1The period between May 2020 and September 2021 in the US was rife with uncertainty. On May 25, 2020, the ghastly footage of George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis soon spread online, launching a massive wave of protest against police brutality and racial injustice across the US and beyond. The visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) swelled up with crowds all over the world chanting BLM slogans all summer long. Between May 26 and August 22, in the US, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project recorded “over 7,750 demonstrations linked to the BLM movement across more than 2,440 locations in all 50 states and Washington, DC” (Kishi and Jones), so much so that it initiated a “national reckoning over race” (Greenblatt 209). Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic had already reached frightening proportions, infecting and killing millions of people around the world and engulfing the US in one of the greatest sanitary crises of its existence. Domestically, more than a million Americans died from the virus, instilling a general fear and acute paranoia in the population. The abrupt slowing down of economic activity triggered a large-scale recession leading to a virtually unprecedented wave of layoffs which, in turn, further weakened the US social fabric. Finally, from a political standpoint, the presidential race between President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden highlighted the extreme polarization of the American electorate, utterly split on issues including—but not limited to—climate change, the economy, health insurance, and immigration. Trump’s refusal to concede defeat emphasized once again, and in greater proportion than ever before, the prevalence and potency of misinformation and disinformation when, on January 6, 2021, a crowd of MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory, topping one of the most dramatic political sequences in US history. The US then started a healing process, trying to patch the sizable economic, social, political, and racial fault lines exacerbated by these events. Amanda Gorman’s delivery of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration symbolized the willingness of the new administration to take a step in that direction. For a fleeting moment, the reading was a reminder of the soothing power of literature and suggested that the written word—or rather, the spoken word in Gorman’s case—could still help to make sense of recent developments and fight the dogged impression of pending doom that had seized the US.
2Other efforts promoting the explanatory power of literature and writing had preceded Gorman’s reading. Newspapers, magazines, and the publishing world at large had called to writers of all stripes to contribute material helping the public to understand the sequence of events, especially when it came to BLM. Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II have documented how, in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, journalists, librarians, and scholars put forth “antiracist reading lists” (179) addressing systemic racism. While the popular reaction of outrage reached a record high over the summer of 2020, publishing houses scrambled to meet the skyrocketing demand for books on racism and social justice. This upsurge of interest didn’t go unnoticed at The New Yorker, where staff members “began to comb the archives to get a sense of how the political, cultural, and economic questions surrounding race and Black achievement [had] been portrayed” (Cobb and Remnick xv) in the magazine. It resulted in the publication of the anthology The Matter of Black Lives in September 2021, assembled by David Remnick, who had been a staff writer since 1992 before becoming the main editor of The New Yorker in 1998, and Jelani Cobb, a Black staff writer at the magazine since 2012, and currently the dean of the Columbia Journalism School.
3As Cobb himself acknowledged on multiple occasions, the initial impetus behind the publication of the anthology was indeed George Floyd’s murder and its repercussions for American society (Cobb and Remnick xiv; Harvard Bookstore 00:04:35-00:04:55). The photograph used on the cover features a man holding an American flag upside down with names written on the white stripes. Names include Tamir Rice, Renisha McBride, Tanisha Anderson, or Freddie Gray, all of them Black people who were killed during the BLM period and whose death led to additional BLM protests. In short, the anthology indirectly borrowed from BLM the very words for its title, the photograph for its cover, as well as the impetus for the book—by the editors’ own admission. Given all these factors, it would be hard not to see the BLM movement as a direct raison d’être for the anthology.
