2021: A Few Books I Read for Pleasure and Work

Below are a few books I read in 2021, with some very brief annotations. 

2021 was a year when I rediscovered my joy in reading genre fiction -- especially science fiction, mystery/detective fiction, and fantasy. The pleasure reading got me through some fairly dark and difficult stretches, especially the gloom and boredom of the 'Delta' and 'Omicron' waves... People who have known me for a long time will also see that there are some new ideas percolating with respect to research interests. Perhaps a future book project on extractive fiction & colonial modernity?

I also felt it would be helpful to list both pleasure reading and more serious literary fiction (i.e., books that I read with an eye towards the classroom -- or research). 

I think both are important! 

For pleasure (mostly)

Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone Trilogy and Grisha Trilogy. I watched some of the Netflix fantasy series based on book one of Shadow and Bone (though the Netflix actually combines that series with Bardugo's Grisha series set in the same world). I thought, "maybe I would enjoy the books more?" And in fact, I did. These are essentially young adult, but the Russian culture orientation and world-building is compelling and the characters and plot are pretty satisfying, especially in the Grisha series. That said, the Netflix series has richly multicultural casting that is a plus from my perspective.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora. The ship has been moving towards its goal for many years; as it approaches a hopefully habitable planet, things suddenly start to go wrong. More generally, though: Interstellar colonization? Let's not. Maybe -- just maybe -- we should just take care of the planet we have? This book has a lot of the familiar 'hard' science fiction angles of other later KSR novels, including a serious consideration of AI. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon. Very enjoyable hard sci fi + political thriller imagining a (fairly realistic) scenario where China takes the lead in colonizing the moon. Also has a serious engagement with the internal complexities of the actually existing Chinese political system, and what life might be like in a total surveillance state. Again, a thoughtful consideration of the role of AI, both as a tool of the state (i.e., data mining and surveillance), but also as a possible tool for resistance. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below. Earlier KSR, book two in the "Capital" trilogy. Has more of a political thriller feel, though also with a strong climate change message. Imagining what winter in DC would be like if the Gulf Stream suddenly stopped & temperatures dropped to -50 F. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain. An early KSR entry in the "Cli Fi" genre. Book one in the "Capital" trilogy. I liked this one less than Fifty Degrees Below -- seemed a little elementary from the point of view of characterization as well as the science. You can pretty much go straight to book two. 

Harlan Coben, The Boy From the Woods. I read a profile of Harlan Coben in the New York Times, and was intrigued. I zoomed through this twisty ebook thriller in a couple of days and found it pretty satisfying. 

Harlan Coben, The Stranger. Another very smart Coben story with some interesting formal invention (i.e., the stranger who approaches people, seemingly at random, and tells them secrets about the people in their lives).

Harlan Coben, The Woods. What happened at summer camp back in 1994? Lots of entertaining twists and turns in this murder mystery thriller. 

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice died in December & I realized I had never read this. So I read it as an ebook in mid-December. I hadn't realized there was so much homoeroticism in Anne Rice (interesting! juicy!), but I was distressed by the way enslaved people were treated throughout the book. 

Chris Colfer, Land of Stories Series and Tale of Magic. My daughter read all of these multiple times and loves them with a passion. At some point over the summer, I also read through the whole series. So enjoyable! Much better in terms of the lessons about difference and 'otherness' than Harry Potter, I think. We also listened to a lot of the series on audiobooks while on various road trips last year; Colfer, a former star on Glee, reads them himself as audiobooks with wonderful energy. (A very clever inventive writer who's also an accomplished actor -- makes for brilliant audiobooks!)

For work/teaching (mostly): 

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Paradise, Love, God Help the Child, A Mercy, Home. I taught a class on Zoom in the spring of 2021 on Toni Morrison! I ended up creating a lot of materials for the class & worked with a graduate research assistant over the summer to develop a Scalar site that expanded considerably on those lecture notes. I had read most of Morrison's novels before at various points, but never so close together. And they really hold up! Obviously, the later novels are not quite as compelling as the first five novels, though they are all interesting and rewarding. 

N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth trilogy. I had read The Fifth Season a couple of years ago, but never read the entire series until this year, when I assigned Jemisin in my "Postcolonial Ecocriticism" class. I had earlier been thinking a lot about Jemisin's interesting approach to racism in the book, but my students got me thinking about what Jemisin is doing with queerness & gender roles, as well as the disability / superpower theme in the book. 

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I had of course started reading this when it first came out in 2017, but only finished it this year (when I assigned it in my grad class). It's not without its flaws, but it's also a very rich, thoughtful book. Interesting of course for its exploration of a trans woman / Hijra's experience, but also for the way it approaches political violence in contemporary India. 

Indra Sinha, Animal's People. I had read this when it was first published back around 2006-7, but revisited it this year while teaching "Postcolonial Ecocriticism." Sinha's novel is considered a classic account of the 1984 chemical spill in Bhopal, India -- perhaps the most important work of "postcolonial ecofiction" from South Asia. And there's no doubt that Sinha's public advocacy on behalf of the victims of that disaster was important and valuable. That said, the misogyny in this 'picaresque' novel was a little hard for some of my students to swallow. I respect what Sinha is trying to do, but I'm not sure I will teach it again. 

bell hooks, Outlaw Culture, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West), Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (with Stuart Hall). bell hooks died in December, and I spent a couple of days revisiting some of her wonderful early essays; she was particularly smart and prescient on questions of race and representation in 1990s cinema I think. (Interesting to see that her criticisms of Spike Lee's Malcolm X back in 1992 are somewhat similar to her controversial critique of Beyonce's Lemonade from 2014!) I also read some of her later stuff for the first time, including the book of conversations with Cornel West, and the fascinating conversations she had with Stuart Hall (2018).  bell hooks was often surprisingly raw, but always honest and unfiltered. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future. Near-future climate fiction. Here Robinson is thinking about climate change with a truly global orientation. What will it be like in India? In east Asia? In Europe? I thought this was so thought-provoking, I ended up assigning it in my "Postcolonial Ecocriticism" class. Students did find it to be a tough read (at times a slog), but I thought the method was original and a step forward from earlier KSR novels like Fifty Degrees Below. 

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape our Futures. Really eye-opening accessible science-oriented nonfiction about mycology. Mushrooms are fascinating & much more important than most people think! Mushrooms could also solve a lot of our environmental problems if we decided to try and harness them.  

Jenny Offill, Weather. Minimalist climate fiction + upper middle class marriage drama + substance abuse plots. Beautifully done; read it in one sitting. 

Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind. I haven't taught this yet, but will. Another example of a text imagining a near-future apocalypse with a minimalist approach. It's not about the what and how of the end of the world, it's about how it affects the compelling characters Alam creates. Also read this very quickly (two sittings?). 

Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic. Highly entertaining. I liked this so much I assigned it in my "Postcolonial Ecocriticism" class. The students also dug it & several wrote fascinating papers on it, looking at the mushroom/mycology angle, the postcolonial/decolonial angle, and all of the rich intertextual stuff in the book. 

Helon Habila, Oil on Water. Nigerian petro-fiction! An aging journalist and a young Turk are sent on a mission to talk to a militant group that has abducted a white woman, the wife of an oil executive. Habila gives us a portrait of the impacts of the oil industry in the Niger Delta, on the the people who live there as well as the ecosystem.

Richard Powers, The Overstory. Amazing first half of this much-praised work of climate fiction. The magic of old growth forests! The second half, involving extra-legal radical environmentalism, was less compelling. 

Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby. The romantic lives of trans women in New York. I learned a lot about trans culture reading this. Well-constructed plot; sometimes a little too "first world problems"?

Ranjit Hoskote, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. I had a student doing an M.A. thesis on Hoskote and Evie Shockley's poems. I really enjoyed exploring Hoskote's historical consciousness, especially of the intricacy and hybridity of the Indian Ocean experience under British colonialism. 

Evie Shockley, The New Black and A Half-Red Sea. I have known Evie Shockley since grad school, but somehow (criminally) hadn't actually read a lot of her poetry in book form since then; I'm happy to have corrected that now! I found the historical consciousness of A Half-Red Sea particularly powerful & compelling. 

Comments for Modernist Editing Panel: 12/8/2021

Below are some comments on my digital editing projects that I prepared for a Modernist Editing panel sponsored by the University of Glasgow and NYIT.

What inspired your project and what would you like to change in or add to it in the future?

https://scalar.lehigh.edu/harlemwomen/index

https://scalar.lehigh.edu/mckay/index

I’ll start by mentioning two digital editing projects I’ve done in the early 20th-century literature space, Claude McKay’s Early Poetry and Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance, were both inspired by teaching investments – and my sense that there was a gap I could fill by creating a resource that would be useful for me and for my students. In addition to helping students access textual materials that had fallen out of print or were otherwise difficult to access, I wanted to offer them ways to navigate collections of poetry by Black authors around themes they could select and explore, whether it might be race and racism, war, Christianity, gender relations – and yes, even nature poetry. There are print editions of some of these works available, such as Maureen Honey’s Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, but the short selections from many of the poets included leave readers wanting more. 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ucvCcPLUF_ka4ciPsgjN75VXFk2fJj9A

My more recent project, a textual corpus of early African American literature, was designed not so much as an editing project but as a digital humanities project where the goal was to create a corpus that could be applied to quantitative analysis – distant reading of African American literature. In practice, I realized that curating and producing texts for the corpus required skills that overlapped with textual editing skills. But with more than one hundred full-length books in the corpus, the scale of the project is such that close editing of individual texts simply hasn’t been a possibility for me yet in terms of time. At present, I have simply aimed to produce the texts as minimalist plain text versions. 

As I’ve been doing this work, I’ve gotten interested in the editors who worked with Black writers, specifically Black editors like William Stanley Braithwaite, Alain Locke, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These editors helped to shape the course of Black literary expression in some important ways. Locke and Fauset, for example, were instrumental in the creation of the race-conscious aesthetic we now associate with the Harlem Renaissance. Braithwaite resisted race-consciousness – and modernism! – and often counseled writers he worked with to aspire to a more conservative, universal style. Braithwaite also worked with many white writers and could be considered a kind of bridge figure between white and Black poetry in the early 20th century. 

What questions have twentieth-century literary and cultural texts presented, and how have editors addressed them? 

One surprise with African American corpus project is the sheer heterogeneity of styles and genres the writers explored. In the early 20th century, there’s Black detective fiction, Black romance, Black travel, and adventure narratives, alongside serious literary fiction. Some of the writers appear to explore several genres at once – Pauline Hopkins and Oscar Micheaux are particularly quick to embrace different styles. 

The question for editors that comes out of that heterogeneity is whether and how this body of work might be seen as holding together. To some extent, this is a question we could ask with quantitative analysis and predictive algorithms (along the lines of Richard Jean So and Hoyt Long's recent essay in Cultural Analytics), but we could also think of this as a problem for human editors. If we’re going to expand the early 20th century African American Canon to include popular fiction by writers like Oscar Micheaux alongside traditional literary fiction (James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer), what story are we telling about the development of Black writing as a field?

How does an editor’s work shape the reading of a text? 

What do readers want to see in print and digital editions? 

One of my discoveries working with digital editing with an emphasis on pedagogy is that scholarly textual editing might be less of a driving concern than accessibility and context in the digital space. If there’s a poem in the voice of a mother whose African American son has been sent to fight in World War I, or a poem expressing outrage over the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917, part of my job as an editor is to offer annotations that offer some context. In my digital projects, I’ve also aimed to help readers find other poems that might relate to the one they’re reading, so they don’t see the individual poem as an orphan. 

With less well-known authors, the editor plays a key role in introducing the author to the reader and helping the reader navigate their work. The editor’s role can entail making a case for the value of that author in a way you don’t see if you’re editing an established author. 

How can we engage non-academic audiences with our editorial work and its implications?

I’ve already been getting a fair amount of non-academic engagement from readers. I know that pages from my Claude McKay project have been used in K-12 high schools in various parts of the country, and periodically I get emails from readers who are simply McKay fans rather than McKay scholars. With that community constituency in mind, it’s helpful to continue thinking of ways to make sites more accessible and navigable, especially on mobile devices. Much of what we might do to make our projects accessible and useful for students would also apply to non-academic users.

Toni Morrison: a Teaching and Learning Resource Collection

It's not quite done yet, but it nevertheless seems like a good time to announce a project I've been working on with the help of a graduate research assistant and an internal faculty research grant. 

Toni Morrison: a Teaching and Learning Resource Collection 

In brief, this is an open-access web resource that collects materials that might be helpful to people teaching or studying Toni Morrison's works. 

I had the idea for it when I was teaching a single-author course on Toni Morrison this past spring, and realized that there weren't convenient collections of archival materials related to Morrison's works online. The goal was not to produce new research on Morrison, but to collect materials in a convenient central location that might be accessed by others who might be doing such research. 

