Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Blogging about Black World magazine


Although there has been an increasing focus on digital humanities in literary studies over the last several years, we have hardly produced adequate online projects related to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. While the scholarship on Black Arts has grown in notable ways during the past decade, that scholarship, for some reason, has rarely been transformed into or conceived as digital projects.

My plan over the next few months is to devote a series of blog entries to Negro Digest/Black World magazine; nearly the entire run of the periodical appears on Google magazines. In January 2016, at the Modern Language Association conference, I will discuss some of my experiences researching and blogging about Black World.

This project illuminates the extensive textual production – writings, photographs, and illustrations – related to African American poetry and poets appearing in Black World magazine. The project deciphers and showcases dozens of bibliographic codes (page format, typeface, prices, images, etc.) transmitted in select issues of one of the most far-reaching African American literary periodicals ever produced. In the process, the project reveals what a blog series on texts from the black arts era can achieve that traditional scholarly publishing cannot.

Entries:
• October 4: Editorial Cartoons in Negro Digest/Black World
• October 1: 30 Days of Blogging about Black World magazine
• September 30: Clovis E. Semmes's Invaluable Index 
• September 29: Kalamu ya Salaam and the Richard Wright Award for Literary Criticism 
• September 28: The many appearances of Amiri Baraka in Negro Digest/Black World
• September 27: Special issues of Negro Digest/Black World 
• September 26: From Poet-Scholars to Poets and Scholars
• September 25: The concentration of black women critical writings during the 1960s/70s 
• September 24: Literary criticism for African American audiences
• September 23: Frederick Douglass and Negro Digest/Black World 
• September 22: Illegibility and Negro Digest/Black World
• September 21: Displaying images of poets and their publications 
• September 20: Malcolm X and Black World
• September 19: "The Black Aesthetic" and "The Black Arts Movement" 
• September 18: An early poem for Malcolm X 
• September 17: Tracing "Black Aesthetic" in Negro Digest/Black World
• September 16: Back covers of Negro Digest/Black World, Pt. 1
• September 15: Pricing for Negro Digest/Black World 
• September 14: Negro Digest/Black World & Black Aesthetics 
• September 13: Amiri Baraka previews a shift in African American literary discourse, 1965 
• September 12: Black World and this broader African American discourse 
• September 11: The Literary Scholar as Journalist
• September 10: The Rise of Poet-Critics during the 1960s and 1970s 
• September 9: The missing online issues of Black World 
• September 8: Diaspora and Black World magazine
• September 7: Searching for Sarah Webster Fabio in Negro Digest and Black World
• September 6: Outstanding Special Issue on Black Poetry--Negro Digest (Sept. 1969)
• September 5: Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Helen Washington, and Black World 
• September 4: Exploring Black World--Then and Now 
• September 3: Google Books and Black World magazine 
• September 2: Discovering Black World magazine
• September 1: Blogging about Black World magazine

Related
A notebook on Black World magazine
The Black Arts Era

No comments: