I have a new article out -- making points I have made in various ways before ("Beyond the Archive Gap"), but here designed for inclusion in a volume focusing overwhelmingly on Anglo-American modernism.
"The Modernist Archive Gap: Black Writers and Canonicity in the Digital Era" Published in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, July 2024.
Introduction:Modernist studies has been moving deeper into the archives, with much recent scholarship drawing on artifacts connected to the lives of early 20th-century authors. Primary documents, including personal papers, manuscripts, and paratextual elements have become essential to modernist studies scholarship, evidence of what, in the proposal for the current volume, is referred to as ‘a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can recontextualize modernist writing and artistic practices.’ Unfortunately, the archival turn has not necessarily helped to advance the process of making modernist studies more geographically inclusive or more racially diverse, a goal associated with the advent of the “new modernist studies” in the 1990s, and continuing with the interventions of Susan Stanford Friedman and many others in the 2000s. Rather, at times, the archival turn has reified the existing white Anglo-American modernist canon, though this apparent conservatism with respect to coverage might be an artifact of availability rather than intentional retrenchment: there are vast stores of archival material catalogued and available for many established modernist writers, and typically less material available for Black writers from the period or writers who were (or are) colonial subjects. In some cases, archival material for Black writers exists, but was neglected by collectors and librarians for many years. An example along these lines might be the Anne Spencer (1882-1975) papers, which remained essentially uncatalogued after the author’s death at her residence in Lynchburg, Virginia until 2008, when the collection was acquired by the University of Virginia. The thirty-three year gap between the death of a major Harlem Renaissance poet and the acquisition of her papers by a major research library might be telling. That said, with many other authors, no significant archival material has been preserved. These various gaps and omissions constitute a phenomenon I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘Archive Gap.’ The Archive Gap remains an issue both with print and digital archives, though the latter concern might be the more pressing one as it is being reproduced in the present moment.
Here, the aim is to begin by describing the digital archive gap as it exists in the field of modernist studies, with an emphasis on how African American writers in particular have been absent from digital archive projects and left out of many important emerging conversations about genre and canonicity. Secondly, I will argue for a series of concrete steps that might be taken to mitigate the archive gap going forward, in a range of projects created for different constituencies. Of particular importance is the construction of annotated digital collections to make writings by a broad range of authors accessible to the next generation of readers, particularly in high school and college classrooms. Such projects might go a long way towards correcting the imbalance in the syllabi of modernist literature courses, a correction that would be the starting point for any real and sustained revisioning of the modernist canon. Secondarily, the creation of rich, scholarly digital editions dedicated to both established Black authors like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, and to lesser-known figures, might be of value. Finally, the creation of corpora dedicated to Black writers and writers from the colonial world could also be seen as part of this project: the creation of new digital archives specifically for quantitative textual analysis.