This fall, students in the Intro to DH class that Ed Whitley and I co-taught produced a pretty wonderful collaborative digital project they
decided to call “Harlem Echoes,” a version of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows oriented
to a broad, public readership. This project was produced
in response to an assignment that I generated for them with help and feedback from Chris Forster and Roopika Risam along the way. The students had some technical
help from staff members in Lehigh’s Center for Digital Scholarship.
This is the
project the students in the class produced:
Major features of the site include:
--All of the poems are thematically
tagged based on a set of tags agreed upon collaboratively by students in the
class. The site includes a clickable “Wordcloud” of student-generated tags that
leads users to lists of poems oriented around specific tags.
--A substantial number of
contextual and biographical essays that help bring the poems in Harlem
Shadows to life for today’s readers.
--Students built the site
themselves, including menus, graphics, and text. I directed them to use a
public domain, “dirty OCR” version of Harlem Shadows derived from the
Internet Archive. They proofread and corrected the OCR and produced unique
pages for each poem in Harlem Shadows.
Digital Humanities and Social Justice; DH Projects and
their Audience
Why Harlem Shadows?
I am relatively new to formal involvement with Digital
Humanities as a field, though I have been floating around the edges of Digital
scholarship for many years. As I’ve been studying DH more intensively in recent
months I’ve had two distinct observations about the field that I wanted this
assignment to speak to:
1) While there is quite a bit of scholarship in Digital Humanities that does deal with social justice oriented themes, in its early period the field seemed to be largely oriented towards digitization and analysis of canonical, Anglo-American texts (see my essay from earlier in the fall on “The Archive Gap”). Scholars like Alan Liu have pointed out the strangeness of the fact that while DH ideas and tools were being pioneered in the 1990s, many important scholars in the field seemed not to be very engaged in the intense conversations about gender, race, and sexuality (queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory) that were also occurring in parallel during that same period of time.
As a result of my own training and orientation as a scholar, I wanted this assignment to explicitly speak to social justice issues in some way. I believe that minority authors in the Anglo-American tradition as well as non-western authors are underrepresented or overlooked in prominent digital archives, so I had a strong interest in asking students to do a digitization project with an author in that category.
2) It’s been noted that many digital archives and digital thematic collections that tend to be posted online can have very small readerships. Is that because the texts being digitized are too obscure (I doubt it), or is it rather because we haven’t been thinking enough about issues of access and audience in designing our digital projects? What is it that the average web user might be looking for when searching online for particular texts?
My hunch is that the average reader isn’t that preoccupied with a precise digital recreation of the original printed texts they are encountering online. Rather, the interest is much more likely to be thematic (“poems about the resistance to racism”), contextual (“early black poets”), and presentist (“how does this matter today?”). In designing this assignment, I nudged students to consider these issues and build a site that might have an expansive and somewhat revisionist approach to the original material. In our DH class, we did present students with examples of digital archives that were invested in a textualist methodology (foremost being the Whitman Archive), but I at least made it a point to suggest that there might be other models for presenting digital collections to consider.
My Background
I should start by saying that I’m not an expert on the
Harlem Renaissance, and indeed for most of my career teaching modernism I have
focused on British and Irish modernists rather than American modernism (in my
department the teaching of American materials has generally been the province
of my colleague Seth Moglen). However, in recent years I have grown more
interested in the transatlantic contexts of the early modernist movement
(1910-1925), and one especially interesting site along those lines is the
Harlem Renaissance – many of whose most important figures spent significant
amounts of time abroad.
One upshot of my relative newness to these materials is that
I don’t have a ‘set’ approach to teaching Harlem Renaissance literature.
Indeed, this assignment emerged out of a process of exploration that I’ll
briefly describe before going deeper into the assignment itself.
Genesis
The genesis for this project was my first experience
teaching Claude McKay’s poetry in the spring of 2014 in an undergraduate seminar on Transatlantic Modernism. In addition to McKay, in that class I
assigned Nella Larsen’s Quicksand for its depiction of Harlem cultural
life in a transatlantic context (the biracial protagonist of Quicksand travels
to Denmark in the middle of the novel and returns to Harlem with a clearer idea
of what her black identity means to her, but without clear answers to the
central quandary facing her regarding her love life and career).
