Archive as Love: Rethinking Archival Practice and Research on the African Diaspora and its People in Opera Studies

Over the past decade, interest in studying the involvement of African-Descended people in opera has increased in the opera industry, opera studies, and music studies. Yet very few researchers, scholars, and opera organizations have attended to archival practice and archival research in Black opera archives or repositories of memory that primarily focus on people(s) of the African diaspora in opera and contain opera-related materials created by people of African Descent. By largely disregarding and improperly engaging with their archival and research practices, academic and the opera industry risk reinforcing white supremist and colonial ideals of Black absence and inferiority in opera and in the archives. As a Black musicologist, trained opera singer, memory worker, and public-facing digital curator, I aim to help remedy these issues via my own praxis “archive as love.” Developed while researching Madame Mary Cardwell Dawson and the National Negro Opera Company (NNOC), archive as love is a vehicle for understanding, conceptualizing, researching, and constructing Black opera archives within institutional archives like libraries, universities, colleges, historical societies, and special collections. It argues that institutional archives can be understood as manifestations of corrupted love or harbingers of practices that are antagonistic to Black opera archives. To counter the corrupted love, archive as love calls for the use of historical portraiture, a methodology I created centered upon Black methods of memory and knowledge keeping. Then, I will illustrate how to utilize archive as love in application via a case study of my digital exhibition, Music Must Go On: Remembering Mary Cardwell Dawson. Finally, this paper encourages Black opera scholars to utilize and modify archive as love for their own research thereby creating more equitable archives and research.