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What is “Black” about Black Bibliography?

2022; Bibliographical Society of America; Volume: 116; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/719985

2377-6528

Jacqueline Goldsby, Meredith L. McGill,

Race, History, and American Society

Previous articleNext article FreeWhat is "Black" about Black Bibliography?Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith L. McGillJacqueline Goldsby and Meredith L. McGillPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIOver the last fifty years, the study of African American literature has grown rapidly in scope and importance. It is now a vital field of specialization in any US English department of merit. And yet scholars of African American literature still lack thorough bibliographic knowledge of many of the texts at the heart of the field. Why has bibliographic study been marginalized within the field's development, and what has been the intellectual impact of this inattention?The opening of the Anglo American literary canon to writers of color coincided in the late twentieth century with the decline in the scholarly practice of descriptive bibliography—the systematic study of books as physical objects. This divided path has produced significant unevenness in the resources available to scholars, arguably re-instituting a color line that needlessly hampers the growth of African American literary studies. Even as bibliographic study has waned in importance in English departments, criticism of canonical white writers continues to be shored up by authoritative accounts of the production and transmission of Anglo American texts. Two examples come quickly to mind: the groundbreaking Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson electronic archives rest on decades of meticulous bibliographic scholarship, enlivening the possibilities for research and for teaching Whitman's and Dickinson's verse.1 By contrast, scholars studying African American and Black diaspora literatures are often forced to sort out complex and confusing publication histories on their own, because standard bibliographic sources often don't include Black writers in their canonical range.2For instance, the nine-volume Bibliography of American Literature (BAL)—the gold standard reference tool in US book history—provides comprehensive bibliographic information for American authors of belles-lettristic works who died before 1930. However, due to a narrow definition of literariness, an emphasis on elite print sources, and mid-twentieth-century ignorance of the wide range of African American writing, only a single African American author—Paul Laurence Dunbar—earned entry into its ranks, sharply limiting the utility of this important reference tool for African Americanists. Ironically, the BAL's inclusion of Dunbar only emphasizes the troublesome history that haunts the exclusion of Black writers from US literary bibliographies. Shortly after the poet's death in 1906, W. E. B. Du Bois proposed a biography of Dunbar to Dodd, Mead & Company, Dunbar's longtime publisher. However, the firm rejected the idea for two dubious reasons. Its decision-makers doubted whether there would be sufficient market interest in a cultural-literary history of Dunbar's life, and they justified this prediction by citing the uncertainty of Dunbar's literary archive: without a bibliography of his works, the firm explained to Du Bois, an accurate market assessment could not be done.3 Having published twenty-four volumes of Dunbar's writing, including verse collections, short stories, and novels, Dodd Mead could have easily compiled much of this information.4 The firm's willful ignorance of one of its best-selling authors' backlist demonstrates the institutional racism that made a career like Dunbar's exceptional in the first place and verifies why creating Black bibliographies is (and has long been) a political pursuit.But bibliographic information about US Black authors only seems scarce from the perspective of the dominant critical and bibliographic tradition. If we broaden our understanding of bibliography to include the work of Black collectors, librarians, and institution-builders, we find not a trickle but a flood of information about Black writing. Checklists, enumerative bibliographies, bio-bibliographies, union catalogs, and "bibliographies of bibliographies" date back to the mid-nineteenth century, comprising an extraordinarily rich intellectual tradition to which scholars have paid scant attention.5For instance, if we turn to works such as Dorothy Porter's North American Negro Poets, 1760–1944 (1945), Geraldine O. Matthews's Black American Writers: A Bibliography and Union List (1975), or William P. French, Michel J. Fabre, Amritjit Singh, and Genevieve E. Fabre's Afro-American Poetry and Drama, 1760–1975 (1979),6 we will find Dunbar's works noted along with dozens of Black poets who were his contemporaries during the 1890s and early 1900s. Providing full bibliographic citations—listing publishers and publication locales and often noting multiple editions of a given work—these bibliographies remap the sites of Black verse cultures in the US beyond the expected centers of literary gravity (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Chicago). The sheer number and broad geographical distribution of authors, printers, and small publishing firms detailed in these bibliographies suggest that African American poetry has long been a grassroots practice that spans the nation. In the wake of such evidence, we have to ask: what might these earlier efforts at describing Black cultural production tell us about African American literary history and the practice of bibliography itself? And what exactly is "Black" about the tradition of Black bibliography?This essay sketches the history of twentieth-century African American attempts to organize Black writing and chronicles a series of ambitious bibliographic projects shaped by the struggles of African Americans to gain access to print and to preserve