Writing Letters as Counter-Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice

Abstract

Can counter-archiving be a form of social care? This essay is a dialogue on this topic among four Afro-Nordic feminists writing to each other in the form of letters over a five-month period during 2021. Using an explorative and intuitive practice informed by Black feminist thought, the authors dive into the archives of their families and of the communities that they relate to and are part of as a way to communicate how and why they approach counter-archiving. Black diasporic contributions to Nordic histories are widely erased, silenced, and forgotten, both in the past and present, which is why the authors write them into being. The aim of the essay is to communicate some of the specificities of living and negotiating a Black feminist life in the Nordics. The authors also want to inscribe the Nordics into the Black European archive. The following themes are used to organize the dialogue: 1) positionalities and contexts; 2) Multigenerational legacies: silences, gifts, stories, 3) Counter-Archiving (as) mobilization, transformation, refusal, 4) Imagining otherwise: letter writing as a practice of care. Finally, we argue that counter-archiving through letter-writing dialogue can be a pleasurable, caring, and collective form of knowledge creation that transgresses traditional academic forms.