An Ethics of Care in “Generous” Editions

Of the many ideas in this vibrant collection calling out for response—such as Nicole Gray’s observation that “preservation, like editing, is world-building work” (294) or Dirk Van Hulle’s sense of an edition of an author’s complete works as a kind of “creative ecology” (87), among many others—I will focus here on a particular orientation toward both archival and editorial work that promises to remake both fields in substantial ways, an approach based on an ethics of care. As Julia Flanders notes in her call for an editorial practice grounded in radical empathy, archivists and librarians have historically been seen in primarily service roles, and so are “anchored by affective virtues,” while editors, and scholars more generally, have been “imagined as having primarily epistemological virtues” (71). By reframing authors as “ethical agents,” Flanders concludes, the field might begin “to de-objectify the author and their work: to situate the author’s work as something other than an object of study, and to orient the editorial enterprise as a whole towards goals other than scholarship as currently understood” (68). Similarly, Stephanie Browner proposes “generous” editions, grounded in recent work in Black bibliography, as a response to presumptions of white privilege baked into “standard” annotation principles and their unspoken assumptions about “average” (i.e. white) readers.

As these references suggest, making a space for the “affective virtues” of archival practice, especially the care-based archivism suggested by Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and others, would go hand in hand with a generous editorial practice, as both conceptual revisions would seek small steps toward social justice by caring more deeply for authors, texts, and readers.1 Drawing on the philosopher Nel Noddings’s notion of “engrossment,” Bethany Nowviskie similarly proposes a “productive appreciation” both for a “cared-for person or group” and an “artifact, document, collection, or system requiring study or curation.”2 As Nowviskie notes, this method of curation would extend into digital collections as well, a point echoed by Mitchell Whitelaw’s call for “generous interfaces” that would open themselves to users beyond the vagaries of keyword searches.3 I will explore these kinds of archival and editorial sensibilities here through the lens of a digital project in progress, the Black Bibliography Project (BBP), under the joint auspices of Rutgers and Yale universities, with a particular focus on questions of authorial citation and naming.4 One (other) way in which large interfaces like the BBP might “de-objectify” authors, I will suggest, derives from questions about how to refer to the “same” writers appearing in print under multiple names.

As part of its “‘Black’ approach to descriptive bibliography,” the BBP uses Linked Data to trace the multiple print and non-print forms that Black texts have taken, as well as all those contributing to their production, distribution, and reception.5 For instance, in a departure from much standard bibliographic practice, the BBP records not only the names of authors, publishers, and printers, but also “editors, stereotypers, engravers, illustrators, writers of forwards, introductions and afterwords, and the names of dedicatees.” As project directors Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill explain, “These data points give a rich picture of the many agents involved in bringing a work to print.”6 Further, the BBP aspires eventually to include “every single reprinting” of each item in its database, including those in periodicals, recordings, or other multi-media formats.7 Thus, the BBP aims to represent and make accessible deep synchronic and diachronic histories of textual production and reproduction.

A basic question that will arise in this endeavor, as in most descriptive bibliographies, will therefore be the matter of how to account for authors (or other agents) associated with multiple names in print. This is an especially urgent concern in the history of Black print culture, given the often fraught nature of public authorship. To cite but a few examples from the (so-called) Harlem Renaissance era, though every period of Black literary history would offer many others: James Weldon Johnson famously appeared as “Anonymous” in the first edition of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) before attaching his name to the 1927 reprint; Nella Larsen submitted her first two magazine stories as “Allan Semi” (an anagram of her maiden name, Nella Imes); Richard Bruce Nugent appeared alternately as “Bruce Nugent” in The New Negro and as “Richard Bruce” in Fire!! and briefly went by “Ricardo Nugent di Dosceta” upon his arrival in New York City;8 W.E.B. Du Bois likely published three short stories in The Crisis as “Anne du Bignon”;9 and Alice Browning, editor of the journal Negro Story (1944–53) sometimes published her short fiction there as “Richard Bentley.” Georgia Douglas Johnson shows up under that name in The Crisis, but also as “G. Douglas Johnson” and “Georgia D. Johnson.” And published names may not even refer to actual people, at least directly; the Crisis report “Out of Texas,” about the 1922 hanging of a thirteen-year-old Black man, was attributed to “Lucy Maverick,” the name used by a group of writers from Texas, who likely feared retribution from the same local forces of white terror.10

So far, the BBP (which is still a work in progress) would link each of these publications to the “same” author’s name, in order to enhance the searchability and semantic links that are at the heart of the project’s mission. Indeed, as Goldsby and McGill explain, standard practices in descriptive bibliography often conspire to elide the realities of Black textual production, as in cases where a white editor is credited as an “author” or “contributor.” Accordingly, the BBP “prioritizes and honors the agency of Black writers” by always associating Black authors with their works; in the case of Phillis Wheatley, for instance, her “name as author will supersede any other as the primary link to the Work.”11 (In the BBP’s usage, “Work” refers to the “intellectual content of a specific print item,” so that the system connects all editions, reprints, and translations to each other via the Work.)12