evidence of Black agency and achievement. Our aim is to distill some of the principles we have gleaned from these works and that guide our development of the Black Bibliography Project (BBP), our attempt to revive descriptive bibliography as a critical practice in African American literary studies. Beyond our own work, we understand the BBP as part of what we perceive to be a "bibliographic turn" in African American literary studies; we therefore also seek to introduce in this special issue a compendium of fresh, original scholarship that marks this new movement's critical possibilities.7"Thinking bibliographically," to use Elizabeth McHenry's apt phrase,8 is paving new directions in the study of African American literature—in new digital humanities initiatives which require item-level inventories of materials for designers to curate and organize their sites; with increasing scholarship in Black book history and textual studies which depends on tracking multiple editions of a given work; and in the critique of the archive which takes issue with the elisions and exclusions of Black primary sources that an example like Dunbar's represents. Whether questioning concepts of authorship and teleologies of publishing histories, tracing the lives and afterlives of the paratextual elements of Black books, or mapping the traditional as well as the underground circulation of Black pulp and middlebrow fiction (among other exciting and innovative topics), the contributors to this volume understand that bibliographies offer more than simple leads to primary sources and secondary criticism. As McHenry explains, Black bibliographies are "powerful instruments of investigation used by practitioners to test and stabilize how African American literature would be seen, defined, and used."9 With this special issue we hope to demonstrate how activating Black bibliography into a critical heuristic, given the tradition upon which it rests, offers new payoffs for African American literary studies and for bibliographic studies and book history in general.IITwentieth-century African American bibliography has appeared in three major waves. A revealing way to track the momentum of this work is to focus on a specific genre of Black bibliographic writing: bibliographies of bibliographies. Scholars of Black librarianship agree that this practice began with W. E. B. Du Bois's 1901 Select Bibliography of the American Negro for the General Reader and crystallized with Monroe Work's 1912–1938 Negro Year Books and his 1928 A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America.10 Du Bois and his team of collaborators at Atlanta University distilled previous bibliographies that had been published separately and that covered distinct areas of inquiry. The Select Bibliography's complex arrangement and re-arrangement of categories and sources also implied that the study of Black life was itself complex and demanded a nimble but explicit pedagogy to apprehend it.11Monroe Work's towering achievements emerged from a historically Black college. As the Director of Records and Research of the Tuskegee Institute, Work compiled annual Year Books beginning in 1912 that included bibliographies "of articles and publications 'of various sorts, carefully classified.'" He prepared nine editions, which sold for twenty-five cents each and were mailed to subscribers.12 Work's masterpiece, A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America, was the culmination of twenty-five years of research. Financed by major grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Phelps Stokes Fund, Work's Bibliography compiled over 17,000 entries organized in seventy-four carefully classified chapters covering a staggering range of topics. Work traveled the US and Europe to document multilingual sources that spanned the globe. The standard-setting innovator in Black librarianship, Dorothy Porter, paid homage to this bibliographic forebear, noting that "Monroe Work's contribution, as a bibliographer, to the study of American Negro and the African cannot be measured. It supplied a great basic need for Negro scholarship. It was 'a monument of which any man [of] any race may well be proud.'"13Richard Newman's landmark Black Access: A Bibliography of Afro-American Bibliographies was published in 1984, nearly a half century after Du Bois's and Work's efforts. In her introduction to that formidable volume—encompassing 3,000 bibliographies of Black writing—Dorothy Porter endorsed Newman's work as "the standard for a good many years to come."14 Newman, in turn, credited Betty Gubert's 1982 Early Black Bibliographies for reprinting the key catalogs and checklists compiled by the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bibliophiles of Black print culture: Robert Adger, William C. Bolivar, Daniel A. P. Murray, and Arturo Schomburg, among others.15 Prior to these compilations, the 1930s and 1940s gave rise to a quiet boom in Black bibliographic writing; the post-Harlem Renaissance and World War II era coincided with the growth of university-based and professionally managed archives.16 During this second wave, the documentary drive that characterized Depression-era Works Progress Administration initiatives included crucial bibliography projects at Howard University and the Chicago Public Library. Dorothy Porter supervised a WPA-funded effort to catalog the vast holdings of the Moorland collection in 1937–1938, an important endeavor during her early years leading Howard's library.17 Around that same time in Chicago, a research team directed by Elizabeth Wimp compiled a union catalog that sourced (and annotated) all Black-authored or Black-themed books, pamphlets, and periodicals held in the city's major repositories—public, private, university-based, and civic organizations.18In a bittersweet coincidence, the growth of publicly accessible Black archives was fueled by the deaths of major bibliophiles: Arturo Schomburg's death in 1938 solidified the holdings of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, and