Anthologies of African American Writing

Afrika v Amerike: antologiia poezii amerikanskikh negrov [Africa in America: Anthology of American Negro Poetry]

Afrika v Amerike: antologiia poezii amerikanskikh negrov [Africa in America: Anthology of American Negro Poetry]. Ed. Iulian Anisimov and S. Dinamov. Trans. Iulian Anisimov. Afterword Loren Miller. Moskva: Gos. izd-vo khudozhestvennoi lit-ry, 1933. 107 pp. [in Russian]

n/a, but includes poems by Lewis Alexander; Sterling A. Brown; Aloysius Green; Countee Cullen; Joseph S. Cotter; Claude McKay; Edward Silvera; Langston Hughes, and Walter Everette Hawkins (among others).

Wilson, Jennifer. “The Soviet Anthology of ‘Negro Poetry.’” The Paris Review 15 May 2018.

“Appearing in the early 1930s, “Africa in America” arrived somewhat late to what scholar Brent Hayes Edwards describes as early twentieth-century Europe’s “obsession with anthologizing the Negro.” In his book, The Practices of Diaspora, Edwards writes: “in a rush that with hindsight is astonishing . . . there was great interest in researching, notating, transcribing, assembling, and packing almost anything having to do with populations of African descent.” Edwards notes that anthologies often served to either frame black people as backwards and inferior or conversely as modern, cultured, equal to whites. Anthologies were never merely archival, he insists, but meant to demonstrate something essential about blackness. For the Soviets, the anthology was part and parcel of their plan to situate “the Negro” (particularly the American Negro) as a natural political ally during the Cold War. But that framing required, as framing tends to do, a certain degree of distortion, one aided in this case by the process of translation.”

A0032