"The End of Something, and the Beginning": Fragments, Failure, and the Ethics of Reading the Black Literary Archive
On Thursday, October 30th, 2025, Autumn Womack delivered a talk in the Bridgwaters Lounge at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center as HBW's guest speaker for its campus launch.
In her lecture, “The End of Something, and the Beginning,” Womack explored what she called an “ethics of archival engagement” to urge scholars to reconsider how they interact with literary archives composed of writers’ personal papers, drafts, and incomplete projects. Drawing on her research within the archives of W. E. B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison, she proposed that these materials require a different kind of attention than institutional or state archives. Rather than scholars seeking to complete, repair, or explain every fragment, Womack suggested they allow such materials to remain partial and unresolved in order to embrace what literary archives reveal about process, incompletion, and the limits of interpretation.
Focusing on Du Bois’s unpublished 1905 novel “Scorn” as a case study, Womack examined the concept of failure. She approached failure not as a shortcoming, but as a creative condition central to Black literary history. Specifically, she traced how DuBois’s text, which he abandoned after multiple revisions, embodies both the challenge and the value of unfinished work. For Womack, reading the manuscript’s gaps, repetitions, and experimental form illustrates Du Bois’s struggle to find a narrative structure that could fully encompass his complex ideas about history, time, and Black life. Moreover, she proposed acknowledging such “failures” opens an ethical space for understanding literary study as an exploration of “successful” published works as well as the experiments Black writers engage with throughout their career trajectories.