in 1946 Atlanta University acquired Henry P. Slaughter's magnificent collection. An active collector until his death in 1971, Arthur Spingarn presented his Negro collection holdings (then 35 years in the building) to Howard University in 1948. Meanwhile, an emerging generation of curators transformed key collections at major universities. Novelist-librarian Arna Bontemps expanded Fisk University's special collections when he was appointed director in 1943, and Carl Van Vechten mobilized his interracial artistic networks to contribute their rare books to Yale University and Fisk University in 1941 and 1949, respectively.19 Each of these repositories took up the massive task of compiling finding aids, catalogs, and dictionary catalogs that inventoried their holdings. Published in the 1970s, these bibliographic works not only served researchers and students at their home institutions for decades as "in-house" guides, they also helped create the research infrastructure that supported the rise of African American studies.20The explosive growth of Black studies programs and departments after 1968 triggered the third wave of bibliographic scholarship, as colleges, universities, and public libraries sought to acquire more Black history-related materials and to inventory and assess what they already owned.21 Turning back to the mid-twentieth-century archival inventories provided Black studies founders then (and scholars now) blueprints for how to build knowledge infrastructures that could sustain the field's developments into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For those facing the cultural reckonings of 1968 head on, coordinating access to Black history sources led to a landmark "Workshop on Bibliographic and Other Resources for the Study of the American Negro." This week-long session was hosted at Howard University in July of that year, not long after the uprisings following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Rising scholars who would soon lead Black studies as a discipline (including John W. Blassingame, Jean Fagan Yellin, and Ulysses S. Lee, among others) served as instructors. Predictably, Dorothy Porter was the standout: she prepared a 900-item "Working Bibliography" that workshop members used as a starting point to advance their consensus principles: to pursue cooperative consortium work, to foster discipline-specific bibliographic writing, and to resist the use of bibliographies to underpin commercial reprints of primary sources.22Anglo American bibliography's historical connection with book collecting has pegged it as an elite endeavor. But Black bibliophiles and bibliographers undertook such work as early as the mid-nineteenth century and approached it with distinctively different values.23 Literary historian Tony Martin notes that Black bibliophiles "collected books to counter the pseudo-scientific racism that was so prevalent" during the nineteenth century.24 Importantly, these early collections focused on ancient African and Egyptian history to prove the greatness of Black peoples and civilizations prior to enslavement. These "grand narrative" bibliographies (to recall scholar-activist Abdul Alkalimat's rubric)25 aimed to collect materials printed across the Black diaspora—acquiring titles from the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and Africa—to knit together global networks of Black print communities.26 Committed to education, Black bibliophiles preserved printed works as proof of Black achievement and as a legacy for future generations,27 with collections extending beyond books to include pamphlets, newspapers, and clippings.28 In an era when public libraries, like other public facilities, often refused access to Black readers, Black collectors acquired rare book and print materials to make them more widely available, stressing their use as much as their display.29Complementing the twinned goals of popular access and use, Black periodicals from the late nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries also routinely published bibliographies. For instance, the AME Church Review during the 1890s and 1900s, the Atlanta University Bulletin in the 1900s, the Crisis Magazine during the 1910s through 1930s, and Negro Digest/Black World from the 1950s through 1970s regularly compiled titles of "race literature" to foster learning and scholarship beyond the academy.30 Remarkably, early Black bibliophiles pioneered the strategy of pooling resources to collect works communally; this was the strategy of the 1915 American Negro Collectors Exchange, a practice with its roots in the early nineteenth-century Black reading rooms and literary societies.31 In these ways, collecting Black print materials was an act of political activism, an ongoing attempt to "correct the record of American history" by preserving writings that documented Black presence, contributions, and struggles toward freedom.32Black book collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended toward communal efforts. For example, Daniel Murray—who single-handedly amassed the books and pamphlet collections that formed the core of the Library of Congress's Negro collection in 1900—sought and obtained works via public channels of gifting and borrowing. Murray, however, was an exception to the rule that shaped the next generation of Black bibliophiles.33 Driven by idealists who were all too human, Black book collecting and the bibliographic practices that emerged (and came to predominate) in the twentieth century were shaped by personal ambitions and rivalries, professional frustrations, and unexamined cultural differences. Beginning in the 1920s, Black bibliophiles became professionalized and their collections reflected more personal pursuits. Arthur Schomburg, Henry Slaughter, and Joel Spingarn actively jockeyed with one another to build their libraries by outbidding one another in the rare book market. As Dorothy Porter discloses in her behind-the-scenes memoir, "Fifty Years of Collecting," these men "acquired and possessed each book