The Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery (MSRCAS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in California dedicated to the collection, study, and presentation of materials that engage with the ongoing legacies of Atlantic slavery and antiblackness in the United States and abroad. Located in Los Angeles, MSRCAS operates as a reading room, viewing room, and archival resource that supports theoretical research, curatorial inquiry, and public programming related to the legacies of Atlantic slavery. With a focus on both historical and contemporary materials—including books, rare books, exhibition catalogs, artist publications, and a media library—MSRCAS serves as a site of interdisciplinary engagement at the intersection of Black studies and Black contemporary art.
Our Accession Policy
The Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery collects materials of enduring research and cultural value, including but not limited to:
• Published and unpublished texts in Black studies, Black Feminism, Literary Studies,
Film/Media Studies, Post/Colonial Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, Slavery
studies, Political Theory, Affect Theory, Ecological Studies, Economics,
Psychoanalysis, Afropessimism, Art History, Cultural Theory, and Aesthetic
Philosophy that are relevant to contemporary and historical Black thought;
• Artist publications, zines, exhibition catalogs, and ephemera related to contemporary
art practices that engage the histories and aesthetics of slavery and antiblackness;
• Audio-visual materials including films, recorded lectures, interviews, sound works,
and music archives;
• Institutional documents, press releases, correspondence, and printed matter from
exhibitions, curatorial projects, or research initiatives responding to slavery’s global
aerlives;
• Donated or deposited personal papers, notes, or annotated works by artists, scholars,
and cultural workers whose research or practice contributes to the Center’s mission.
• Accessions may originate from artists, researchers, institutions, and independent
archives, or estates.
The Morning Star Research Center welcomes collaboration with other archives, libraries, and cultural institutions with shared commitments to critical memory work and to the ethical handling of materials shaped by or in response to the historical trauma, displacement, and loss incurred as a result of slavery’s representational and economic consequences.
In seeking to preserve these materials, the Center also recognizes that no archive is neutral, and endeavors to remain transparent about the conditions under which its holdings are acquired, organized, and made accessible.