About

Project Rationale

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive the practice of descriptive bibliography for African American literary studies. Our goal is two-fold. First, we want to remedy the dearth of accurate, organized information about Black print by creating authoritative web-based bibliographies of major African-American authors. Our second goal is crucial: we’re not interested in simply stirring and adding Black books to existing bibliographies like the BAL; rather, we want to ask: how would bibliographic and cataloguing practices have to change in order to accommodate Black print culture and its modes of production, dissemination, and use?

A long and distinguished history of efforts by scholars, librarians, and private collectors to identify, curate, and provide access to primary source collections of African American materials precedes our initiative (see the conference proceedings of the 1983 “Black Bibliophiles and Collectors Symposium” held at Howard University, published in 1990 as Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History, eds., Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, W. Paul Coates, Thomas C. Battle). Indeed, we envision our effort as both indebted to and an extension of those pathfinders’ crucial work.

With the information-saturated 21st century upon us, an exciting opportunity awaits. We believe that bibliography can gain wider relevance to U.S. literary studies by developing new methods and technologies that advance the field of African American print culture studies. If the Black Bibliography Project becomes a resource for reliable, centralized information about black-authored and black-published texts, we will realize our most general and ambitious aim for this project: to advocate, gather resources for, and extend the practice of critical bibliography in African American political, intellectual, literary and cultural history.

Sponsors

The Black Bibliography Project has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rutgers University, and Yale University