with a selfish love."34 To their credit, though, Schomburg, Slaughter, and Spingarn did not sequester their libraries, nor did they consider their collections as exclusively private property. They regularly opened their collections for scholars and readers to use.35Though these early Black bibliophiles wrote about their own collections, producing catalogs and enumerative bibliographies, Dorothy Porter criticized these early efforts as frustratingly incomplete. She noted, "it is a pity that [they] kept no narrative reports about when, where, and how they acquired their books,"36 underscoring the difference between these works and the rigorously documented bibliographies and catalogs that professional Black librarians would later prepare.The developing discipline of US Black studies diverged in significant and consequential ways from African Studies, which understood bibliographic work to be central to its aims. As early as 1958, the African Studies Association determined that the library sciences would be integral to its knowledge production infrastructure, appointing a "Library Committee" to commission bibliographies and archival inventories that were regularly published in its peer-reviewed journal, The African Studies Bulletin. US Black studies never formally instituted such a partnership, relying more on ad hoc initiatives.37 This heterogeneity of practice suggests to us that "bibliographic documentation" may be a more apt phrase to characterize the work of most twentieth-century bibliographers of African American writing. Indeed, the term "bibliography" itself results in many varied (and sometimes hybrid) projects, including union catalogs, dictionary catalogs, checklists, "bio-bibliographies," and descriptive bibliographies. But no matter the method, Black bibliography seeks to identify, make visible, and make accessible Black writing. By any bibliographic means necessary. This commitment gives rise to an exploratory, even experimental, outlook that fuels its traditions.For instance, Richard Newman can barely contain his glee when he discloses that Black Access includes discographies along with books and other print material. By his lights, music is integral to understanding the development of Black print culture. Theressa Gunnels Rush's "A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary" includes contemporary authors' manuscript "works in progress" along with extensive lists of their periodical publications, reinforcing the idea that published books are not the only measure of a writer's output.38 Melanie Chambliss, Laura Helton, and Zita Nunes have described Dorothy Porter's best-known contribution to Black studies and American librarianship—her radical revision of the Dewey Decimal System. As these scholars explain, Porter systematically reassigned call numbers to books so that they could be recognized both as Black writing and as contributions to their respective disciplines.39 Less well known, however, is the fact that Porter was an innovative bibliographic writer, as Derrick Spires explores in his essay in this volume. Indeed, Porter openly defied the norms of Anglo American bibliography to compile her 1945 "Early American Negro Writings: A Bibliographical Study." She noted that:Since present practice does not provide for catalogue entries under the color or race of author, nor as a general rule does a library classification bring them together on a shelf, existing bibliographical apparatus was of very little use and [my] checklist had to be built up item by item, in the main by the slow process of first framing a possible list of Negro authors, and then by searching existing catalogues and collections for the published works of each name on the list.40Creating research protocols to make race a bibliographic category of analysis, Porter was able to make Black writing visible as such, a claim that she nonetheless refused to essentialize in her second major bibliography, also published in 1945. Porter had aimed to compose a global survey of Black verse, including poetry published in the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Africa. She pared back the bibliography to a hemispheric scope in North American Negro Poets only because her publisher Charles Heartman refused to print what he feared would have been an impossibly large (and costly) volume.41 Undaunted, Porter received funding from the Rosenwald Foundation to develop her bibliography of Black Latin American writing into a full-length work of its own. Notably, this survey revealed patterns of literary production that prompted Porter to use conventional genre-specific categories for the writings she encountered: she listed the "poetry" of Uruguay, the "drama" of Cuba, and the "novel" of Brazil, in striking comparison to the genre-bending categories that comprised her "Early American Negro Writings."42 For Porter, "Negro" or "Black" writing varied across time and place, requiring descriptive categories that conveyed the possibilities of that plurality.What is distinctive about Black bibliographic practice depends, we contend, on compilers' awareness of the conditions and traditions that have shaped Black print, Black archives, and the cultural and institutional efforts to preserve them. Black bibliography can be written by all scholars—Black and non-Black, alike—if they are mindful of the following principles:43(1). The "Black" in "Black bibliography" is a polyvalent termIn our work with the BBP thus far, we have focused on US Black print cultures. We are aware, however, that Black print cultures beyond the US have their own genealogies, languages, physical formats, modes of publication, distribution, and circulation. Essential scholarship that analyzes the complex literary histories manifest in those print materials' physical forms has been done and is ongoing. To use the term "Black," then, signals that multiple histories of print production, transmission, and consumption await to be aligned and reconciled, not into a seamless, homogenous field of inquiry, but mapped as a constellation of relational possibilities.