Shadow Archives

The Lifecycles of African American Literature

Jean-Christophe Cloutier

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231550246
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: North American Literary Criticism

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts—including Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth —to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.

Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors' archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

1

BLACK SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND THE MIDCENTURY RISE OF THE INSTITUTIONAL COLLECTOR

“The historical development of special black collections that have been assembled and subsequently housed in American libraries would make interesting study [sic],” wrote Jessie Carney Smith, the long-standing dean of the library at Fisk University in 1990.1 It would indeed, and although this book is above all a literary study, it shares Smith’s conviction. This chapter takes a closer look at the neglected yet crucial history of the rise of contemporary literary papers in the United States across the twentieth century through a focus on black special collections and their struggle for acquisition by university and college libraries as well as other institutional collectors. It would be impossible to cover the entirety of this complex and moveable scene, let alone the fate of every player, so I concentrate on representative cases involving major institutional collectors and on the novelists most prominently featured in this book, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison.

For African American authors, the postwar institutional love for literary papers was far from universally distributed. Unlike today, outside of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), only a few repositories—notably Yale University and the Harlem branch of the NYPL (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)—were actively interested in acquiring their papers. More often than not, such acquisitions also had to be in the form of gifts and donations on deposit rather than purchases. In contrast, living white authors, British and American alike, enjoyed an intensifying and increasingly aggressive attention from the rare-book and manuscript market in the postwar period—as exemplified by the acquisition record of the University of Texas library (now the Harry Ransom Center)—marking a paradigm shift in value that turned the living writer’s waste basket into a potential goldmine.

Regardless of race, the “institutional collector,” to quote Stephen Enniss, the current director of the Harry Ransom Center, played a tremendous role in altering the literary landscape. At midcentury, the rabid acquisition program of these collectors—mainly university and college libraries—increased the value of literary artifacts, introducing fierce competition in the market (which always favors repositories with deep pockets) that led to “a shift toward contemporary collecting.”2 Professional writers’ archival practices, therefore, matured in the institutional collectors’ shadow; a swelling number of authors began to preserve rather than throw away, establishing a trend that has now come to include born-digital records. In turn, literary study was altered once access to a larger number of literary collections changed what was possible to know and assess of the writing business. As more and more literary scholars became de facto historians thanks to these collections—which further affected the where and the how of literary study, privileging the sizable holdings of elite institutions—living writers and their heirs regarded their personal archives as another means of revenue. Families and estates were enticed by the potential promise of financial rewards down the line; they consulted literary appraisers, who assisted them in setting base prices, in isolating certain items that could fetch higher prices at auction, and in recommending repositories that might be potential buyers.

Though my focus in this book is not the role of literary collections as gatekeepers to what Jim English calls the “economy of prestige,”3 it is essential to examine the postwar upsurge of interest in literary collections and to do so through the perspective of the archivists who have also seen their profession altered by this shift. As with Richard Wright’s case at Yale, the specific custodial repository can be “the difference that makes a difference.” Secured within what looks like a gigantic Asgardian hammer supported by vibranium, Yale’s prestigious Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses one of the largest collections of African American materials on the globe: the James Weldon Johnson Collection. The establishment of this collection, founded in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten, has played an especially central role in the future of modern African American letters: it has allowed for the delayed recuperation of numerous previously unpublished texts, enabled thousands of new scholarly projects to emerge, and made it possible, as archives do, to discover new voices for the first time and old voices anew. This collection, which is deservedly the subject of a rising number of studies in modernist and African American literary history, is also directly tied to each author considered in this book and so warrants some attention.

