Confessions of a Failed Revolutionary Subject: Toi Derricotte and the Black Notebooks in the Archive
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
In this essay, I use black feminist methodologies to theorize archival voice as opposed to silence, drawing from Toi Derricotte’s 1997 book The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey and its drafts. I examine Derricotte’s published and unpublished writings on the psychological wounds of racism, internalized antiblackness, shame, and the racial and relational politics of being white-presenting to understand her vision of how we free ourselves from the toxic imaginaries of race. I focus on Derricotte’s use of confession and her commitment to wayward speech, or saying the unsayable, to challenge political ideology’s domination of language and harness the political possibility of painful truth, intimacy and affect. I trace intersubjectivity as it works in both my own feminist archival method and Derricotte’s relational ethics.
Recommended Citation
Jain, Kavya, "Confessions of a Failed Revolutionary Subject: Toi Derricotte and the Black Notebooks in the Archive" (2025). Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections. 34.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/mssa_collections/34
This Article is Open Access