the archive; recent accounts in black studies on the legacies of slavery that persist in history's gaps and silences; and contemporary scholarship produced by archivists on the vicissitudes of acquiring, cataloging, and curating collections. Readers come away from this book with a diverse set of citations and a literal list of the location, status, and acquisition date of the special collections of more than forty well-known black authors, which itself is an incredible gift (69–71).

Cloutier remains aware of the book's uneven representation of black women. He alludes to the widows and daughters, for example, that in most instances are the ones to administer the sale or donation of literary papers to institutions. To be sure, the book would have benefited from an extended engagement with the forces and relations mediated by these hidden labors. Some readers might also find the stark contrast between the chapter on the paucity of the Petry collection and the chapters on the black male writers as a point of criticism. Yet the ways in which black female friendship and a “culture of dissemblance,” to borrow Darlene Clark Hine's famous concept, figure centrally in Cloutier's account of Petry's somewhat antagonistic relation to preservation and desire for secrecy further testify to the need for scholarship like Shadow Archives that seeks out the unexpected ways in which social life “lives on” in and through the archive.