The Implicit Canon Across Anthologies of African American Literature

Abstract

Editors of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (NAAAL) referenced earlier anthologies of African American literature when selecting the authors and works for their table of contents. They argued that prior anthologies contained an “implicit” canon that NAAAL editors would extend and amend. We created a relational database that describes every author and work selected for 26 comprehensive anthologies of African American literature over the past century to make that implicit canon explicit. We show that anthologists are significantly more likely to agree about who one should read than what one should read to understand the African American literary tradition. Counterintuitively, any two of these anthologies usually share more authors than works. This discovery challenges theories of the literary canon that assume that the work, not the author, is canonized. Evidence from our database shows that the implicit canon is primarily a list of authors, not a list of works. After establishing this, we turn to interpretations motivated by our quantitative findings: A reading of the two most frequently anthologized texts across these anthologies, and a discussion of the exception that proves the rule of author consecration: Vernacular material central to the African American literary tradition, which is often represented in tables of contents without an author.