4Providing a full historical background of The New Yorker is beyond the scope of this article and historians such as Ben Yagoda and Mary F. Corey, among others, have written lengthy and insightful studies of the magazine. Yet, although the magazine has become a staple of American—and perhaps global—culture, a brief overview of its history may be warranted to understand the oscillation of the magazine’s editorial policy over time. The New Yorker was launched in 1925 by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, who wanted the magazine to convey a blend of “sophistication, lightness and urbanity” (Yagoda 40). It was initially designed to have a circulation limited to New York in order to maximize revenue from local advertising (Yagoda 37), but The New Yorker soon gained a larger audience. By 1932 more than fifty percent of its readership lived outside the city and by 1945 the proportion reached seventy-three percent (Yagoda 59). The editorial policy was partly transformed by World War II and its aftermath, with the magazine taking a deeper and more serious interest in international affairs while still containing a lot of adverts (Corey 38). Indeed, in the few years after the conflict, New York became the epitome of an international and cosmopolitan metropolis. While hundreds of European artists, intellectuals and scholars flocked to New York in the postwar era, the headquarters of the United Nations and the brand new Idlewild airport—opened in 1947 and 1948 respectively—connected the city to the rest of the world both figuratively and literally. As an unmistakable New York product, The New Yorker slowly began to partake of the international and cosmopolitan aura attached to the city. For Corey, the magazine was a building stone in the construction of a postwar “global intellectual village” (13). The overall tone of the magazine has historically alternated between a light-hearted sophistication and a deeper gravitas, a “pendulum swing” (Yagoda 418) in policy that can be largely attributed to successive editors. Under the editorship of Remnick—who began as a correspondent for Russia—the magazine has reverted to a more serious tone designed to provide content to a now truly international readership thanks, in part, to the digital edition of the magazine.
5Anthologies usually serve a dual purpose: to present and preserve (Lucas 158-160). By reproducing texts that were published in other types of media, these books often mix well-known and less well-known works in order to offer material that has the double advantage of being both familiar and brand new to readers. Today, the word “anthology” is liable to be customarily applied to any collection of literary texts, although two different types of collections have historically coexisted: anthologies and miscellanies. While anthologies tend to offer a diachronic perspective of a literary tradition, miscellanies tend to pull together material which is essentially contemporaneous (Benedict, 1996 3; Mujica 203). This distinction is by now largely theoretical. For instance, the book jacket of The Matter of Black Lives presents it as an anthology, while there is a slightly more pronounced emphasis in the book on contemporaneous writing—with 25 texts written after 2010 compared to 20 texts written earlier. In theory, it would make more sense to label The Matter of Black Lives a miscellany even though the word has rather fallen into disuse. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to The Matter of Black Lives as an anthology throughout this article. However, it should be borne in mind that The Matter of Black Lives is in a poise between the two different types of collections. Hence, it contains an inherent tension between the will to represent The New Yorker’s tradition of engaging with the matter of Black lives on the one hand—symbolized by the diachronic perspective of the anthology—and the attempt to capture the Black Lives Matter period on the other hand—which the synchronic snapshot of the miscellany affords. This tension can be felt in the very contents selected by the anthologists as well as in the concluding remark of the foreword, where Cobb explains that the book was conceived as a “chronicle of at least a part of [the] past and a lens to help envision a better American future” (Remnick and Cobb xvi).
6Likewise, the order chosen for the material in the book allows anthologists to suggest unforeseen connections, new angles, and lengthier perspectives on a topic. As such, anthologies can aptly impart the impression of giving a fresh perspective on an issue, while also conveying the sense of an overarching structure uniting the past with the present (Re 586). Besides, the typically fragmented format of anthologies (Gayard and André 100)—which relies on a multiplicity of authors and viewpoints while achieving an appearance of overall coherence—applies to magazines such as The New Yorker as well. Hence, it is no surprise that Remnick and Cobb decided to rely on this genre to try to provide an original answer to the pressing questions that arose after George Floyd’s murder. The Matter of Black Lives was more than a simple reaction to a tragic situation. As an anthology, its very purpose offered an inherent bridge between past and present, giving enough room to fully grasp the historical, political, and cultural depth of events. Also, the very format of the book enabled the editors to come up with a powerful polyphonic response, resting upon a plurality of voices across time and space. The Matter of Black Lives was printed on offset paper which affords high quality printing and sold for 25$. Though it was not printed on Bible paper like similar volumes—one can think here of any iteration of The Norton Anthologies—the book seems quite as voluminous as any Bible with more than 830 pages, projecting the idea of a rich collection able to tackle its main subject—that is to say the matter of black lives and the BLM movement—from all possible angles, rendering both its intricate nuances and its intriguing complexities.