Two resources I particularly wanted this past spring were: 1) a collection of primary texts related to the story of Margaret Garner, the inspiration for Beloved, and 2) a collection of primary texts related to Jazz, particularly the photographs in The Harlem Book of the Dead that inspired the plot of the novel. 

Since it was hard to find these materials on the open internet, I assembled them myself as I prepared lectures for my class. Those collections of materials, and much more, are now part of the larger site. 

We also have a number of other features on the site, including overviews of Morrison's fiction (mostly complete), overviews of Morrison's nonfiction and drama (in progress), Reception Histories for Morrison's novels (in progress), annotated critical overviews of literary criticism related to Morrison's works (in progress), and a detailed biographical note. 

You can find all of these in the menus on the site itself, but for convenience, here are the key features for the site under development: 

Overviews of Toni Morrison's Fiction

Overviews of Morrison's Nonfiction and Drama

Reception Histories for Morrison's Fiction

Annotated Critical Overviews

Biographical Note

Maps and Data

I am responsible for most of the material on the site, though a substantial chunk of material was authored by my graduate research assistant over the summer, Daniel Rosler. In particular, Daniel is responsible for the bulk of the reception histories and the annotated critical overviews (all pages authored by Daniel should be marked as such). The reception histories Daniel put together have some fascinating details (admittedly, as of this writing, we have yet to put in an account of Stanley Crouch's infamous response to Beloved...maybe we don't need to bother); see for instance the account of Sara Blackburn's review of Sula, where the reviewer says, "Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life." (Wow. Ok.)

The "Maps and Data" section in particular is in an early stage of development, though for now I have produced a table with some basic data about Morrison's eleven published works of fiction for adults. It's often been said that Morrison's later novels were shorter and simpler than the novels up to and including Paradise, and my data supports that. Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child were all among Morrison's shortest works, and they also contained fewer 'unique word forms' than many of Morrison's earlier novels. 

If others have materials they use when they teach Morrison they would be willing to share publicly on this site, I would be eager to hear from you. (All materials shared would include full attribution. You would also retain copyright.)

Fall 2021 Teaching: "Postcolonial Ecocriticism"

[This is a new graduate-level course I'm trying this fall.] 

It's no secret that nations in the Global South are on the front lines of climate change, especially with respect to access to food and clean water, exposure to dangerous storms and flooding, and the threat of associated civil unrest. Inequities between rich and poor countries are likely to exacerbate climate change harms in ways that are only just beginning to be understood. To begin with, millions, if not billions of people are in the Global South live in low-lying areas that are likely to face the brunt of rising waters and may be displaced. Millions are also in regions facing an increased likelihood of catastrophic droughts, heat waves, and tropical cyclones. And yet, powerful countries, even those that have joined the Paris Climate Accord, have been extremely slow to take action: is apathy towards climate change an example of ‘first world’ privilege? What are the historical conditions that led us to this point? And what might be some viable solutions to the current impasse? How to persuade people who are invested in not recognizing the threat? The humanities -- and works of literature in particular -- might play an important role in doing the cultural work of communicating the urgency of the problem, imagining alternative futures, and, perhaps, changing minds to galvanize the social resolve to effect change and move towards global environmental justice.

These topics are being discussed by a growing range of critics, some described as postcolonial critics and theorists, others primarily associated with ecocriticism, including Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement), Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rob Nixon (Slow Violence), Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others.

We’ll read a selection of their work to get oriented and develop a conceptual toolkit as well as a working vocabulary, including familiarity with the following terms: Colonialism, Imperialism, Postcolonial (as historical period and as method), Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism, Ecofiction, Climate Fiction, Anthropocene, Greenwashing, Petrofiction, and others. This course is designed to serve as an introduction to key concepts and terms in both Postcolonial Theory and Ecocriticism, as well as the prospects for bringing these two fields together to develop a global and inclusive way of thinking about environmental justice. We’ll start by posing the two fields separately and attempt to get a sense of foundational concepts as well as the various ways each field might be seen as a little slippery and porous. 

Alongside these critical and theoretical interventions, we'll explore a range of works of fiction by writer-activists like Arundhati Roy, Helon Habila, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Indra Sinha. In addition, we’ll discuss texts that might not neatly fit either the ‘postcolonial’ or the ‘ecocritical’ category, including Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. 

I’ve divided the course into four units, with two novels per unit:

●     Petrofiction: two visions of the extractive economy in Nigeria

●     Indigenous Americas/Decolonial Alternatives

●     Political Violence and Embodied Resistance in India

●     Speculative Ecofictions

We’ll start the “Petrofiction” unit with a novel not usually understood as such, E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). This is a novel set entirely in England, and usually understood as a turn-of-the-century (fin de siècle) text, or a text of early modernism. But it is worth a closer look, both for its critique of industrial capitalism in England, and for the ways it gestures towards the extractive economics of British colonialism in Nigeria.

Forster’s account of a ‘garden’ England also links back to the Romantic origins of much modern western environmental thinking, and as such seems like a good place to start our work. Against Forster, we’ll look at a recent novel by the Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, Oil on Water (2010), in which a pair of journalists travel into the oilfields in central Nigeria to try and locate a kidnapped white woman who is being held by anti-government militants. While in this unit we’ll also take some time to discuss the legendary Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, in a chapter from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence.

The “Indigenous Americas/Decolonial Alternatives” unit contains two somewhat unlikely texts, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020). Morrison’s book looks back at the early days of the English presence in North America, a moment when the distinctive American race formation (founded on slavery and anti-Black racism) was still emergent. In this novel, Morrison is very interested in how early English settlers perceived the climate and spaces of North America, as well as in how indigenous people understood what was happening as their territory and way of life was being displaced. Moreno-Garcia’s novel is a page-turner clearly influenced by the Anglo-American Gothic tradition, but it has some interesting ecological elements (fungi play a role…) as well as an engagement with legacies of settler colonialism and northern (American) economic dominance. In connection with Mexican Gothic, we’ll take a little detour into ‘harder’ science, with two chapters from a recent book on fungi by Merlin Sheldrake called Entangled Life. Finally, for this unit, we’ll introduce the concept of the “decolonial alternative” as theorized by Walter Mignolo -- a way of thinking about settler colonialism in North America that takes elements from postcolonial theory but also reworks some concepts to make them more directly relevant to thinking about indigenous forms of resistance.