It will be immensely useful for BBP users to trace all the appearances in print of a given Black author, perhaps most of all to account for the full extent to which many Black texts have been recirculated in a variety of print and multimedia forms. But those modes of recirculation, especially, point to the various forms in which scholars and other users will encounter Black writers through a variety of names, whether designated as “original” or otherwise. A recent essay by Heidi Craig, Laura Estill, and Kris L. May, “A Rationale of Trans-inclusive Bibliography,” demonstrates the ways in which this is hardly an innocent question. As they point out, “enumerative, large-scale, digital bibliography shapes how and what we research. Names are foundational to enumerative bibliography, citation, and scholarship.”13 Yet, while bibliographers have long presumed that “the name attached to a piece should always be cited as it appeared on the published work,” this practice in fact “can enact harm by upholding cis normative and transphobic scholarly practices while making them seem merely descriptive.” In contrast, “Trans-inclusive bibliography operates on ‘trans time’ and rejects this assumption.”14

The Renaissance would certainly lend itself to conceptions of trans time, as it was a time when “gender was becoming more and more conjectural,” as Nugent writes in “On ‘Gloria Swanson’: (Real Name Mr. Winston),” a recollection of the New York and Chicago drag scenes of the 1920s.15 How might we then extend such conjectures to cases like Browning/Bentley or Du Bois/du Bignon, especially if we were to think of these pseudonyms as instances of “rhetorical drag,” as Lauren Louise Anderson suggests of the du Bignon stories? 16 “Accuracy and fidelity to the historical record may seem like obvious goals for a bibliographer,” Craig, Estill, and May conclude, “but these goals are neither obvious, uncomplicated, nor ideologically neutral.”17 While trans-inclusive bibliography organizes all publications under a single name, in order to avoid continued citations to an author’s deadname, this approach also opens up a broader space for thinking through relations between personal identity and bibliographic practice.

Reframing that discussion within the long-standing philosophical debate between “narrative” and “episodic” notions of selfhood may help to clarify these questions. Briefly, we might understand personal identity as an ongoing, if frequently revised, story featuring the same protagonist who would still recognize some kernel of their younger self at later stages of life, or as a series of unconnected episodic events, all of which are associated with the “same” person, but which do not add up to a single, overarching narrative.18 A trans-inclusive bibliography would proceed from a narrative premise in these terms, understanding an author’s earlier publications not as isolated episodes but as part of a single self’s career trajectory, so that a trans writer’s corpus would be represented as reflecting the same personal self (and the same name, retroactively applied) throughout. On the other hand, to subsume “Semi” into the heading of “Larsen,” or “du Bignon” as “Du Bois” and “Bentley” as “Browning,” might end up misrepresenting the more episodic natures of those authors’ (a doubly plural possessive) lives, especially if we were to view Browning or Du Bois as finding a greater degree of expressive liberty when publishing as if through another gendered identity, yet not necessarily carrying that departure over into the remainder of their authorial lives, at least as measured by the record of their published names. A generously annotated edition of those works, or a generously edited database containing those works, might well seek to clarify for readers the full historical and cultural context in which the stories “by” Semi, du Bignon, and Bentley originally appeared, and further to lay bare the otherwise hidden connections between these authors’ names and their other selves. But we might also imagine, I would suggest, an ethics of care oriented toward those particular instances of publication, and their original readers as gestured toward in an edition or a searchable database, that would not necessarily or automatically reveal these hidden connections. (Presumably many Crisis and Negro Story readers did not perceive these stories as by Du Bois or Browning, and certainly those encountering the unknown writer Allan Semi’s fiction in Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine would not have understood it to be the intellectual property of the equally unknown Nella Larsen.) Databases like the BBP thus might consider giving readers the ability to toggle off the kinds of connectivity that would otherwise lie at the heart of such projects, in an ironic reversal of the problems that Whitelaw diagnoses with databases where the only point of entry is a keyword search. When entering into a state of engrossment with objects in the world, Noddings writes, “We are not attempting to transform the world, but we are allowing ourselves to be transformed.”19 Adopting that kind of caring stance toward edited representations and searchable inventories of stories as published by Semi, du Bignon, or Bentley, as part of an attempt to “de-objectify the author” in Flanders’s terms, might well mean not transforming those texts into part of the corpus of works by Larsen, Du Bois, and Browning, but rather allowing ourselves to be transformed by their original circumstances of production.

John K. Young is a professor in the department of English at Marshall University. He is the author of Black Writers, White Publishers (2006), How to Revise a True War Story (2017), and The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism (2024), as well as the co-editor, with George Hutchinson, of Publishing Blackness (2013), and, with Jeehyun Lim, of Teaching Post-1945 Short Fiction from the United States, forthcoming in the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching Series. Beginning in Fall 2025, Young will serve as the North American editor for Textual Cultures (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/textual), the journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship.