As part of her ongoing effort to chronicle African American literary culture at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Elizabeth McHenry (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) has been focusing on African American bibliographies, which emerged as experimental knowledge structures that provided ways of mapping and making sense of an emerging and rapidly evolving canon of “Negro literature.” These bibliographies were not just “lists,” but exploratory documents, where black intellectuals thought critically and advanced arguments about the boundaries and contours of black literature and authorship. Despite their seeming authority, bibliographies also make visible the instability of African American literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the most understudied and least understood moments in African American literary history.
Public Events
Making Negro Literature: Literary Workspaces at the Margins of Print Culture
April 20, 2017
Elizabeth McHenry’s talk at the Center also serves as the keynote address for the Triangle Book History Symposium, April 20-22, 2017, organized by Paul Fyfe (NHC Fellow, 2018–19) and sponsored by the RBS-Mellon Fellowship in Critical Biography and the National Humanities Center. For details and to register for the symposium, please visit https://tbhs2017.wordpress.ncsu.edu/.