The third unit, “Political Violence and Embodied Resistance in India,” will involve two novels, one a classic of postcolonial ecofiction (Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People), while the other, Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness, might fit this concept a little more approximately.

Sinha’s novel deals with the aftermath of the horrific Union Carbide chemical disasterin Bhopal, India, which took place in 1984. Between 4000 and 8000 people were killed in the initial release of a poisonous gas at an American-owned chemical plant, but more than half a million people were exposed to toxic levels of the chemicals at the plant, with severe disabling effects. What might justice look like for the survivors of that disaster, in light of the power multinational corporations hold over global political alignments, and in light of the general weakness and corruption of the Indian state? Roy’s 2017 novel was her first work of fiction in almost twenty years. It deals with a broad swath of Indian political history over the past two decades, a time where the author herself has become a bold and prolific critic of both rich western countries (especially with respect to the prosecution of the “War on Terror”) and her own government (where she has become especially well-known for her involvement in resistance to government policies that lead to the displacement of poor and indigenous communities). This novel is also notable as being the first major Indian novel that I know of with a transgender protagonist; South Asia has its own culturally specific trans communities, which we will also learn a little about via critical readings. Finally, we’ll look at some of Roy’s ecological polemics as well as Rob Nixon’s chapter on Roy’s emergent status as an influential “Writer-Activist” through both her fiction writing and her nonfiction essays.

The final unit, on “Speculative Ecofictions,” will feature two books that might or might not really belong in this course. N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015), the first in her hugely influential “Broken Earth” trilogy, imagines a world on the brink of a catastrophic environmental event. The event appears to be cyclical (hence the title), and an artifact by a powerful wizard (referred to as an “orogene” in the novel). The novel brings together ideas common to fantasy fiction (i.e., humans endowed with special powers), ecofiction (the idea of the natural world as a living and dynamic field), and critical race & disability studies (how do we treat those who are different?). This novel represented a breakthrough for a work of science fiction written by a Black woman, winning the Hugo Prize in 2016.

I'd also like to look at least part of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel Ministry for the Future (2020). Robinson is an established science fiction writer with an impressive track record of writing climate-related science fiction. This book begins with the author imagining a catastrophic heat event in north-central India and gives prominence to the perspective of inhabitants of poor countries in a near-future set of climate events (he even uses the word “postcolonial” within the novel to describe their point of view!). I particularly wanted to consider this novel because, alongside the apocalyptic theme, there are also many moments where the author suggests possible solutions and responses the world might take, both at the level of large-scale state and international institutions, and on a more autonomous, decentralized level. 

So yes, we’ll end with what I think will be two speculative works that are both very aware of imminent catastrophic changes but also contain a modicum of hope. (And hope turns out to be very important for all of us: too many people sometimes fall into paralysis linked to the prevalence of climate pessimism. If we can’t do anything to stop it, why bother?) 

A Response to Frank Gunter's "Myths About Poverty"

Professor Frank Gunter’s YouTube video, which was originally posted on the Lehigh College of Business’ official YouTube channel, has generated considerable debate, especially among Lehigh’s student body. (Get the full background, including a sampling of reactions, by reading this Brown and White story)

Responding to the controversy, Prof. Gunter says, “Attack my data, attack my analysis, but attack me? You don’t know me.” Fair enough: my goal here will be to challenge Prof. Gunter’s data and analysis. Admittedly, I am not an economist; I teach in the English Department. But I believe the real problem with Professor Gunter’s slides is a matter of how he frames his arguments and the language he uses, not necessarily the data itself. Let’s look at each of his three main points in turn.

1. “Poverty is Not a Matter of Race”

Let’s start with Gunter’s first Myth, “Poverty is Not a Matter of Race.” Prof. Gunter appears to be deriving his data here from a U.S. Census study, which has statistics for 2019 that closely align with the three data points given in the slide above.

Just for reference, here is a more detailed summary of Prof. Gunter’s main arguments from the Brown & White:

“Are (Black people) disproportionately represented? Absolutely, but what if we looked at the 2019 data and the numbers were reversed? What if we found that 80 percent of Blacks were below the poverty line and three-fourths of the poor in America were African American,” Gunter asked. “What would be the policy implication? If that was what the data found, I would say we have a severe racial problem in this country that is as bad as it was during Jim Crow in the 1930s and 1940s, but what conclusions can be made with the information we have, that 18.8 percent of Blacks are poor and 24 percent of the poor are Black? There is probably a racial element there, but race can’t be the whole answer because the majority of the poor are white.” (link)

Gunter’s citation of these statistics is highly selective. Most problematically, he neglects to mention the relative size of the Black population against the total U.S. population. “Blacks make up 24% of [the] poor” in the U.S., yes -- but given that they make up about 12% of the total population that is quite clearly not the whole story. This is actually a pretty elementary statistical mistake, and frankly, I’m a bit surprised someone with my colleague’s credentials and experience would make it.

Moreover, the very same U.S. census study that is the source of these claims also clearly points to a continued correlation between race and economic status. Take a look at this chart:

(source)

As of 2019, 18.8% of Black Americans and 15.7% of Hispanics lived in poverty. Meanwhile, 7.3% of Asians and Whites were in poverty. There is clearly a correlation between race and economic status; Professor Gunter’s slide title, “Poverty is Not a Matter of Race,” is simply not supportable.

All of that said, the general trend line -- again, as of 2019 -- appears to be a good one. The poverty rate for Black Americans is down from 40% in 1965, around when the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were put into law, and down from 87% in 1940.

If we want to discuss how and why that improvement happened -- and how we can continue to reduce the correlation between race and poverty, as well as poverty rates overall -- that might be a productive conversation to have. In the meanwhile, it remains true that there is a correlation between race and economic status, so Gunter’s statement that “Poverty is Not a Matter of Race” is not accurate.

(Incidentally, careful readers might note that this data runs through 2019; 2020 was, needless to say, an epic disaster of a year, including for the economy. It's very possible that poverty numbers and trendlines will all look very different when we start to see the full data from last year.)

2. “Poverty is Not a Generational Trap”

Here is Prof. Gunter’s second major point: “Poverty is Not a Generational Trap.”

I am not going to nitpick this data, though again Prof. Gunter’s use of statistics seems selective. (I am also unclear exactly where he is deriving this data from, though just Googling some of these numbers leads to this story from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which in turn derives its data from a study done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. I have not at this point looked closely at the study's methods or underlying data. It might be interesting to do so.)

