Online text collections

[waelisc.livejournal.com]

E-books by PoC came up in the recs post from earlier this week and that made me want to do some surfing for online collections by writers of color. Here's what I found this evening.

Some of these contain book-length texts, others are shorter works like poetry, stories and interviews. (Was there going to be a sister comm for short works?)

South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1938

Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress

Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache Texts. (These stories were collected by white anthropologists but as best I can tell, they were taking dictation from the Native American persons being interviewed - I hope that's okay.)

Comments

[waelisc.livejournal.com]

Which isn't to say that the audience isn't going to affect what is said, sometimes greatly. (And that's even assuming that you've decided that the person taking down the story is trustworthy.) The same problem exists with most FWP ex-slave narratives, too.

Yes, that's true. If you or anyone else feels that those two collections are ones you don't want representing PoC on this comm because of the white interviewer "filter" that the interviewees' thoughts and ideas went through, I would be more than willing to edit them off the list.

[sanguinity]

I feel strongly that we shouldn't be saying that a particular person of color's words are off-limits to the challenge because said person spoke to the "wrong" transcriber, or because they spoke in a highly constrained context.

However, I do think it's important to be aware of those contexts and constraints as one reads. And if you don't know what those constraints might be, to find out before you start tackling the transcripts.