As an accompaniment to Quicksand, I had initially
assigned McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928), only to decide that
emphasizing that novel was somewhat of a mistake in this class setting, for two
reasons. One problem is that the novel really isn’t “transatlantic.” It does
give us an example of a Caribbean intellectual and activist figure who emerges
once the novel is well underway, but the novel’s primary protagonist is
actually a “street” character rather unlike McKay himself. Secondly, Home to
Harlem’s emphasis on street culture, slang, and nightlife could be seen as
opportunistic and salacious rather than documentary. I should also add that the
novel isn’t exactly a page-turner; it begins to drag around the mid-point,
though the depictions of African American porters working on a railroad are
interesting in part because we can assume they are derived from McKay’s own
time exploring different American cities while working on the Pennsylvania
Railroad in the 1910s. Some of McKay’s peers wondered at the time about whether
the novel helped or hurt the cause of black literature, and we still need to raise
those questions today.
A better bet seemed to be McKay’s rarely-read books of
poetry, Harlem Shadows (70 poems; published in New York in 1922) and its
shorter predecessor text, Spring in New Hampshire (31 poems; published
in London in 1921). We did spend a session in that class looking at some of the
poems from Harlem Shadows, and I was struck by both their quality and
their potential relevance to a course on transatlantic modernism. Going
forward, I expect that I will probably always assign these poems in future
versions of Transatlantic Modernism classes I teach, rather than Home to
Harlem.
The Assignment in the Context of an “Introduction To Digital
Humanities” Course
Ed Whitley and I began planning the department’s first
graduate level introduction to Digital Humanities in spring of 2015, and we
worked on it much more intensively during the summer.
We knew that we wanted to do a unit on digital archives and
thematic collections, and we also knew that this unit should have a hands-on
component – a project that involved the students either contributing to an
existing digital archive project, or doing a certain amount of work on
something new. Because of the intense labor involved in digitizing print texts,
we knew we couldn’t ask our students to do too much since we only
intended to dedicate about four weeks to this topic.
I had the idea of asking all of the students in the class to
produce a collaborative digital edition of Harlem Shadows as an
assignment, and in the summer I discovered that Chris Forster (Syracuse U.) and
Roopika Risam (Salem State U.) had already produced an elegant digital edition
(though it admittedly took me awhile to find it; their site does not show up on
the top of Google searches for “Harlem Shadows”). I began corresponding with
these two scholars with the idea that students in our course might add
materials that could eventually be added to their existing site, or perhaps
build a parallel site that might look quite different. This is their site:
I have been especially interested in including biographical,
historical, and literary context on any site the students might produce to help readers understand better
what it is they are looking at. Thanks to projects like Google Books, the
Internet Archive, the Project Gutenberg and the widespread interest in digitization amongst digital humanists, we now have a truly formidable array
of digital texts available to us online -- though we still often don’t have very good ways
to navigate those texts. Google Books has virtually no metadata and is actually
difficult to search. As a result, we now have access to millions of texts, but we
need much more infrastructure to help us know what we might actually want to
read.
As my reading and preparatory work took shape, I began to
generate a list of possible contextual short essays students could research and
write, for upload to the site. Eventually, I presented these suggestions to
them:
--We should think about the front
page and the entry to the site. Perhaps a student could write an “About” page,
which introduces McKay and this book of poems and also has a summary of the new
contents we are adding with links to the new content.
--Perhaps a student could write a
short bio-critical essay that links to and quotes from specific poems. In order
for the links to work, we first need to build a Page for each poem that has a
unique Permalink.
--Perhaps students could think
about a presentation of the poems in Harlem Shadows that focuses on their historical importance
and influence (esp. “If We Must Die” but also “America,” “Mulatto,” etc) rather
than recreating the original presentation of the text itself (in any case, the
Internet Archive edition and the Forster/Risam edition already do that).
--I would encourage students to
generate tags for each of the poems that might allow visitors to the site to
approach poems that focus on certain themes that are of interest to them. So we
could create tags for each poem (“Race,” “Harlem street life,” “Gender,”
“Capitalism,” “Lynching,” “Jamaica,” “Violence,” “Personal life,” “Family,”
“Taboo Love,” “Migration” [or “Exile”], “Possible Queer Subtext,” and so on).
