This digital poster, originally titled "The Panther and the Lash: Black Literary Movement Publications and the Black Aesthetic," was first presented at the
Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black Conference held by the
African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities Society (AADHum) at the University of Maryland, on October 19, 2018. The purpose of this digital poster is to analyze the way literary movements and black little magazines influenced canon development in black American literature, as represented in the
Norton Anthology of American Literature.
This poster is divided into two sections. The first looks at little magazines and black American literary movements. The second looks at the
Norton Anthology of American Literature in every edition, and charts the inclusion of black American authors from edition to edition.
In the first part there are three pie charts representing the Harlem Renaissance, the Indignant Generation (name borrowed from Lawrence P. Jackson), and the Black Arts Movement respectively. Each pie chart looks at black American little magazines from the respective era, and groups them according to categories that I have assigned them. Researchers can click on the pie charts and look at the raw data, and see which magazines I have included, how I have categorized them, years extant, and notable writers or editors associated with the magazines. The Black Popular Magazine category is so broad that I have sub-categorized them by type in the raw data. Researchers can also click on the header, “60 BLACK-OWNED LITTLE MAGAZINES (1859-1976)” to see a complete list of magazines used in this poster.
The second part of this poster looks at author inclusion in the
Norton Anthology of American Literature from the first edition to the latest. The early manifestations of W.W. Norton & Company’s American literature anthology,
The American Tradition in Literature, are also included. The bar charts on the left look at the number and percentage of African Americans authors included in each edition respectively. Researchers can click on the first bar chart and get a complete list of black American authors included in each edition. Authors included for the first time are listed in purple. Names listed in green are authors who were previously included, later excluded and then included again. By clicking on the second bar chart, researchers can switch to a line graph looking at trends of inclusion comparing black authors included to total authors included.
The two line graphs on the right look at author inclusion according to the movement the author is generally associated with. Here again, researchers can click on the first line graph and see how I have categorized the individual authors, and see how I have categorized them respective to each edition of the
Norton Anthology of American Literature. The second line graph switches between an overview of black American authors included by movement in each edition, to a pie chart looking at black American authors included by movement in all the editions of the
Norton Anthology of American Literature collectively. Researchers can also click on the header “THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (1956-2018)” and see a complete list of black American Authors included in the
Norton Anthology of American Literature in all editions, see how many times they appear in the
Norton Anthology of American Literature throughout all the editions, and see which movements I have categorized them in. The authors are sorted according to date of birth, from earliest to latest.
The problems of categorization are recognized by this digital poster, and thus in the spirit of complete transparency, researchers are free to see all the raw data, and see how I have made my categorizations -- and are thus free to question, comment on, add to or improve upon them. I hope this poster is a useful resource for researchers working in this field. Thanks to Prof. Dr. Marc Priewe at the University of Stuttgart, Erik Fredner at Stanford University, and my wife, Anne. Charts and graphs were developed using
Beam Venngage online software.
Whit Frazier Peterson
Lecturer and Research Associate
American Studies
University of Stuttgart
whitfrazier.com