Black Archives Day on 29 November 2025
Join us in celebrating and contributing to the living power of Black archival memory, activism, and cultural transformation.
29 October 2025Blog series Americas and Oceania Collections
On 29 November, the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the British Library, in partnership with Oxford University and the Friends of the Huntley Archives at LMA Foundation (FHALMA), are respectively hosting parallel sister events that honour legacy, amplify underrepresented voices, and build bridges between scholarship and community.
Join us in celebrating – and contributing to – the living power of Black archival memory, activism, and cultural transformation. See below for details about the two events.
What is the Black Archive? Reparations and Transformation
Where: British Library
When: 29 November 2025
This day of discussions will bring together artists, researchers, students and heritage professionals to explore how Black archives shape—and are shaped by—their readers, positioning them as spaces of creativity, confrontation, and repair. It is the final event in a year-long series of discussions that have considered the ‘What’ of Black archives in two ways: what sites and spaces should we consider ‘archives’, and what can we do with those archives to transform our understanding of the communal lives they contain?
Developed in partnership between Oxford University and the Eccles Institute at the British Library, the series has soughtto strengthen and expand networks, enhancing understanding of Black study in a time when it is, again, under threat.
The Power of Black African Caribbean Archives
When: 29 November 2025 | 10.00 - 17.30
Where The London Archives
Two radical Black anniversaries: The Bogle-L'Ouverture Bookshop and The Huntley Archives
FHALMA's one-day celebratory festival will bring together artists, archivists, publishers, scholars, and activists to examine archives as instruments of resistance, cultural memory, and collective self-representation.
Highlights include provocations under the overarching theme of 'Archives – The Source for Radical Cultures' featuring curators of Black archives, and a keynote address by Olu Alake, CEO of The Africa Centre.
With contributions from research volunteers, attendees will reflect on questions of identity, ownership, voice, and discuss radical archival methodologies.
Instagram @huntleyarchives
Spring 2026
In Spring 2026, we will bring together participants from both events to examine their outcomes and explore new opportunities for cross-collaboration, highlighting the many diverse and imaginative ways of understanding the role, purpose, and voice of the Black archive in shaping Britain’s cultural and historical landscape.
Together, these interconnected initiatives contribute to a long-overdue national conversation on authorship, ownership, and the enduring power of Black archives – demonstrating how archives can transform discourse and practice, bridging the worlds of academic research and lived community experience.
In partnership with
Americas and Oceania Collections blog
This blog is part of our Americas and Oceania blog series, promoting the work of our curators, recent acquisitions, digitisation projects, and collaborative projects outside the Library. Our blogs explore the British Library's extraordinarily diverse collections for the study of Americas and Oceania.
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