We could then display all of the Tags on a column in the right; if the user
clicks on a keyword they see a list of poems that match that tag. It may even
be possible to build a widget that might dynamically arrange all poems on a
given topic for the user: here are the 20 (?) poems McKay published in this
period that deal with race. This could be especially useful for students or
colleagues who are just looking for the poems dealing with race…
--Max Eastman’s preface to Harlem
Shadows is problematic. Do we think it adds value to have the preface
presented without editorial comment? Or perhaps we could add a short essay
about just the Preface – including the language that some might find
patronizing / insulting ? Would we prefer to jettison the preface entirely?
(This would constitute a radical departure from the 1922 edition! But we are
allowed to do it if we want to.) Between the two prefatory documents in the
original Harlem Shadows, I prefer McKay’s own “Author’s Note”; perhaps
one option might be to structure the site so that text is more prominently
displayed.
--Perhaps a student might write a
short essay offering a close reading of the poems that seem to allude to the
complexity of McKay’s personal life – specifically his relationships with men
(and often white men).
--Perhaps a student might write a short
essay offering a close reading of the poems as reflective of an immigrant’s
outlook. (Quite a number of the poems are reflections on McKay’s status as
effectively a foreigner on American shores, still trying to digest the
strangeness of American racism.)
--A student might write a short
essay discussing McKay’s often tense relationship to the Modernist movement. He
saw himself as a political radical who strongly embraced modernity and progress
as leading to liberation and justice. But he was not interested in
“modernizing” or radicalizing literary language or literary form. He liked the
sonnet form.
--A student might write a short
essay describing McKay’s relationship to the Harlem Renaissance movement. (He
is considered one of the core members of the Harlem Renaissance group, but he
is actually an outlier in some ways. A bit older than other core figures, and
different in that he was an immigrant who left Harlem fairly quickly. He
actually wrote Home to Harlem while
living in Marseille, France!). This essay might also mention a few other major
figures and benchmark’s in the advent of the Harlem Renaissance (Alain Locke’s
“The New Negro,” etc).
--Images and multimedia. (There are
numerous audio recordings of McKay reading poems like “If We Must Die.” We
could embed those links into our own site.) Have to consider permissions and
copyright.
--And in correspondence with me,
Chris Forster had this suggestion:
I would add perhaps one more that folks may wish
to explore. Do the poems of Harlem
Shadows represent a “toning
down” of McKay’s politics? The poems that once appeared alongside the poems of Harlem Shadows in periodicals but which
disappear when McKay collects the poems of Harlem
Shadows (which themselves are
largely a rehash of poems that were first in Cambridge
Magazine and then as Spring in New Hampshire… I
wrote a bit about those here) are often more
radical. “To the White Fiends” disappears; and where is “The Capitalist at
Dinner” (a poem which is not anywhere mention in the edition right now—to my
horror)? These poems strike a very different note from those published in the
collection—and very, very different from the universalist
spin McKay puts on “If We Must Die” when he later reflects in the reading here. (Chris Forster)
As you might see from looking at the final product, the students took
me up on some of my suggestions (though not all of them); they also had their own quite fascinating
ideas for topics to cover. One student focused on the different contexts and
uses to which “If We Must Die” has been put (divided into three shorter essays; start here). Another focused on the possiblerelevance of McKay’s poetry to the present-day, Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet another student decided to write about McKay’s use of bird imagery,
especially with reference to migration and movement. Another wrote about the queer subtext in McKay’s poem, “Alfonso, Waiting at Table.” I also found the essay another student wrote on "spatial poetics" in McKay's poem "On the Road" quite compelling.
Helping the Students Out: a Bibliography and
Scanned Critical and Biographical Materials
To facilitate student research, I gave them my introductory
lecture notes on McKay’s early career, with a fair amount of biographical
material about McKay drawn from Wayne Cooper’s biography (these were notes I
had developed for the earlier course I taught). I also scanned quite a bit of recent scholarship about McKay and made
those PDFs available on CourseSite (the courseware platform we use at Lehigh).