PROVENANCE: THE JAMES WELDON JOHNSON EFFECT

Along with its many other considerable achievements in the worlds of literature and the arts, the New Negro movement, later known as the Harlem Renaissance, also brought about a “revolution in the act of saving and collecting the black past,” as the Beinecke curator Melissa Barton puts it.4 By midcentury, I suggest, that “revolution” came to alter what it meant to be a professional black writer and was one of the major factors in establishing archivism as an entrenched practice. This archival sensibility can in part be traced back to interwar modernism, but it also stems from an evolving ideological shift taking place in the American scene in relation to the preservation of documents and records and in the postwar competition for literary artifacts by living writers. As Jeremy Braddock makes clear in his book Collecting as Modernist Practice, the “collecting” revolution is a modernist staple that reaches beyond race, even though Afromodernism operated within a distinct set of stakes and conditions of possibility.5 The foundation of the James Weldon Johnson (JWJ) Collection at Yale University in 1941, as Braddock describes, represents a key moment in this ideological and practical revolution. In addition to Braddock’s book, Emily Bernard’s invaluable biography Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance and Michele Birnbaum’s critical assessment of the JWJ Collection’s importance and far-reaching implications yield a comprehensive account of how Van Vechten helped orchestrate the establishment of this archive.6

Carl Van Vechten, perhaps the most prominent white member of the Harlem Renaissance, remains a polarizing figure, even though today he is often remembered more as a portrait photographer than as a writer in his own right, despite the tremendous literary fame he enjoyed in his heyday. Regardless of what one makes of him as a person, Van Vechten was a major figure in the arts of the interwar years, and he used his privilege and contacts in the publishing world (notably Alfred Knopf, a personal friend) to boost the careers of many writers, black and white, from Mina Loy to Nella Larsen, Wallace Stevens to Langston Hughes.7 His relationship with Hughes ran deep, and the two were lifelong friends and collaborators. Yet as a growing body of scholarship is demonstrating, Van Vechten’s ultimate importance may be his all-consuming passion for collecting and archiving writ large, a passion that proved to be particularly instrumental for African American letters even though it ran across the color line.8 The founding of the JWJ Collection, plus the decades of solicitation for black materials that came in its wake, was a watershed moment.

Sometime in 1939, the Library of Congress approached the recently widowed Grace Nail Johnson to inquire about the papers of her late husband, James Weldon Johnson, with the intention of making his archive “the nucleus of a new poetry room.”9 Major upheavals had been afoot at the nation’s library ever since President Franklin Roosevelt had appointed poet-bureaucrat and champion of literature Archibald MacLeish as librarian of Congress in July 1939, a post he occupied until 1944. MacLeish was a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives throughout the 1930s, and his tenure at the nation’s library brought tremendous administrative changes and a pointed increase in the value and presence of literary artifacts, including poetry readings and a fellowship for writers and scholars. By 1941, MacLeish had undertaken a general restructuring of the library’s operations, revising its “cataloging, acquisitions, personnel, and budget policies.”10 The following year he formed the Librarian’s Council, a group “composed of distinguished librarians, scholars, and book collectors who would make recommendations about collection development and reference service.”11 This council, in short, helped determine whose voices would be included in the nation’s growing heritage and thus boosted the value of certain collections over others. It was at this early pivotal moment of remarkable change that the Library of Congress attempted to obtain the James Weldon Johnson archive, a request that was progressive enough to attract the attention of close Johnson family friend Carl Van Vechten.

Van Vechten became consumed with the idea of placing his own impressive collection, one he had been amassing diligently for years, in a renowned institution. In fact, he was determined to expand it beyond anything the world had ever seen by soliciting items through the vast network of black writers, teachers, librarians, artists, reporters, intellectuals, and dilettantes he had nurtured for more than two decades. In terms of site, Van Vechten settled on Yale because, as he told readers of The Crisis in 1942, it was ideally located between major urban centers Boston and New York, and its librarian, Bernhard Knollenberg, had confessed, “We haven’t any Negro books at all.”12 So enthusiastic was Van Vechten at striking this deal with Yale that he believed the collection would soon bring about the creation of a chair of African American literature at the Ivy League institution—a position that, in reality, was not created until decades later.13

