“African American Poetry” as a Category: Critical Data Analysis of Poetry Anthologies in the 1920s and Alain Locke’s The New Negro

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, African Americans sought to bring into public attention their literary achievement in poetry. The publication of numerous anthologies and bibliographies that include the section dedicated to “Negro Poetry” reflects their efforts to take ownership in organizing the knowledge and legacy of African American poetry. While anthologies are often criticized for canonizing well-established writers and their selective works, this study proposes that African American poetry anthologies published in the 1920s worked to add diversities and dynamics to the formation of the African American poetry category, resisting its fixation and essentialization. This study adopts a critical data studies approach by visualizing data from major African American poetry anthologies of the 1920s as a network graph and particularly paying attention to the data that has low connections with other nodes. I investigate each editor’s reasoning behind their inclusion of specific poets and their poems that might have otherwise gone unrecognized even by many African Americans. Furthermore, although the network graph suggests that Alain Locke’s The New Negro recirculates a selective group of already established authors, this paper closely examines three poems included outside the poetry section of The New Negro. By analyzing how Locke employs different sections and the strategies of categorization, this paper argues that his editorial practice aligns with the efforts of other African American poetry anthology editors of the 1920s to conceptualize “African American poetry” as a category characterized by polyphony and open to critical reflection.