(2). Black bibliography encompasses more than booksAll these compilers emphatically acknowledge the centrality of periodicals, anthologies, and other print ephemera to Black print culture. Even if they exclude such materials from their lists, they admit that those materials are indispensable to understanding Black literary production.(3). Black bibliography traverses disciplinesNewman was emphatic about this point; his inclusion of discographies reflects that outlook. Gubert's reprints encompass the social sciences as well as literature, as do the early bibliographies of Du Bois and Work. Porter's "Early American Negro Writings" tracks a wide variety of genres (poetry, sermons, and convention minutes) and discursive fields (aesthetics, theology, politics) as befits the earlier period's more capacious definition of "literature." So, too, does North Carolina State University's 1975 union catalog of "Black American Writers, 1773–1949," which lists literature along with writing in the social sciences, public policy, and technology. As a rule, Black bibliographies present Black writing as porous, co-existing with multiple discourses, disciplines, and epistemologies.(4). Black bibliography is openly and pro-actively politicalThere is no doubt that Black bibliophiles and collectors acquired print materials for the pleasures of the text; their personal curiosities and the satisfactions of collecting certainly spurred their investments. As Dorothy Porter divulged, she relished dealers' catalogs and checklists as bedtime reading, and collectors like Schomburg, Spingarn, and Slaughter competed intensely with one another to build their libraries.44 At the same time, that generation, its predecessors, and those who followed took up the work of organizing Black print collections as political statements. Black bibliographies record the existence of Black scholarship and creativity. Black bibliographies assert Black knowledge production despite racism's repressive impacts. Black bibliographies articulate ongoing struggles for acknowledgement in a world dominated by white-founded and -run institutions.(5). Black bibliography embraces indeterminacyStrikingly, unlike contemporary critics of the archive, the compilers of Black bibliographies do not believe their fundamental challenge is redressing lack or absence. On the contrary, the problem Black bibliographers face is a surfeit of print materials.45 Though managing this excess is an awesome task, it is not a lamentable one, for they regard bibliographic assessment and writing to be provisional at best. "Bibliographic control" is a more porous idea than it sounds, for it is ever subject to dialogue, revision, and supplementation.46For instance, Samuel May admitted in his 1863 Catalogue of Anti-Slavery Publications in America that "the following list does not pretend to completeness." He offered it nonetheless "as the commencement of a better one."47 Though Daniel A. P. Murray sought to "secure a copy of every book and pamphlet in existence, by a Negro author" to display at the 1900 Paris Exposition, he disavowed the monumentalizing logic his ambition implied. To start, he titled his bibliography a "Preliminary Checklist." He also conducted a national survey to seek leads for his list, offering to pay contributors for shipping materials to him. Amassing five hundred items through this effort, Murray rightfully exhorted: "I need not dilate upon […] the value of such a collection to future investigators of the bibliography of Negro Authorship."48 That Murray and May relished the prospect of indeterminacy reminds us that bibliography begins a process of inquiry that can—and must—be revised because no list is ever complete.Stretching beyond books to ephemeral and periodical publications, traversing disciplines, adopting a flexible approach to enumeration, and bearing the unmistakable stamp of an activist agenda, Black bibliography chafes against the norms of Anglo American bibliography as it developed over the course of the twentieth century. For instance, both cataloging and bibliography have prioritized universality in information design, but such norms reproduce the biases of the dominant culture. As we have noted, the tradition of descriptive bibliography in the US has failed to reflect the genres of Black writing and the print formats in which Black authors published, to the point where their works have often been excluded from bibliographical scholarship.Moreover, bibliography as a discipline doesn't necessarily reflect the values that African Americanist scholarly and curatorial communities have long brought to the practice of preserving Black texts. Tied to a market for rare books that prizes scarcity, traditional bibliography winnows and straightens out the often-convoluted pathways of a text's circulation, telling the story of publication as an enumerated list of "firsts." But we know Black print culture doesn't work like that. Black print is characterized by overlapping histories of reprints and reissues, excerpts, lags, and revivals. Black print frequently circulates outside of and below the radar of mainstream publishing houses and trade journals. Black print culture intersects with that of white authors and publishers, but it has its own tempo, its own pressures to negotiate, and requires a different set of institutional structures and alliances to thrive and survive. What bibliographic models could capture and distill this flux, while also reflecting Black print culture's particular modes of literary production?IIIWe founded the Black Bibliography Project to revive descriptive bibliography for African American literary studies, convinced that re-engaging with the long tradition of bibliographic work undergirding Black studies would change how literary critics approach Black texts. Collaborating with an ace team of catalogers and metadata librarians at Yale's Beinecke and Sterling libraries,49 in partnership with scholars, curators, and librarians across the country, as well