The Black Atlantic Archive

Mapping the Memory of Dispersed Africana Civilization

The Black Atlantic Archive is a cultural preservation initiative dedicated to documenting the people, places, traditions, institutions, and networks that make up the Black Atlantic world.

We understand the African Diaspora not as a collection of isolated communities, but as a vast civilizational network stretching across continents and centuries.

New York. Lagos. Havana. New Orleans. Kingston. London. Port of Spain. Paris. Cape Town. And many more. 

The Black Atlantic was never merely a route of displacement and rupture. It became a world. A world of shared memory, cultural exchange, intellectual production, spiritual innovation, artistic creation, political struggle, and community building.

The Archive exists to preserve the records of that world and the connections that bind it together.

What Is a Node?

The Black Atlantic is composed of nodes.

A node may be a city, a neighborhood, a religious house, a family lineage, a mutual aid society, a cultural institution, a social movement, a musical tradition, a marketplace, a migration route, or a community whose influence extends beyond its geographic boundaries.

These nodes form the living infrastructure of Black civilization.

Each one preserves unique histories, yet each remains connected to a larger network spanning Africa and its Diaspora.

The Black Atlantic Archive seeks to document both the nodes themselves and the relationships between them.

No community exists in isolation.

Our Mission

The mission of The Myriad’s Black Atlantic Archive is to identify, document, preserve, and connect the cultural record of Black Atlantic communities across time and space.

We seek to preserve:

• Oral histories

• Community memory

• Spiritual and religious traditions

• Family archives

• Photographs and visual records

• Music and performance traditions

• Literature and intellectual production

• Community organizations

• Social movements

• Historical sites

• Material culture

• Contemporary cultural life

More importantly, we seek to document how these traditions traveled, transformed, and influenced one another across the Atlantic world.

The Black Atlantic as a Living Network

The history of Black people cannot be understood solely through nations. Many of the most important relationships in our history transcend national borders. A drum rhythm in Cuba may preserve knowledge from West Africa. A spiritual practice in South Carolina may share roots with traditions found in Haiti. A family in Cape Town may carry memories that connect them to Angola, Madagascar, the Khoisan, and Nguni people.

A Black community organization in London may draw inspiration from movements born in the Caribbean or the United States.

The Black Atlantic Archive approaches these connections as part of a larger cultural ecosystem.

Our goal is not simply to preserve isolated histories, but to reveal the pathways between them.

Areas of Focus

African Nodes

Cities, communities, institutions, and traditions across the African continent that continue to shape the global Black world.

Diasporic Nodes

Communities formed through migration, survival, adaptation, and cultural creation throughout the Atlantic world and beyond.

Sacred Nodes

Temples, churches, shrines, religious houses, ceremonial grounds, and spiritual traditions that serve as centers of cultural continuity.

Intellectual Nodes

Writers, scholars, educators, publications, archives, and institutions responsible for preserving and producing knowledge.

Artistic Nodes

Musicians, performers, visual artists, storytellers, and cultural movements whose work shaped Black Atlantic identity.

Community Nodes

Organizations, neighborhoods, families, and local institutions that function as custodians of collective memory.

What Will the Black Atlantic Archive Project Document?

The Black Atlantic Archive Project is dedicated to preserving the histories, traditions, oral narratives, cultural memory, and living inheritances that connect Africa and its Diaspora.

Rather than organizing its work solely through national boundaries, the Archive focuses on major Black Atlantic nodes: communities, cities, regions, and cultural centers that have played significant roles in the formation and transmission of Black Atlantic life.

Initial areas of focus include:

New York City
A global center of Black intellectual, cultural, artistic, spiritual, and diasporic life, and the founding city of The Myriad.

The African American South
Including Gullah Geechee communities, Louisiana Creole traditions, Hoodoo lineages, and other foundational cultural traditions that continue to shape Black life throughout the Americas.

The Caribbean Basin
Including the traditions, histories, and cultural memory of communities throughout the Caribbean, one of the principal crossroads of the Black Atlantic world.

The Guianas
Including Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, whose histories preserve unique intersections of African, Indigenous, Asian, Maroon, and diasporic cultural traditions often overlooked within broader Black Atlantic scholarship.

Brazil
Particularly Afro-Brazilian communities whose traditions represent some of the largest and most influential continuities of African culture in the Americas.

West and Central Africa
The homelands from which many Black Atlantic traditions emerged and with which diasporic communities remain connected through memory, religion, language, and culture.

The Western Cape
A unique convergence point shaped by African, Khoisan, Malagasy, South Asian, Southeast Asian, European, and diasporic influences, representing one of the most culturally layered regions of the Black Atlantic world.

Black Europe
Including Black communities throughout the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and elsewhere whose histories reflect centuries of migration, exchange, resistance, institution-building, and cultural production within the Atlantic world.

Contemporary Diaspora Communities
Including emerging sites of migration, return, exchange, institution-building, and cultural transmission throughout Africa and its Diaspora.

The Archive is ultimately concerned not only with places, but with the relationships between them.

Its purpose is to document the routes, memories, traditions, and living inheritances that continue to connect Africa and its Diaspora across generations and across oceans.

By preserving these interconnected histories, the Black Atlantic Archive Project seeks to create a permanent record of one of the world’s most influential and far-reaching cultural civilizations.

The Work of Preservation

Many of the most important archives of Black life do not exist in formal institutions. They exist in memory. They exist in family photo albums. They exist in conversations between elders. They exist in community centers, churches, social clubs, cultural organizations, and private collections. The Black Atlantic Archive is committed to documenting these materials before they disappear. Every elder is a library. Every community is an archive.

Every node contains knowledge that helps us understand the larger network.

Building a Cartography of Memory

The long-term vision of the Archive is to create a living map of the Black Atlantic. A map of relationships. A map showing how ideas moved.

How people traveled. How traditions survived. How communities influenced one another.

How Africa and its Diaspora continuously reshaped each other across generations.

The goal is to reveal the structure of a civilization that has often been studied in fragments despite existing as an interconnected whole.

Why This Matters

What is lost in one node is ultimately lost to the entire network.

When an elder passes without recording their story, a connection disappears.

When a tradition vanishes, a pathway closes.

When an archive is neglected, future generations lose access to part of themselves.

Preservation is therefore not only an act of memory.

It is an act of cultural continuity.

The Black Atlantic Archive exists to ensure that the histories, traditions, institutions, and relationships that define our civilization remain accessible to those who will inherit them.

This work belongs to all of us. Together, we can preserve the memory of a civilization.