Most compelling is Cloutier’s overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists—Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison—approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies.

- Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

<i>Shadow Archives</i> is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the “scenario” of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics.

- Stephanie Browner, Eugene Lang College–The New School, Textual Cultures

Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an “archival sensibility.”

The Columbia Review

[This] monograph promises a historically and theoretically grounded account of the archival practices that informed the writings of McKay, Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. . . Generally, Cloutier’s book is highly recommended to anybody interested in African American literature of the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, any future history or theory of the archive in African American letters will have to grapple with Shadow Archives.

- Stephan Kuhl, Goethe University Frankfurt, African American Review

With Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s scholarship in hand today, we are now better informed and poised to protect the integrity of African American archives for tomorrow.

New England Quarterly

In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms “archival sensibility.” Grounded in Cloutier’s astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections, <i>Shadow Archives</i> reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry; <i>Shadow Archives</i> is a welcome addition to literary criticism.

- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University,

<i>Shadow Archives</i> is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers—Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison—actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large.

- Salamishah Tillet, author of <i>Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination</i>,

No novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is—hands and laptops down—one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In <i>Shadow Archives</i>, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who’s who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship.

- William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis,

As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration, <i>Shadow Archives</i> demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the “archival sensibility” of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier’s book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang—an exhilarating reminder of the “belated timeliness” and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete.

- Brent Hayes Edwards, author of <i>The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism</i>,