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Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive

  • Michael A. Chaney EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 23, 2020
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Anglia
From the journal Anglia Volume 138 Issue 3

Abstract

This article introduces readers to the enslaved African American crafter, David Drake, otherwise known as “Dave the Potter”, who incised poetry, signatures, dates, and sayings onto the stoneware ceramic jugs and plantation storage pots he made (from the 1830 s to the 1860s). In view of the concept of an archive, Dave the Potter’s works are significant as they are made up of writing and plastic arts, words and material. They not only record what has been thought through writing, they also perform through material languages of handles, spouts, bases, rims, etc. disruptions of the conventional functioning of the archive. If, as Derrida and others have argued, an archive confuses the content of cultural artefacts with the invested right of those housing an archive to interpret its content, then Dave the Potter’s incised jars perform this contradiction on their very surfaces, in their very design and construction, showing how the place or site of memory is also a house of hidden hermeneutic rights to remember.

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Published Online: 2020-09-23
Published in Print: 2020-09-15

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. What’s in an Archive? Cursory Observations and Serendipitous Reflections
  4. Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats
  5. Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival
  6. The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures
  7. Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive
  8. Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive
  9. From Parchment to Podcast: The Collaborative Process of Building and Unlocking an Archive
  10. “The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity
  11. Speculative Bibliography
  12. Reviews
  13. Thijs Porck. 2019. Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History. Anglo-Saxon Studies 33. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 278 pp., £ 60.00/$ 99.00.
  14. Francis Leneghan. 2020. The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon Studies 39. Cambridge: Brewer, xxi + 300 pp., 1 illustr., £ 60.00.
  15. Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott (eds.). 2019. The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 51. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, xix + 281 pp., $ 109.99.
  16. Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins (eds. and trans.). 2019. Ælfric: Old English Lives of Saints. Volumes I-III. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 58–60. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. I: xxxii + 384 pp.; vol. II: vi + 426 pp.; vol. III: vi + 402 pp., each volume $ 35.00/£ 28.95/€ 31.00.
  17. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz and Sabine Sielke (eds.). 2016. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Heidelberg: Winter, 305 pp., € 58.00.
  18. T. R. Johnson (ed.). 2019. New Orleans: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 379 pp., £ 35.00.
  19. Christian B. Long. 2017. The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000. Bristol/Chicago, IL: Intellect, 300 pp., £ 70.00.
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0038

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. What’s in an Archive? Cursory Observations and Serendipitous Reflections
  4. Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats
  5. Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival
  6. The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures
  7. Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive
  8. Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive
  9. From Parchment to Podcast: The Collaborative Process of Building and Unlocking an Archive
  10. “The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity
  11. Speculative Bibliography
  12. Reviews
  13. Thijs Porck. 2019. Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History. Anglo-Saxon Studies 33. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 278 pp., £ 60.00/$ 99.00.
  14. Francis Leneghan. 2020. The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon Studies 39. Cambridge: Brewer, xxi + 300 pp., 1 illustr., £ 60.00.
  15. Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott (eds.). 2019. The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 51. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, xix + 281 pp., $ 109.99.
  16. Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins (eds. and trans.). 2019. Ælfric: Old English Lives of Saints. Volumes I-III. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 58–60. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. I: xxxii + 384 pp.; vol. II: vi + 426 pp.; vol. III: vi + 402 pp., each volume $ 35.00/£ 28.95/€ 31.00.
  17. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz and Sabine Sielke (eds.). 2016. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Heidelberg: Winter, 305 pp., € 58.00.
  18. T. R. Johnson (ed.). 2019. New Orleans: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 379 pp., £ 35.00.
  19. Christian B. Long. 2017. The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000. Bristol/Chicago, IL: Intellect, 300 pp., £ 70.00.
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