First, generational poverty is a well-established phenomenon that has been widely studied by social scientists: a good place to start might be this study by the National Center for Children in Poverty; that study shows a strong correlation between poverty experienced in childhood and the likelihood of experiencing poverty as an adult. The correlations between race and generational poverty have also been widely studied and discussed in more formal academic studies; a good place to start might be this study by Chetty et al. (2018). Indeed, this study (shared on Twitter by Prof. Dominic Packer) suggests that if anything Black Americans remain highly likely to fall down the economic ladder, rather than rise up.

Incidentally, one of the studies I linked to above was unpacked and explained in detail by the New York Times here. The Times produces some nifty visualizations and animations to drive home the point; here is one I particularly like, because of 1) how it shows how poverty is passed down generationally, specifically for Black men, and 2) how it introduces another variable we haven't been talking about, namely gender: 

(source) 

Note that the chart on the right above does not show that Black women and white women have earning parity; rather, it suggests that white women with poor parents and Black women with poor parents are likely to reach the same outcomes. Whereas Black boys and white boys have a huge gap. 

Would anyone say that it’s impossible to move out of poverty across generations? No -- but that would be what we English teachers call a “straw man” argument. A more salient question might be: if we accept the vast array of data that shows that intergenerational poverty is real -- and that race is an important part of that story -- what are effective strategies for combating it? Are there other countries that have done this better?

It's probably also worth mentioning at this point that the focus on the poverty line obscures other ways in which economic status and race are passed down generationally. If we look at generational wealth transfer, the gap between white and Black is pretty stark. The Brookings Institute has, for instance, this stunning chart showing median net worth by race. While the poverty rate numbers mentioned above appear to show improvement, this data shows little to no improvement at all; if anything, it shows a growing wealth gap.  

(source)

3. “Three Choices Critical to Avoiding Poverty”

Here, Prof. Gunter tells us explicitly where he’s getting his data from -- a Brookings Institute study (Haskins and Sawhill, Creating an Opportunity Society [2009]). 

Again, I’m grateful to Prof. Packer for pointing us to a helpful Vox.com account of this study and the way it’s been misleadingly cited by conservative economists. I won’t go deep into the numbers, but framing these three behavioral “norms” as choices is misleading. Whether or not you graduate from high school has a lot to do with the kind of school district you are in; whether or not you can work full time depends a lot on underlying economic conditions (and more and more Americans find themselves as gig workers or ‘independent contractors’ who are denied full-time status); and when people have children is, again, often not always entirely under their control.

At the end of the story above, Dylan Matthews writes:

The truth is that low high school graduation rates in poor black communities are in part a legacy of systemic racism. Joblessness in poor black communities is in part a legacy of systemic racism. Single parenthood and family instability in poor black communities is in part a legacy of systemic racism. To say this isn't to reject the idea of free will. It's to acknowledge that if you're actually serious about solving these problems rather than waving them away, you need to tackle structural causes. Reasonable people can disagree about how best to deal with those causes, but just running around telling people to work hard and get married isn't a serious proposal. (link)

 

Overall Takeaways:

I believe Professor Gunter’s YouTube video uses data misleadingly, though the real source of the visceral reaction many students have had to his arguments probably comes from his language and rhetoric. 

If his first slide had said “U.S. Census Data Suggests Poverty Rates are Declining for Black Americans,” instead of “Poverty is Not a Matter of Race,” frankly, I doubt we would even be talking about this. So the first takeaway is: how you frame arguments and the language you use matters. 

Second, for all of the topics covered, both Prof. Gunter’s comments and my reactions to them should probably be seen as the beginning of a conversation, not the definitive endpoint. I would encourage both students and faculty at Lehigh to continue to have those conversations with one another -- respectfully. 

More broadly, Professor Gunter’s entire presentation aims to suggest that government policies and systemic actions are less important than individual choice. Most historical evidence would say the opposite: the reason poverty rates in the Black community have gone down has much more to do with changes in American law and public policy than changes in personal behavior: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Affirmative Action, and so on. If we accept that, it might be easier to see that fixing the problems we still have will surely again demand concerted institutional efforts; we cannot simply turn it over to the “free market” (the real Myth that needs Debunking, if ever there was one). In this YouTube video, Professor Gunter’s approach seems to suggest that the problem isn’t serious, and whatever problems we do have are not “our” concern; people affected by poverty should just fix themselves. As educators -- and as colleagues -- I think we can and must give better answers.

Spring 2021 Teaching: Toni Morrison -- the Art of Storytelling

Brief Introduction:

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the Nobel-prize winning author of eleven novels and several important works of literary criticism. This course will be a deep dive into her life and career, starting with her earliest novel (The Bluest Eye) and continuing through her later career. We'll study the evolution of Morrison's style and thematic interests, and consider whether Morrison's explorations of American history constitute a unified method. We'll also consider the impacts of Morrison beyond the world of English departments, considering theatrical and filmic adaptations of some of her key works. What is Morrison's status in African-American literature, in American literature, and World literature? How did Morrison expand the market for fiction by African-American women? Likely texts include: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, A Mercy, and God Bless the Child. 


In a Little More Depth:

It’s considered a bit old-fashioned these days to do a whole seminar on a single author; it would be more common to teach a course called something like “Fiction by African American Women,” and include Morrison as well as peers like Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Octavia Butler, as well as notable predecessors like Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Frances Harper, and Pauline Hopkins. Another version could be a more general contemporary “African American Fiction” course. Think: a combination of the above-named writers along with male writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ishmael Reed, and so on.

Those other courses that I just described are necessary and valuable, though unfortunately with the staffing in the current Lehigh English department there are not many folks who are likely to teach them. Morrison wrote in dialogue with a broader Black tradition in American literature, and indeed, in dialogue with white writers as well (her Master’s thesis at Cornell was on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner -- and we can see traces and ideas from both of those important modernist figures in her works). If any of you want to get started reading other contemporary Black authors on your own (perhaps over the summer), please let me know and I can give you a reading list as a starting point.

That said, there’s also something special that can happen when you do a deep dive with a single author. For one thing, you can trace the evolution of a voice and a literary sensibility. As a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as nearly every other major literature prize, Toni Morrison is easily the most celebrated Black author of the past 50 years. Her books straddle the divide between popular fiction--her most successful books have sold millions of copies--and serious literary fiction; she is a household name. But what makes her so special? How did her interests and technique evolve over the course of a long and storied career that included eleven novels (of which we’ll read seven), two published plays (one of which we’ll read one), several books for children she co-authored with her son Slade (sadly not on our syllabus), and an impressive amount of literary and cultural criticism (some of which we’ll read)?

