While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground 'black' as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women's organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present.

The archive dictates what can be said about the past and kinds of stories that can be told about the persons catalogued, embalmed, and sealed away in a box of files and folios. (Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 2007, p. 17) If the archive is a remnant, it is one that keeps whispering to me, insisting on its place in my everyday life. What I might have said to her instead is this: I am a disquieted archive that fumbles in words. A thing made up of infinite, untraceable traces. (Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 2018, p. 26) There has been substantial work in recent years, from different contexts and traditions, on the use of archives. The possibilities and limitations of the archive, as theoretical concept as well as material site, are picked up widely by queer, feminist and decolonial scholars. The past decade has seen an increase in publications, special issues, events and exhibitions grappling with the idea of the archive and its role in feminist, queer and diasporic contexts. Recent significant special issues include Radical History Review (2014), which questions what it means to 'queer' the archive; Australian Feminist Studies (2017), exploring the role of archives in new modes of feminist research; and a special issue on decolonial archival praxis in Archival Science (2017). Feminist Review has also published a number of articles on archives and archival practice, from pieces that rethink the role of the archive in feminist visual art (Zapperi, 2013) or the role of archives in the articulation of black diaspora feminist identity and consciousness (Burin and Sowinski, 2014;Swaby, 2014), to a manifesto for feminist archiving that underlines alternative methods for reading the archive (Digital Women's Archive North, 2017). The Feminist Review Collective also offers a three-month fellowship for early career scholars to critically engage with the Feminist Review archive. These interventions demonstrate the continued engagement with the archive as a complex, lively and material site.From the 1990s onwards, the humanities and social sciences have experienced what is termed the 'archival turn'. Most notably, the 'archival turn' has been picked up outside of the discipline of history, which produced a wide range of scholarship on what is understood by the 'archive ' and 'archives' (Steedman, 2011). However, the 'archival turn' has not produced rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship in which the materiality of the archive, reflexive accounts, racial taxonomies of archival collections and the work of archivists are put into conversation with each other. We are interested in exploring the interdisciplinary and innovative ways in which scholars, activists and artists push the conversations on what constitutes an archive. This includes an engagement with the 'digital archive' and how the digital 931874F ER0010.

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