7This article will use some methodological tools provided by book history, namely statistical analysis of the contents themselves as well as a focus on editorial choices, in order to explore the ways in which the composition, structure, and editing of the book affect the presentation of texts about Black life in the US, in turn actively shaping the understanding of both the magnitude and representation of the BLM movement. It will discuss the reasons behind the publication of the volume, then assess its stance in regard to the BLM movement, before identifying some editorial blind spots, namely the imbalance that might go unnoticed in terms of gender representation, as well as the effects created when two editors—one Black and the other White—gather texts about African American life and culture in a single volume.
8From a historical standpoint, The New Yorker has not always been very interested in the lives of African-Americans, especially in the earlier years of the magazine. Up until the 1960s, African American issues and perspectives were, to say the least, neglected. According to Ben Yagoda,
To say that the New Yorker traditionally held itself at a remove from racial matters would be a significant understatement […] the magazine essentially ignored anything to do with race. In the early days, black people were stereotypically depicted in short stories, cartoons, and advertisements as servants, Pullman porters, and comic figures, but in the postwar period such depictions were recognized as offensive. So blacks disappeared completely. Since the magazine’s overwhelmingly white readership looked to the New Yorker for reflections of its own life, the editorial Jim Crow was easy for them to ignore. […] in most of the few instances where the existence of domestic people of color was recognized, one got the sense that the writer was an ornithologist studying an odd species. […] The New Yorker had no black editors and no black contributors—and had not since Langston Hughes published a handful of stories and poems in the thirties and forties. (316)
9This editorial Jim Crow was not specific to The New Yorker at the time but was endemic within the American publishing world (Lucas 99-104). In the wake of World War II and the Civil rights movement, this stance changed a little, albeit not automatically in the pursuit of a greater open-mindedness. As Mary F. Corey pointed out,
Often, stereotypical African Americans were replaced by stereotyped South Sea Islanders, Africans, and jungle denizens. This sleight-of-hand offered many New Yorker contributors a way to continue doing what they had always done (produce stereotypical representations of black people) without seeming to do so. It is difficult to find a single issue of the magazine that did not contain at least one cartoon depicting a swarthy caveman, a cannibal, or a grass-skirted South Sea Islander up to some antic caper. (83)
10Occasionally, The New Yorker would contain profile pieces of Black musicians—usually jazz musicians—which were “slightly better” (Yagoda 316). Thus, it is no exaggeration to assert that The New Yorker was late in the day paying heed to the advances of the civil rights movement and to the issues it raised. According to Cobb, the beginning of the editorial shift can be located in the 1962 publication of James Baldwin’s essay, “Letter from a Region in my Mind,” which is fittingly reprinted in the volume and serves as the opening piece (Cobb and Remnick 3-59). As a consequence of Baldwin’s essay, more Black writers became part of the staff—Charlayne Hunter, Calvin Trillin, or Jervis Anderson among them (Cobb and Remnick xiii)—and the magazine covered racial issues more consistently. However, at this point the magazine had alternated, from its inception onward and for several decades, between racist mockery and willful disregard for African American lives. In the sixties, to have the same magazine assemble a substantial anthology of more than 830 pages on The Matter of Black Lives would have represented cause enough for wonder, if not careful investigation. However, it is perhaps less surprising to see the cultural institution answer the cries of “Black Lives Matter” in the 2020s, now that the magazine has more Black contributors than ever before.
