Books in Brief: The Geographies of African American Short Fiction by Kenton Rambsy

About the Book

Publication: 2022

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

A long-overdue history of short stories, place, and the significance of setting on racial representation

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?

I originally started working with novels and collecting data, but novels are long and time consuming. Also, as a genre, they get a lot of scholarly attention already. I turned to short stories because nearly every major Black novelist has written them, which allowed me to cover more ground, collect more data, and pay attention to a genre that circulates heavily but is not studied as much. I also wanted to think about the constructedness of literary history and use anthologies to build a systematic, evidence-based archive for examining which writers and stories circulate most often.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?

I was surprised by the way signature stories take hold over time. A writer might have several stories that appear in anthologies, but the data allowed me to see when a consensus began to form around particular stories and how those selections came to represent a writer.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?

The hardest decision was figuring out how to assemble the dataset because there are so many anthologies, and Black literary materials can sometimes be elusive and difficult to track down. I wanted the dataset to be as representative as possible, but I also knew I could not collect everything, so I had to think carefully about when to stop and be transparent about what I collected and why I included certain anthologies.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?

The project made me realize how scarce Black data is, especially Black literary data, and how important it is to curate datasets in machine-readable formats for analysis. It also taught me that collecting data is itself an involved form of scholarly labor: I spent a long time building the dataset before I could analyze it, and if that data had already existed, I could have spent much more time on interpretation.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?

Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason-Dixon Line influenced how I thought about geography and the importance of the South in African American literature. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was also important to me because, as a student, it helped shape how I understood the field, literary cohorts, and the writers who came to represent different periods of Black literary history.