Morrison first novel, The Bluest Eye, is a powerful coming of age story -- it’s really centered around three girls growing up in Ohio roughly contemporaneous with when Toni Morrison herself grew up there (in the early 1940s). This a novel that is often ferocious in its anger at what racism does to young Black girls, especially dark-skinned girls; it is painful to read and sometimes narratively challenging, owing to its unconventional structure (we really see the influence of writers like James Joyce on Morrison here). The Bluest Eye was rejected by many publishers, and even once it was published, it wasn’t especially well-received at the time (Morrison has written that “the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread”). I should underline that this first novel of Morrison’s, which we’ll start discussing today, goes to some very dark psychological places. That said, they aren’t all going to be like this: starting around the time she published Beloved, Morrison starts to inject more emphasis on hope and possibilities for the future of her characters even as she continues to grapple with heavy topics.

(And I should also add that even with the heavy stuff, there’s humor and laughter in all of Toni Morrison’s works. Also engagements with popular culture -- music, the movies, current events. Even the stories that are tragic have upbeat moments. And I think one of the key lessons of Morrison's writing is that even people who have dealt with horrific challenges in their lives continue to try and find laughter, continue to feel hope, and continue to have desire -- including sexual desire.)

What really made Morrison rise to a different level as an author is a set of four novels she published in the middle of her career -- Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Together, these four books earned her her highest and most consistently positive reviews. They were bestsellers, often helped by Oprah Winfrey’s book club (which was an undeniable force in American publishing in the 1980s and 90s -- and actually continues to be one even today). These books had a massive cultural impact.

Morrison’s writing reflects a level of craftsmanship, literary invention, and sophistication that’s effectively unique in modern American literature. As a result of that success, Morrison transcended what might have been a marginal status and a limited readership -- i.e., the world of “Black women’s fiction” (the “Black Authors” section of the bookshelf) -- and became what we call a Canonical figure: someone who is widely and regularly assigned in general American literature classes as well as more specialized classes.

Morrison has managed to do this while also insisting on writing primarily about Black people and with a sense that Black readers are her primary intended audience. There’s a great quote she gave in an interview once that speaks to this:

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girt in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but l am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good—and universal —because it is specifically about a particular world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective, there are only black people. When I say "people," that's what I mean. (New Republic, 1981. Link to original)

I especially like this quote because of the unassuming way she marks her space within the culture. I don’t think too many of us today read this and find it controversial, but when she said it (in 1981), it was not at all a commonplace thing to say. Writers who focused exclusively on Black culture (and who saw themselves as addressing primarily Black audiences) were frequently marked as “Afro-centric.” White readers (and other non-Black readers) often steered clear of this material, thinking it wasn’t for them. But that’s not how Morrison is framing it, and I think it’s important that non-Black readers engage with her work & learn to hear her voice. Even if she is not necessarily thinking of us as her first intended audience.

Content and Language Warning. One thing I should say right off the bat is that the topics covered by these novels frequently involves direct and frank experiences of racism and misogyny. There are characters who are referred to by others using the “n-word” in these books -- not to mention countless other instances of hurtful language. I will not use that word aloud in this class, but it will definitely be in the readings. In my view, we cannot hide from the racism that impacts the characters in these novels: it is an important part of American history, and it is central to Morrison’s voice and vision as a novelist. If directly engaging with representations of racism in stories centered around a Black feminist perspective makes you uncomfortable, you might wish to consider another class.

Another content warning -- Morrison’s novels also depict sexual violence, including in rare instances the rape of children. It is never gratuitous and it is always integral to the story she’s trying to tell. I will try to approach these topics carefully. However, if you find reading about or discussing these topics too difficult, you might wish to consider taking another course. 

* * *

Though I’ve been teaching at Lehigh for a long time, this is the first time I’m teaching this class, so there are likely to be some bumps on the road; please bear with me if so. I see the teaching of literature at an advanced level as a space where we can open up the voices of authors and make texts accessible to students -- who will ultimately interpret those works for themselves. It’s not my job to dictate an interpretation or to be the final Authority. Rather, I am approaching these novels with humility and as a learner myself. With each text, my goal will be to elucidate some key historical and cultural references you may not have encountered before, but then to step back and invite you all to offer your thoughts and interpretations of the texts.

Thoughts on Brownness Studies (for MLA 2021)

Below is the text of my talk for MLA 2021: "Critical Brownness Studies."

Here are three book titles we could put on the table: 

Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk (2000), 

E.J.R. David’s Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino/American Psychology  (2013), and Hamid Dabashi’s Brown Skin, White Masks (2011). 

What do the titles of these very different books have in common? All three transpose “Black” to “Brown” in really recognizable ways. The transformation is legible within a frame of reference where the “Black” text is visible as an antecedent and as a standard -- The Souls of Black Folk; Black Skin, White Masks. Here “Brown” thinking is dependent on and probably could be described as appropriating Black thought. Importantly, while all three authors of these texts could be described as “Brown” (an Indian, a Filipino, and an Iranian, respectively), none of the three authors of these texts is self-conscious about the borrowing or their rhetorical dependence on Du Bois or Fanon.  (Vijay Prashad, to his credit, is highly aware of the ways in which model minority discourse as applied to South Asian Americans is built on anti-Blackness. And yet, theorizations of Brownness are likely to be dependent on analytical frameworks for Blackness created by folks like Du Bois, Fanon, or more recent theorists like Christina Sharpe or Saidiya Hartman. How far would we get in theorizing Brownness without double consciousness? Without Fanonian thinking about the entanglement of race, gender, and desire?

So when Ren Ellis Neyra wrote this past October that “‘Brownness” distorts extraction into relation” in their essay for SX Salon, “the question of ethics in the semiotics of brownness,” I think I understand what they are saying, even if I am not entirely sure I agree. 

A Few Things from 2020: Teaching Notes, Digital Projects; "Survival is Insufficient"

Obviously, a wild year. 

The main thing I am really proud of this year is actually parenting. My work as a professor -- teaching, advising, administering the English graduate program, doing digital projects -- all continued by remote, more or less, but for much of the year that work took a back seat as the urgency of the need at home presented itself. 

With respect to work, everyone reading this knows how difficult it was to get new writing and research done this year -- with libraries closed, conferences canceled, kids at home, and of course the generalized state of anxiety and distraction.

