This talk considers the Black feminist provocation to reimagine archives in creative and speculative ways through Umi’s Archive, an interdisciplinary and multimedia research project that engages everyday Black women’s thought to investigate key questions of archives and power. Umi is Black Arabic for "mommy" and in this talk I trace how by analyzing my mother’s archive, I have moved away from colonial logics that demand we “verify” a Black past and toward practices of listening, reading and creative speculation, modes of research that require intimacy and collaboration, that build new archives that propose new possibilities.

About Su’ad Abdul Khabeer:
Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is a 2022-23 Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and associate professor, American culture.