11Yet, the timing of the publication for the anthology may seem puzzling, since it came in 2021, eight years after the hashtag Black Lives Matter first went viral. It has to do with the emergence of new commercial opportunities for publishing houses over the past few years. Indeed, in his foreword to the volume, Jelani Cobb explains that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, “reading lists—endless lists” (Cobb and Remnick xv) began to be compiled, in turn prompting the staff at the New Yorker to look for answers on how to best address what the country was going through. It initiated an archival research eventually leading to the publication of the anthology itself. One of the side effects of the spring and summer demonstrations of 2020 was to increase the demand in material on race and on the BLM movement. Indeed, although Robin Di Angelo’s White Fragility and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race had both been published in 2018, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist in 2019, all three quickly made it to the top of best-selling books in the US, together with older publications on race such as Michelle Alexander’s 2010 The New Jim Crow. All age groups were in demand: Jason Reynold’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You published in March 2020—an adaptation for young adults of Kendi’s 2016 Stamped from the Beginning—returned to the top of the list in early June 2020, and the first print run of the children’s book Antiracist Baby—also by Kendi and which was to be published in the summer of 2020—went from 50,000 to 150,000 copies due to the abrupt shoot up of pre-orders (Harris). In all likelihood, The Matter of Black Lives was marketed as a direct answer to this increasing demand. On top of the timing of the publication or its very title, the book cover using a photograph of Devin Allen—which was shot in Baltimore in 2015 during the protest that erupted in the city after Freddie Gray’s death in police custody—seems to unmistakably connect the volume to the timeframe of the BLM movement.
12However, readers who want to learn more about the current movement might be left hungry for more. Indeed, the very expression “Black Lives Matter” appears only forty times over the course of 825 pages. On average, this would represent approximately one occurrence every twenty pages, but when taking a deeper look, one can see that the expression only comes up six times within the first 700 pages of the anthology, and thirty-four times within the last 105 pages.
Fig. 1. Occurrences of the expression “Black Lives Matter” throughout the anthology
Source: Lucas
13The sharp discrepancy could be explained away by invoking the idea that the content has been organized in its chronological order of publication, since it opens with Baldwin’s essay. Yet, this is not exactly the case. The second text in the volume is Toni Morrison’s essay “The Color Fetish” published in 2017, thus upsetting this line of interpretation (Cobb and Remnick 61-67). The rest of the anthology does not conform to a chronological order either.
14As a result, a series of questions may arise. If this volume can be seen as one of the indirect offshoots of the BLM movement, why is the latter seemingly confined to the last hundred pages or so of the anthology? Does this editorial decision imply a reluctance from The New Yorker to fully engage with the movement? Even more cynically, does it suggest that The New Yorker was mostly concerned with reprinting its own material at a timely moment, transforming BLM into an incidental afterthought? This very last question can have two distinct, antithetical answers: both yes and no. The move is necessarily imbued with opportunism since whatever issue is on the social, political, and cultural agenda inevitably provides incentives for publishing houses. For instance, after the first Black Studies Department was opened in 1968 at San Francisco State University under the direction of Nathan Hare, other similar departments and programs mushroomed across American campuses. Publishing houses which, until that point, had paid little or no attention to the field of Black literature became suddenly aware of the commercial potential associated with the creation of those programs. As a consequence, numerous anthologies of Black literature were assembled—sometimes very hastily—in the hope that they would serve as textbooks in the newly created classes (Lucas 112). Barbara Benedict has underlined the peculiar interplay which has historically existed between anthologies and commercial publishing:
[Bookseller’s] first allegiance was to the organization from whence came their profit. This organization consolidated copyrights and actual, physical copies within tight, business coteries called congers that attempted to keep book prices high by starving out competition while also selling literature to less wealthy readers through inexpensive pamphlets. This practice helped to forge a genre designed for profiting from copyrights: the anthology. In such collections, publishing booksellers could print together material they held in copyright and package it as a new book. […] Print indeed is essential to the anthology, for it only exists through copyright legislation and practices. (Benedict, 1996 233)
15In the case of The Matter of Black Lives, the perspective of making a profit was certainly taken into consideration by the publishing house William Collins, but that is probably not enough to ascribe base commercial profits as the sole motivation behind The New Yorker’s decision to publish the anthology. The volume may well have sprung also from a genuine desire to offer a better understanding of the BLM movement. Yet, the decision made by Cobb and Remnick—that of offering a wider chronological perspective on Black lives in America—inherently implies that contemporary events may not receive pride of place. If anything, this indirect approach to BLM may rather point to the difficulty of using print in order to chronicle a movement which is so heavily digitally based. In the foreword, Jelani Cobb calls the anthology “a chronicle of at least a part of our past and a lens to help envision a better future” (Cobb xvi). The relatively few occurrences of the expression “Black Lives Matter” throughout the book are not enough to assert that its editors opportunistically considered the BLM movement as a mere afterthought. Knowing that it would be the reading backdrop upon release, the anthologists focused on Black lives over the past sixty years to suggest the elusiveness and volatility of violent phenomena which, even though they always erupt in particular circumstances and locales, have had the potential to take place anywhere in the US and beyond.