Somehow during the summer, I began to find ways to get a few things done here and there. Preparing for a new version of a graduate Digital Humanities course, I worked on two textual corpora. That work has also catalyzed some new projects that I'm excited about (and you'll probably hear more about them in the future). 

While my usual conference travel dried up after February, I was happy to attend MLA in Seattle in January. One blog post that came out of that was this account of some panels on Postcolonial Ecocriticism I was able to attend. Another theme for the year was a series of events related to Graduate Studies and the future of the Humanities. I was on a workshop related to that topic at MLA in Seattle, then another panel on that topic for the (virtual) National Humanities Alliance conference in October. And I'll be doing another workshop on that as a pre-conference event for the virtual MLA in January 2021. 

I also did some Zoom keynotes and virtual talks this fall -- not quite the same as regular talks, but not bad. 

#MyNameIs as a Return to Identity Work: #Hashtag Activism in 2020

[I've been compiling a small collection of Tweets using the #MyNameIs hashtag. The following are some preliminary reflections on what I've been finding along the way.]

What does it mean to be "Brown" in 2020? By and large, it seems to mean: putting the question on hold. The Trump administration has been an extremely difficult time for thinking about new and emergent identities, for doing what we might call "identity work": the work of defining emergent communities, finding language, and earning recognition in public life.

For many, the Trump years have been a period of frustration and retrenchment, where the President’s ever-multiplying race-related outrages and insults have left us very little space to think and reflect with any degree of nuance about our relationship to identity. Why does it matter what “Brown” might mean when there’s a pandemic that’s disproportionately affecting Black and Latinx Americans; when there are children in cages; when the President is trying to build a wall on the southern border; when there’s Charlottesville; when he says “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”; when there’s George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many others; when there’s a Muslim immigration ban that’s been upheld by the Supreme Court; when African countries and nations like Haiti are referred to as “Shithole” countries -- and on and on and on? Identity does not feel that important when all of this is going on: what matters is resistance. In times of crisis, allyship comes easily; we can think about terminology and concepts later.

But sometime soon, it may be possible to make some headway with this conversation again. I see the recent hashtag #MyNameIs, which emerged on Twitter about ten days ago, as a fresh start in a long-running series of conversations about emergent Brown identity. As the young folks say, “it gives me life.” We have more work to do here, and I think many of us are ready to start doing that work again.  

#MyNameIs Compilation; Twitter Developers API for dummies

I applied to get "Developer" privileges to be able to access the Twitter API, after realizing that Twitter does not allow public scraping using simple Python scripts. The API does allow this sort of thing, though it's fairly involved and difficult to do.

The main goal of course is to set up a structure for the students in my Digital Humanities class -- to help them gather data related to hashtags they themselves might want to research. We'll see if that's actually possible -- and assess their interest in stuff like this -- when we start a unit on social media next week. 

Announcing: a Digital Edition of the Poems of Henry Derozio

I've been happy to collaborate with Professor Manu Samriti Chander on a digital edition of the poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the first Indian poet to write in English. 

It is essentially finished, though some additional copy-editing and proofreading probably remains to be done (if you see any typos or other errors, please contact me!). I edited it and built the collection, so any glitches you find are my doing. It's completely appropriate that Manu wrote the Preface to the project, for reasons I'll explain. 

Derozio published two books of poems in 1827 and 1828, and had an intense, impactful, but brief career as a professor at Hindu College in Calcutta. He died of cholera in 1831. 

I learned about Derozio through reading Chander's Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Among other things, Chander's account of Derozio convinced me of his importance both as a Romantic poet -- and Derozio was intensely interested in and engaged with the writings of British and Irish poets of the 1810s and 20s -- and as a key figure in the emergence of modern Anglophone South Asian literature.

Derozio was criticized by English reviewers even during his life of "imitating" English Romantic poets. And while there is no doubt that he did borrow heavily from the form and style of writers like Byron, Thomas Moore, and others, he also applied his own, distinctly Indian sensibility in his writing. As Chander puts it in his preface to the Digital Edition:

Far from simply following in the footsteps of such popular figures as Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, and Thomas Moore, Derozio uses their work often as a point of departure or as a signpost on his own poetic journey. Indeed, Derozio inaugurated his own tradition in India, inspiring his students to form the Young Bengal Movement. These liberal thinkers and activists were sometimes referred to as “Derozians,” and they carried their teacher’s ideas forward even after his death in 1831. (link)

For more on Derozio's relationship to Romanticism, I would recommend readers to Chander's book, or the books and essays of Professor Rosinka Chaudhuri, who has also edited the Oxford University Press scholarly edition of Derozio's works. 

This digital edition is not meant to supplant Chaudhuri's volume, but rather to provide a convenient point of access to Derozio's works for a broad readership. Among other things, I hope people teaching literature courses -- including specialist courses on Romantic poetry, but also literature surveys, courses on South Asian literature, and others -- will consider assigning Derozio. To faciliate that, I've put together a "Teaching Resource" page on the Scalar site, along with a downloadable PDF with some suggested selections from Derozio's poetry (this might make for a lively one-day unit on Derozio). 

Fall Teaching: "Decolonizing (Digital) Humanities"

[Updated January 2022] 

I'm teaching a grad seminar on Digital Humanities this fall. I'm structuring most of the hands-on work around two Text Corpora I've been developing, one on African American Literature, and the other on Colonial South Asian Literature. 

If the Canon has been the defining structure of traditional literary studies, in the DH framework the starting point is the Corpus. You can do a lot with a group of texts structured this way -- from Text Analysis, to Natural Language Processing, to thinking about Archives and Editions. As with the Canon, the questions you can ask and the knowledge you can produce are strongly determined by what's included or excluded from the Corpus. 

Course Description (short version): 

This course introduces students to the emerging field of digital humanities scholarship with an emphasis on social justice-oriented projects and practices. The course will begin with a pair of foundational units that aim to define digital humanities as a field, and also to frame what’s at stake. What are the Humanities and why do they matter in the 21st century? How might the advent of digital humanities methods impact how we read and interpret literary texts? Some topics we’ll consider include: Quantifying the Canon, Race, Empire & Gender in Digital Archives, and an introduction to Corpus Text Analysis. Along the way, we’ll explore specific Digital Humanities projects that exemplify those areas, and play and learn with digital tools and do some basic coding. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to collaborative, student-driven projects. No programming or web development experience is necessary, but a willingness to experiment and ‘break things’ is essential to the learning process envisioned in this course.

Text Corpus: Colonial South Asian Literature

Recently, I announced a Text Corpus I had put together, of African American Literature from 1853-1923. 

