UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new exhibit at Penn State University Libraries, titled “Black Geographies in Circulation,” highlights a selection of archival stamps and postcards from its Charles L. Blockson Collection of African Americana and African Diaspora that help trace the movement of African-descended people, their experiences, ideas, and collective memory across geographic and cultural boundaries.
On display through Friday, Feb. 26, 2027, and located just outside the Paterno Family Reading Room on the Central Stairs of Pattee Library, University Park campus, the exhibit can be viewed anytime during the library’s regular hours of operation. A curator-led exhibit tour will take place Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 2 p.m., offering additional insights into the exhibit.
Drawn from materials issued from the 1870s through the 1990s, “Black Geographies in Circulation” highlights the United States, the Caribbean and countries across Africa as interconnected sites within Black diasporic geographies. The exhibition understands Black geographies as the ways Black people have created, inhabited, imagined, and transformed places in relation to racialized systems of power.
About the exhibit
Before digital networks, computers and smartphones transformed everyday communication, postal exchange was one of the most vital infrastructures for connecting families, businesses, governments, migrants and diasporic communities. During this era, Charles Blockson was building his collection that would become a major repository of African American and African diasporic materials while developing his career as a historian, educator and advocate for Black history.
The exhibit considers postal ephemera not as peripheral artifacts but as archival evidence of the production and circulation of cultural memory. Stamps index state-sanctioned narratives, often reflecting national identity, commemoration and power. Postcards operate in a more fluid register, circulating images of places, people and cultures that both reinforce and resist dominant representations.
Organized across two thematic sections, "Mobility & Messaging" highlights Blockson’s collection of U.S. Postal Service commemorative stamps featuring African American histories, including the Black Heritage Series, established in 1978. Featuring activists, writers, educators, artists, scholars, and cultural leaders — including Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston — the section highlights their contributions to Black cultural and political life. It considers how their lives and legacies were shaped by connections to Africa and the Caribbean through ancestry, travel, intellectual exchange, and political movements.
"Land & Labor" traces coastal geographies including Bermuda, the Bahamas, South Carolina and Zanzibar through colonial-era and postcolonial postcards, first day covers and other commemorative postal materials. Many of the images circulated through colonial visual economies, transforming Black labor into spectacle and recasting landscapes of work as picturesque destinations for tourists. While such representations sought to fix Black people within racialized narratives of labor, place and empire, this exhibition reinterprets these imposed narratives to contextualize the Black agency and liberatory forms of world-making that persisted alongside and in response to them.
By centering these ephemeral objects, the exhibit challenges conventional archival hierarchies that privilege permanence over transience. Stamps and postcards were designed to move, to pass through hands and connect distant places; their very ephemerality is part of what makes them valuable historical evidence. The exhibit asks: What histories become visible when we attend to the materials designed to move? What forms of knowledge are preserved in circulation rather than containment? And how might these fragments — creased, stamped and inscribed — reveal alternative cartographies of Black life?
“Black Geographies in Circulation” is curated by Keisha Oliver, graduate assistant for the Charles L. Blockson Collection at Penn State and dual doctoral candidate in art education and African American and diaspora studies. Oliver’s research at Penn State focuses on Black diasporic arts, material culture and cultural memory. Born in the Bahamas, Oliver said she became interested in materials displayed in the exhibit after discovering a set of three Bahamas Independence Commemorative Stamps on the First Day Cover, postmarked July 10, 1973. She said the discovery led her to consider how seemingly ordinary postal materials can carry histories of place, national identity, migration, and diasporic memory across geographic boundaries.
About the Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora at Penn State
This multidisciplinary collection includes books, magazines, photographs, manuscripts, sheet music, postcards, record albums and artifacts of the African experience in the United States, Latin America, Caribbean and Africa, dating from 1632 to the present. The Blockson Collection is located on the 3rd Floor of West Pattee Library and has limited hours, however, any of the materials in the collection can be accessed by inquiring at the Special Collections Library reference desk, or by appointment via email request.