This talk considers the archives of slavery, their afterlives, and the future archives of black death, to track the technologies that colonial and state authorities deploy to obliterate their culpability in black deaths. By closely reading two of the documents from the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department generated from Breonna Taylor’s murder, alongside an archival event from my previous work on enslaved women, violence and the British colonial archives, I seek to clarify the urgency of archival critique and ethical scholarly practice. More clearly, this exercise marks the imperative of remaining skeptical of archival neutrality of “official or “authoritative” documents, and the deceptive boundaries between “the public” and academic critique. The work of uncovering and disrupting discursive power in the archives of slavery and black life points to the persistence of black subjugation in the past and the present and tracks its nefarious power of erasure—to erase violence against black people into the future. Presented by the Patrick Finelli Keynote Speaker Series and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Co-sponsored by the Departments of African American Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Click here to register for the Zoom event About the Speaker: Marisa J. Fuentes is the Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Professor Fuentes is the author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), which won awards from Association of Black Women Historians, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the Caribbean Studies Association. She is also the co-editor of Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I-III (Rutgers University Press, 2016-2021), and the ‘Slavery and the Archive’ special issue in History of the Present (November 2016). Fuentes’s most recent publications are forthcoming from Small Axe, English Language Notes, and Diacritics. Her next project will explore the connections between capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade and the disposability of black lives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with support from Oxford University, The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She has served a number of professional organizations including as councilmember for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Secretary for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.