Even though “Yale was the first white college to lobby for black materials,” extending this inclusion to the level of the library staff in the form of “a living, breathing Negro,” as Bernard puts it, let alone a chair of black studies, “became a different matter altogether.”14 Despite strong support from Van Vechten and Knollenberg’s self-professed wish that he “should like very much to try the experiment of having colored people on our staff,” both Harold Jackman and Dorothy Peterson were denied a position at the library.15 Even Hampton University’s Lillian G. Lewis, a young African American student who lobbied to join the Yale library staff for a summer job, was turned down for “her lack of library training.” When Lewis replied that she would “do anything to be close to the collections,” even take a position as charwoman, Knollenberg was “touched by the offer but did not want to hire another black person in a menial labor job.”16 A year later, the young Farm Security Administration photographer Gordon R. Parks would take his iconic photograph of Ella Watson, U.S. government charwoman, holding mop and broom framed by the American flag in one of the federal buildings she cleaned in Washington, D.C. The image, known as American Gothic, Washington, DC, forcefully captured the prejudice and level of racial discrimination permeating the country, especially in the nation’s elite institutions. The Double V campaign of World War II, “victory abroad, victory at home,” was aimed precisely at this kind of injustice.

Like Van Vechten, Harold Jackman felt that therein lay part of the importance of the JWJ Collection—that it could “be made an open wedge for a capable Negro at Yale.”17 The first step in this journey, it seemed, was to admit the “talented tenth” in paper-surrogate form as part of the collection. Van Vechten, Jackman, and Peterson knew that once these black counterarchives became academically sanctioned, they would essentially smuggle radical blackness into traditional sites of cultural and national authority. And word was spreading; as the century entered into its second half, an increasing number of writers realized how diligent archivism could be a means of creating “a permanent register of their careers and weaving them into the recalcitrant fabric of American culture,” as Morris Dickstein puts it.18 Archiving was a way to break through this recalcitrance from the inside, a challenge black authors faced in every aspect of their sociopolitical lives. In a few short years, having welcomed its very own Trojan horse, if you will, Yale was suddenly brimming with black texts, yet the trepidatious Ivy League continued to keep actual black lives at bay.

This initial resistance to African Americans on the payroll at Yale, along with the reality that the great majority of white colleges and libraries were not interested in acquiring black materials, reminds us all the more of the importance of HBCUs as repositories for African and African diasporic artifacts. For instance, under the pioneering librarianship of Dorothy Porter Wesley, the first black woman to graduate in library science at Columbia University, Howard University purchased Arthur Spingarn’s collection in 1946, appending it to the Moorland Collection to create what eventually became the world-renowned Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection. During her forty-three-year tenure as Howard’s chief librarian, from 1930 to 1973, Porter, who is now also enjoying a renaissance, radically expanded the collection while establishing a new classification system and essentially helped lay the groundwork for what became black studies.19 Van Vechten, who took a series of portrait photographs of Porter in 1951, was cognizant of this institutional imbalance between the Ivy League and HBCUs, so he purposefully decided to place his substantive George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature at Fisk University as a means of encouraging whites to visit this historically black university, just as he hoped the JWJ Collection would lead black scholars to Yale.

Another aspect of Van Vechten’s contributions were his continued efforts in the final decades of his life to donate substantial materials to multiple black special-collection repositories across the country, notably the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection (now the Harold Jackman–Countee Cullen Collection) at Atlan...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: “Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang,” or The Lifecycles of Twentieth-Century African American Literary Papers
• 1. Black Special Collections and the Midcentury Rise of the Institutional Collector
• 2. Claude McKay’s Archival Rebirth: Provenance and Politics in Amiable with Big Teeth
• 3. “At Once Both Document and Symbol”: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and the Lafargue Clinic Photographic Archive
• 4. An Interlude Concerning the Vanishing Manuscripts of Ann Petry
• 5. “Too Obscure for Learned Classification”: Comic Books, Counterculture, and Archival Invisibility in Invisible Man
• Coda: Disappointed Bridges: A Note on the Discovery of Amiable with Big Teeth
• Appendix: Artifact Biographies or Vagabond Itineraries of Key Documents Discussed in This Book
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index