New Jersey Online: Affective Histories in Newark’s Digital Archives

Abstract

This article examines how Newark’s affective histories and narratives of racial violence are being reproduced in the city’s digital archives. This article examines two digital archives, Old Newark and the Newark Public Library’s My Newark Story, to explore how emotion is used by individuals and institutions to narrate Newark’s 1967 riots and the city’s subsequent waves of white flight, immigration, and systemic neglect. The article argues that while Old Newark serves as a space for former white Newarkers to express feelings of nostalgia, loss, and displacement that often cast themselves as the victims of diaspora and marginalization, My Newark Story functions as a corrective project that resists the centering of whiteness and feelings of victimization that have haunted Newark’s history.