Special Forum • Curatorial Challenges 9

in part as an “instituting imaginary.”18 Collections provide “fragments of life to be placed in order, one after the other . . . a montage of fragments thus [creating] an illusion of totality and continuity” that scholars tame through interpretation.19 I intended in some ways to tame critically the collection for visitors to the exhibition while also puncturing any sense of a homogenizing illusion of totality across African Christian histories. At the same time, I wanted to make a subtle argument that to understand Christianity in Africa, it must be understood on its own terms—in the vernacular, through ritual and dance, in oral traditions and hymnody, in the intellectual and religious histories traced across bodies, texts, and communities. Visitors would only be able to access or understand these fragments in part just as I, the curator, did so in part.

In addition to providing a thematic introduction to African Christianity, I became increasingly committed to creating a conversation between the exhibition hall and the library’s holdings. Realistically, I wanted the exhibition to serve as perhaps the only primer in African Christianity visitors might read. For the curious and initiated, however, I sought to invite continued learning from and thinking about multiple African Christian pasts, the indigenous resourcing of African theologies, and how a more geographically and temporally complete collection of historical sources bears upon our imaginations for the future of Christianity. The exhibition hall’s materials intervened in strands of multiple histories and sources that provided limited entry points into a much longer set of conversations between communities across a vast and varied continent. It was my sincere hope that the exhibition’s intentionally disparate and fragmentary display of periodicals, monographs, sacred texts, missionary correspondence, and church archives prompted students, researchers, and faculty deeper into the resources held by Pitts. I wanted the exhibition hall to encourage moving into the stacks and periodicals themselves to begin a conversation between researcher and text in the very way in which the periodicals were themselves part of a living conversation with a previous community of readers.20 In doing so, I hoped to reflect Jeschke’s vision not only for the collection but for the church, that the church’s future depends upon critical analysis of its global past.

The Limitations of Curation

Working with specific materials cataloged broadly brought challenges and limitations unique to the subject matter, issues relevant to the larger issue of cataloging. First, I curated an exhibition from a collection vaguely entitled the “Sub-Saharan African Collection.” A myriad of finding aids, periodical listings, and postcards are catalogued under this heading, but dated binders detailing the periodicals’ origins and languages were the most useful tool for my initial searching.21 Cataloger Fesseha Nega supported my work in the collection by searching items particular to nation, language, and historical period.

In the end, the exhibition drew on materials ranging beyond the “Sub-Saharan African Collection” for two reasons. Selecting from the uniquely catalogued items limited the ways in which one could explore more extensive holdings relevant to histories and theologies of African initiative across the library. More importantly, “Sub-Saharan” and “African” prove difficult and somewhat problematic as collection categories in that they bifurcate a continent and elide linguistic and cultural plurality. They are placeholders at best. We generated subject searches within the broadly cataloged items in order to search out select sources—such

18 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Verne Harris, Carolyn Hamilton, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Aca-demic Publishers, 2002), 19.

19 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” 21.

20 Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004), xi. “Texts do not belong on library shelves, tucked away from the sweat, blood, emotion, and idealism of human life. Readers and writers are participants in a much wider body of composition that goes on off the written page. Texts are part of the real, human world of imagination and action.”

21 See http://www.pitts.emory.edu/collections/selectholdings/subsaharan.cfm.