A Conscious Ripping: Emotions in the Construction and Destruction of Anna Banti’s Archive

This chapter explores the many ways in which various kinds of emotional dynamics shaped the archive of Lucia Maria Pergentina Lopresti—best known under her pen name Anna Banti (1895–1985), an Italian writer, critic, art historian, and wife of the famed art critic Roberto Longhi, whose history has so far been neglected. Building on Monique Sheer’s landmark theorization of “emotional practices” such as naming and labeling as generative of emotions, it shows how such practices concretely shaped both the construction and the destruction of this particular archive. Recounting key episodes in Banti’s life in chronological order, it pinpoints the instances in which such emotional practices and processes of archival construction and destruction intersected in meaningful ways.