I've also been putting together a Corpus of Colonial South Asian Literature from roughly the same period.  

The link to that folder can be accessed here. I'll also be posting the files on Github soon.

This has been a much harder Corpus to compose. Whereas with the African American literature we have bibliographic lists of published works to serve as a guide (such as the one posted at the History of Black Writing at Kansas), there does not appear to be an equivalent list with respect to Colonial South Asia. 

Choices Made in Producing this Corpus:

1. Nationalities

I decided to include British as well as South Asian writers in the Corpus. Many of the writers were clearly in dialogue with one another; South Asian writers were clearly reading people like Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mayo. It's a little less clear which South Asian writers British and American writers were reading other than Tagore (and this itself might be studied). The publishing industries also overlapped to a considerable extent; while some South Asian writers published their works with publishers based in India, many aimed to publish with houses based in London. 

One possible line of inquiry with this material might be to try and compare fiction, poetry and drama by British authors with South Asian output in English. Such inquiry could either be historical and thematic (i.e., comparing the way British and South Asian writers reacted to historical events like the Sepoy Mutiny or the Famine of 1876), or it could be connected to matters of language and style. To do that it makes sense to have writers from different backgrounds represented in the Corpus. 

I knew there was a fair amount of interest in colonial India in the U.S. at the time -- from the appreciation of Kipling to the American feminist fascination with Pandita Ramabai. However, while doing this research I was surprised to come across a large number of Pulpy Indian adventure novels by an American writer named Talbot Mundy.  

In the metadata file, I list the nationalities of the authors. Besides a few Americans in the collection, I would draw readers' attention to B.M. Croker (an Irish woman who lived in India and wrote many Romance novels based in colonial India), and Sara Jeannette Duncan (a Canadian woman who also lived in India and wrote prolifically as well).  

In addition to the nationality question, with South Asian writers who moved abroad there is also the question of destination. Cornelia Sorabji (who eventually moved to England) is of course pretty well known. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, who moved to the U.S. in the 1910s, is mainly known for his memoir Caste and Outcast, but he was quite a prolific literary writer, with several books of poetry and fiction that are worth looking at. 

2. Translations. 

I decided to include translations by South Asian writers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay) and Rabindranath Tagore in the Corpus. Tagore of course needs no explanation; he was one of the few South Asian writers to break through and achieve global acclaim in the early 20th century. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (here, I'm using one of the spellings used at the time, aware of course that "Chatterjee" and "Chatterji" are colonial-era abbreviations of Chattopadhyay...) is slightly different. He is clearly historically important for Anandamath (here included in translation as Dawn Over India) and Rajmohan's Wife (thought to be the first English-language novel by an Indian author), but it seemed like it might be valuable to include some other of his Bengali novels in translation here. Several of these I found at Wikisource.

Alongside translations by South Asian writers, there are a few translations in the corpus of historical South Asians texts by British writers. 

3. Fiction and Nonfiction

Right now there is a limited amount of nonfiction included in the corpus. This was a very tough decision, as there is a vast array of nonfiction colonial travel writing based in South Asia from this period. I've excluded that sort of writing for now, though I may include more of it as I continue to expand the corpus. 

However, I decided to include some nonfiction, mostly texts by literary authors who wrote occasional works of nonfiction (Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Caste and Outcaste is included, as is Tagore's My Reminiscences). I've also included a plain text file of Pandita Ramabai's The High-Caste Hindu Woman, mainly because it seems like an important text that might be useful for researchers in this field. Any queries specifically structured around the stylistics of fiction or the colonial novel might want to exclude these nonfiction texts. 

4. Derivation; grunt work

As with my other Corpus, I pulled together materials from different repositories to assemble this corpus. Here, the lion's share of material comes from Project Gutenberg and HathiTrust. (Derivation is indicated in my metadata file.) 

The Gutenberg materials were in good shape; they've generally been proofread and formatted cleanly.

The HathiTrust materials required much more work. One can extract HathiTrust texts by requesting plain text, but these OCR page scans need quite a bit of processing to make them clean enough to use. A lot of the grunt work of assembling this collection has entailed doing that processing. 

Here is a list of works I've imported from HathiTrust page scans thus far: 

Arnold, W.D.	Oakfield; Or, Fellowship in the East	1855
Bain, F.W.	A Hindoo Love Story	1898
Candler, Edmund	Abdication	1922
Candler, Edmund	Siri Ram, Revolutionist	1911
Candler, Edmund	Mantle of the East	1910
Candler, Edmund	Year of Chivalry	1916
Chatterji, Bankim Chandra	Anandamath: Dawn Over India	1882 (1941)
Chatterji, Bankim Chandra	Krishnakanta's Will	1917
Croker, B.M.	Proper Pride	1882
Croker, B.M.	Diana Barrington: A Romance of Central India	1888
Croker, B.M.	A Rolling Stone	1911
Diver, Maud	Lilamani: A Study in Possibilities	1911
Diver, Maud	Unconquered	1917
Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian	Poems of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio: A Forgotten Anglo-Indian Poet	1923 (1831)
Duncan, Sara Jeannette	Burnt Offering	1910
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan	Sermista; a drama in five acts	1859
Dyer, Helen S.	Pandita Ramabai: The Story of Her Life	1900
Kipling, Rudyard and Wolcott Balestier	The Naulahka: A Story of West and East	1892
Mukerji, Dhan Gopal	Caste and Outcast	1923
Mukerji, Dhan Gopal	Layla-Majnu: A Musical Play in Three Acts	1916
Mukerji, Dhan Gopal	Rajani: Songs of the Night	1916
Ramabai, Pandita	The High Caste Hindu Woman	1888
Satthianadhan, Krupabai	Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life	1894
Sorabji, Cornelia	Between the Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women By one of Themselves	1908
Sorabji, Cornelia	Indian Tales of the Great Ones Among Men, and Bird-People	1916
Sorabji, Cornelia	Shubala-A Child Mother	1920
Sorabji, Cornelia	Sun-Babies: Studies in the Child-Life of India	1904
Tagore, Rabindranath	Gora	1924 (1901)

Some of the highlights in the table above are in bold. As far as I know, these are the first plain text versions of the above texts to be made available online. 

You may notice that a couple of these texts are dated post-1923. I believe the 1941 translation of Anandamath (Dawn Over India) has fallen out of copyright in the U.S.

I should add that while I've cleaned up these files, I haven't proofread them. That is going to be a long-term project -- for which I would welcome collaborators!