I decided to do this because this was not, in fact, going to
be a class that was centrally ‘about’ the Harlem Renaissance. I had to operate
on the assumption that students would have had little or no background working
with McKay prior to taking this course (this proved correct). In a class that
was more focused on, say, “Digitizing African American Literature,” I might
have asked the students themselves to generate these materials.
Here is the preliminary annotated bibliography that I
included in the assignment as well:
Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay, Rebel
Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. 1987 (new edition 1996). This
remains the definitive biography of Claude McKay. It suffers at times from a
somewhat judgmental attitude to McKay, but the bibliography is invaluable.
Chapter 3 deals with McKay’s early years – and his relationships with editors
like the Eastmans (which led to his breakthrough publication in The
Liberator in 1919). Chapter 7 has a considerable amount of material on Harlem Shadows, including background and
context (many of the poems in the collection were first printed either in
McKay’s earlier book of poetry, Spring in
New Hampshire, or in other magazines). There are also brief summaries and
discussions of several reviews of the book that appeared at the time in both
the mainstream press as well as in Afro-American magazines and newspapers.
Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home.
(1938). McKay’s own memoir of these years. There’s a good deal of
introductory material from the editor, Gene Andrew Jarrett, including a
detailed timeline of McKay’s life, as well as a helpful biographical note.
You might also consider taking a
look at various early chapters from A Long Way From Home, including Chapter
2 (“Other Editors” sets the stage for the publication of McKay’s poems in The
Liberator in 1919). Chapters 7-13 (very short chapters) deal with the time
period leading up to the publication of Harlem
Shadows. Chapter 9 has an intriguing anecdote of McKay’s encounter with
Frank Harris (editor of Pearson’s), who criticized McKay for not
including “If We Must Die” in the (British-published) Spring in New
Hampshire: “You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir!” Chapter 9 also has
accounts of McKay’s first encounters with peers like W.E.B. DuBois. Chapter 13
has a brief account of the publication of Harlem Shadows in 1922. It was
well-received, but didn’t earn very much money. Soon McKay would be off to Russia
and France…
Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay,
Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (2007). This is
the first book I know of to really explore the complexity of McKay’s identity
as a (closeted, at least to the public) gay black man and a Communist and apply
that understanding to a close reading of his poetry and fiction. Readings of
poems from the Harlem Shadows collection
are scattered throughout the book. The Introductory chapter and chapter 1 might
be important as an intervention in a tradition of McKay scholarship that has
tended to see him as first and foremost a “heroic” Harlem Renaissance figure.
Kottis Sree Ramesh and Kandula Nirupa Rani, Claude McKay: The Literary Identity from Jamaica to Harlem and Beyond.
(2006) Chapter 3 deals with McKay’s immigration to the United
States and how his status as a West Indian immigrant shaped his writing and
outlook. This is valuable mainly because it focuses on McKay’s status as a
“colonial subject.”
Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A
Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (1992). Chapter 3,
“The Problems of a Black Radical,” deal with McKay’s writing during the years
that led to the publication of Harlem
Shadows.
Terence Hoagwood on the poem “Harlem Shadows” Brief essay in The Explicator
(2010). Hoagwood talks about McKay’s appropriation of conventions
from Elizabethan poetry – though this poem is actually not a regular sonnet but
a “deviant” sonnet.
Adam McKible and Suzanne Churchill,
“In Conversation: The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies”
(Modernism/Modernity 2013). This essay will mainly be of interest to people (if
there are any) who are looking into McKay’s relationship to modernism – and the
theoretical problems we tend to encounter if we think of African American writing
from the 1920 and 30s in the context of transatlantic modernism.
David Krasner, review of The
Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Modernism/Modernity
2010). This is a review of a book that looks at McKay’s
representation of race in Home to Harlem in light of the rather
different strategy we see in WEB DuBois’s writing from the same period.
James Smethurst, “The Red is East:
Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century” (American
Literary History 2009) Largely a review essay – looking at Gary Holcomb’s book. Smethurst also
summarizes the three novels that Holcomb focuses on. Not a lot here on Harlem
Shadows. That said, there is a lot here for people interested in McKay’s
relationship to international communism / socialism / Marxism.
