1935–1950s: (Archival Dwelling and the Space of Almost Connection — The Book Answering Its Central Question with an Invitation to Sit in the Moments of Almos…

1935–1950s: (Archival Dwelling and the Space of Almost Connection — The Book Answering Its Central Question with an Invitation to Sit in the Moments of Almost Connection Between the LFAS and the Femme du Peuple Just as Their Experiences of Womanhood Almost Touch but Not Quite, This Practice of Archival Dwelling Making Room for the Quandary That LFAS Women Accounted for the Woman in the Assembly Hall but That She Is Still Unnamed or Named Only by Her Social Position, Dwelling Not as an Invitation to Pathologize Difference or Romanticize Women’s Unity Through Sameness but Rather to Hold Difference and Complexity However Uncomfortably in the Same Frame — a Methodological Invitation to Think with Women’s Intersecting Differences in the Historical Archive): White Gloves, Black Nation answers its central question with an invitation to sit in the moments of almost connection — the space between the members of the LFAS and the femme du peuple just as their experiences of womanhood almost touch, but not quite. This practice of archival dwelling makes room for the quandary that LFAS women accounted for the woman in the assembly hall, but that she is still unnamed, or named only by her social position. Dwelling is not an invitation to pathologize difference or romanticize women’s “unity” through sameness or sisterhood, making women, and by extension the nation, strong. Rather it is an invitation to hold difference and complexity, however uncomfortably, in the same frame — and to see what can be learned from the method, analysis, and feeling in this holding. The book is a methodological invitation to think with women’s intersecting differences in the historical archive, and a record of how these women’s theories of feminism germinated from their reflections on difference. The overwhelming body of scholarship about women in Haiti rehearses separation — most essays, research projects, and books focus on peasant women, elite women, market women, or middle-class women — responding to undeniable differences in women’s social standing but also obfuscating the dialectical ways in which these women’s lives reinforce one another’s. Sanders Johnson insists that holding different women in the same historical and theoretical frame is essential, because the infrequency of material that does so can unintentionally reinforce ideas that gender relations in Haiti are indecipherable or impenetrable or that they cannot be instructive for understanding global meanings of race, nation, and belonging.