Resources

Amy Earhart, Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon (Stanford UP, 2025)

Earhart, along with collaborators, constructed a database of 100 years generalist American and African American literature anthologies to explore inclusion and exclusion in American literary canons. This important work overlaps with ours (and Earhart was kind enough to share her list of generalists African American anthologies so we could ensure the completeness of our dataset), and we look forward to delving fully into its findings. One important difference is that Earhart and co. track only authors, while we also track works. With their work now published, Earhart and co. are making their data available through the Texas A&M archives--an open practice we plan to follow.

Erik Fredner &  J.D. Porter, "Counting on The Norton Anthology of American Literature," PMLA 139.1 (January 2024)

Abstract: "We created a relational database that captures every author and work ever selected for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Given this anthology's influence, our database reveals changes in the literary canon over the past half century. We find that the common story of increased diversity is true, albeit truer with respect to race than gender. However, the biggest structural change has been a substantial growth in the number of anthologized authors. We argue that, while that strategy has produced real gains, it also creates a canon that less effectively manages reader attention, affords women and people of color a less valuable position than many white male authors once enjoyed, and tacitly accepts the notion that the new additions do not have greater literary merit than authors on the original roster, whom we show editors too rarely cut."

Fredner and Porter's relational database and analytic-interpretive work are foundational to our lab's work.

Keneth Kinnamon, "Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994." Callaloo 20.2 (Spring, 1997)

Kinnamon--who had co-edited Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology (1972), which he notes had been an "effort at canonization"--reviews anthologies of Black writing. The first half of this essay focuses on general literature anthologies, suggesting that few anthologies (and especially those created in the flurry of late 60s and early 70s anthology publication) are of enduring importance and looking forward to the then forthcoming Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. The second half of the essay digests a portion of the vast array of non-general African American literature anthologies organized by genre, theme, and/or period. Kinnamon concludes optimistically: "It is clear that anthologies have increased exponentially since the lean years before the 1960s. More will be forthcoming, as anthologists continue to track developments in the African American literary tradition." The last twenty-five years have qualified the pattern Kinnamon discerned a bit, as our working paper on the general features of our corpus shows.

Keneth Kinnamon, "Three Black Writers and the Anthologized Canon," in American Realism and the Canon, ed. Quirk and Scharnhorst (U of Delaware, 1994): 143-153.

Kinnamon examines the presence (and more often before 1969, the absence) of works by Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson in fifty general anthologies of American literature published between 1915 and 1991. He concludes that "[d]espite improving representation of these three [writers] in recent anthologies, one should guard against excessive optimism. African American history has been characterized by cycles of hope and despair, high expectations and grim disappointments, as the tide of white racism has ebbed and flowed" (152).

Howard Rambsy II & Kenton Ramsby, "How the New York Times Covers Black Writers." Public Books 10.12.2022

From the essay introduction: "Our findings reveal that many Black writers received at least minimal attention in a prestigious media outlet (in our research, that was the New York Times). Even so, the vast divide between those who received extensive coverage and those who did not explains why some Black people express concern about the persistence of the “One Black Writer” idea. Only select Black writers—all born before 1950—appeared in more than 1,000 articles. Fewer than 20 writers from our list of 500 appeared in more than 500 articles. That means that a relatively small number of writers (like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Colson Whitehead) appeared in far more articles than hundreds of others."

The Rambsy's findings resonate with our working paper on the inclusion of contemporary authors in African American anthologies.

We have also found Howard Rambsy's writing on anthologies at his blog, Cultural Front, along with his book, The Black Arts Enterprise (U Michigan Press, 2011), very useful.

Alok Yadov, Anthologies of African American Writing (web resource)

From the "about" page: "The present [site] has four facets: first, it aims to provide an enumerative bibliography of anthologies of African American literature (including their various revised editions); secondly, it seeks to document the material history of these anthologies as artifacts by including, wherever possible, images of the front and back covers (with and/or without dust jackets), title pages, frontispieces, and sample pages; thirdly, it seeks to provide a comprehensive index to the contents of these anthologies (which will serve to document an important part of the circulation histories of the various works included in the anthologies); and, fourthly, it seeks to provide materials toward the reception history of African American literature by examining, for each anthology, the discourse supplied by the publishers (in jacket copy, blurbs, and other publisher descriptions) and the discourse of the editors themselves (in their introductions, etc.), as well as documenting responses to the anthologies in reviews and commentary on the anthologies."

Yadov's resource aided us in constructing our corpus of general anthologies of African American literature.