Outcomes: What We Learned from Working with the Students and Listening to their Feedback
Surprise #1: The students seemed to find the assignment
highly interesting and involving, and spent far more time on it than we had
anticipated they would.
Some students in the class initially expressed concerns
about the technical aspects of producing a serious website (as opposed to just
a blog). We were able to arrange a visit from skilled digital scholars and
library staff just around the time students were beginning to work on the
project. This gave them a bit more confidence to start working with WordPress,
though only a couple of the students in the class had used WordPress in the
past. (I should also note that we decided to use WordPress for this assignment
rather than something like Scalar precisely because it is so easy to use.)
I had strongly encouraged them to meet outside of class at
least once, and as the students began to work they ended up meeting several
times (five times in fact!) to make decisions about the intention and design of
the site. It became clear that they had truly entered into the spirit of
collaboration, often helping each other out with various tasks. One student
took special responsibility over site design and technical features. Another
student helped get the ball rolling by going through and creating her own list
of thematic tags to all of the poems on her own.
Even after completing the first draft of the project, the
students continued to talk about the project later, making it clear to me they
were still pretty involved in the work of the project. I hope that this early
experience with collaborative work will come back and pay dividends for some of
the students later in their careers.
Surprise #2: They renamed it. At some point
the students decided to rename the project from “Harlem Shadows” to “Harlem
Echoes.” This was completely within the parameters of the assignment, though I
had not suggested any such change to them nor did I expect them to do it.
I can see two advantages to the decision to change the name
of the project. One is that it frees the project from the responsibility of
prioritizing a digital approximation of the original text of Harlem Shadows.
Harlem Shadows still forms the core of the site, but as the menu design
and ordering indicates, the presentation of the poems is only one of the goals
of the site the students produced.
The second advantage of the renaming might be that it
allowed the students in the class to differentiate their project from the
existing Forster/Risam project.
In effect, I see the project in its current form as more a digital thematic collection based on Harlem Shadows than a technical digital edition of Harlem Shadows.
Surprise #3: They decided to orient the project to student users
rather than specialist scholars. This
made sense to me since the students themselves are not specialists in either
modernism or the Harlem Renaissance, but I still hadn’t quite expected the extremely helpful background essay one student would write describing McKay’s use of the
sonnet form in Harlem Shadows.
Surprise #4: Claude McKay talks more often about “nature”
than about “race.” The thematic tags
the students produced led to a pretty startling observation: the largest word
in the word cloud is actually "Nature” – not “Race.” Admittedly, his discussion of
nature is not in a vacuum – many of those “nature” poems are also thematizing
social issues such as race and migration – but it still tells us something
important nonetheless, and reminds us to be careful in slotting McKay
unthinkingly into the ready category of “black activist poet.”
Future Directions
We have yet to make any final decisions about what to do
with the project. There is still a hope we might coordinate with Roopika Risam
and Chris Forster more intensively. There is also a real idea of continuing to
expand the site, possibly by adding further works ourselves (I have a couple of
short essays I myself would like to contribute), and possibly by soliciting
contributions from scholars who work on Mckay.
There’s also a question about how we might revise the
assignment for future iterations of this class. As I mentioned, students put
this all together in the space of a couple of weeks; we had only allocated
about four weeks to digital archives and collections towards the beginning of
the term. We were using a final portfolio structure for the class and asked
students to revise their individual essays as much as possible for that final
project. But their subsequent work in the course was on different topics; in
the subsequent unit, for instance, we asked them to work with data (text
analysis, visualization, mapping, data mining, network diagrams, topic
modeling, etc).
In our wrap-up conversation at the end, several students
suggested we might coordinate the digital archive hands-on project with the
hands-on project related to data. Perhaps the data segment could ask students
to apply data and analytical tools to the text that they had earlier digitized
and annotated? This sounded like an excellent idea in principle, though
practically with such a small text (70 short poems), many data analysis tools and
methods simply aren’t very useful or relevant. (Topic modeling, for instance,
requires large scale corpora to produce meaningful results.) If we repeat a
version of this assignment with a much more substantial primary text, however, some
of those data-oriented tools could be relevant.