What are the implications of making community engagement both an editorial method and key goal? How can those of us building editions and archives best go about community engagement? What are some of the perils and possibilities?

These are some of the questions that preoccupy us at the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive—an open access archive hosted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Our current work is focused on the incoming and outgoing correspondence of African American author, lawyer, and civil rights activist Charles Waddell Chesnutt. For Chesnutt, race and place were crucial and complex. He was a mixed-race person, visibly white enough to pass, who referred to himself once as a “voluntary Negro.” He lived his formative years in North Carolina and often wrote about the state, but he was born and lived most of his life in Cleveland, and he wrote northern stories, too. We are currently working on letters housed in Cleveland (at the Western Reserve Historical Society), and we wish to engage the heritage community in Cleveland as our work proceeds. Our statement of purpose and principles calls on us to:

• serve the communities from which the materials emerge
• expand the role of descendant communities and African American cultural experts across fields in the development and use of the Chesnutt Archive
• hire African American student researchers and create space for the students not only to contribute to the editorial presentation of these materials, but also to explore the resonances of Chesnutt’s work today by way of their poetry or art
• cultivate an interdisciplinary and diverse advisory board—from scholars and librarians to fair housing policy leaders—who can help imagine what new audiences and engagements the archive might inspire and make possible.

On Feb. 26 at 3:00 PM ET / 2:00 PM CT, project co-editor Ken Price and editorial assistant Bianca Swift will explore the project’s ongoing work to cultivate new audiences and engagements. Their presentation will focus on current efforts to generate collaborations within the Cleveland community in which Chesnutt wrote, sharing their insights into developing meaningful partnerships and examining the challenges faced by such collaborations. Following their brief presentation, they will invite audience discussion about what ethical editing and archive creation looks like in project planning and practice.

Event Price