16After probing the circumstances around the publication of The Matter of Black Lives, a closer look at its content should help determine whether The New Yorker merely paid lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement or if it did engage with some of its tenets in order to provide a valuable contribution to it.
17Placing Baldwin’s essay “Letter from a Region in my Mind” at the outset of the anthology serves a double function. On the one hand, it is a nod to the editorial shift that the essay helped create in 1962, paving the way for a more diverse staff and for a greater attention to racial issues in the magazine. On the other hand, it establishes a symbolic filiation between Baldwin and the BLM movement. Indeed, throughout his life and work, Baldwin constantly emphasized the importance of love (Farred 285), so much so that one of his biographers, David Leeming, characterized Baldwin’s lifelong endeavor as a “gospel of love” (Leeming 135). The idea was that love was absolutely central in order to achieve lasting social change. One of the most famous instances of Baldwin’s defense of love as a transformative means with tremendous social and political clout can be found at the end of “Letter from a Region in my Mind,” which later became one of the two essays in The Fire Next Time:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. (qtd. in Cobb and Remnick 59)
18After George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013, Alicia Garza’s Facebook post, which marked the birth of the expression “Black lives matter,” was titled “a love letter to black people”(Madhawi). As scholars such as Sean Kim Butorac rightly underlined, the post echoed the Baldwinian vision, hoping for a future, a world transformed by love (Butorac 710). The BLM movement shares Baldwin’s belief in love as a cornerstone of social transformation, and the anthologists were careful to give this tenet a central importance.
19Besides, the anthology also highlights various individual trajectories, allowing personal stories to come to the fore in order to shine a light on a larger picture. For example, Sarah Broom’s 2015 “The Yellow House” recounts a trip taken to go back to New Orleans where she grew up, thus offering an occasion to discuss the notion of home, before and after Hurricane Katrina (Cobb and Remnick 179-192). Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 “Black Like Them” tells the story of his Jamaican cousin Rosie and her husband Noel living in Long Island, which enables him to ponder over the reasons why West Indian immigrants are often perceived as different from other Black Americans (69-84). In the 1983 piece titled “Quilts,” Andrea Lee recounts her quest in the early 1980s to find the perfect quilt in Ahoskie, North Carolina, which gives her the occasion to probe the notions of Black ownership of land, the attachment to ancestry and ancestral practices, as well as the vast plurality of skin tones and physical traits among African Americans (121-144). Jennifer Gonnerman’s 2014 “Before the Law” relates what happened to Kalief Browder, a sixteen-year-old boy who was wrongfully charged with robbery, larceny and assault and who spent three years in Rikers, awaiting his trial and being pressured by solitary confinement and injunctions to accept a guilty plea while he maintained his innocence (647-666). It is through these personal vignettes that the anthology’s title really comes alive, confirming Cobb’s claim in the foreword that The Matter of Black Lives is “not an anthology about race” (Cobb and Remnick xv). Instead, they underline the explicit and implicit ways in which Black lives are affected on a daily basis, encouraging readers to connect the dots in order to form a fuller picture of social, political, and historical dynamics which often transcend particular cases.
20In a 2022 interview given to the Harvard Bookstore, Jelani Cobb underlined the wealth of material David Remnick and he had to choose from. Cobb revealed that the long list of works to be considered for inclusion sent by Erin Overbey, The New Yorker’s archivist, was akin to “an embarrassment of riches,” claiming that there could easily have been “a second volume, that would have lost nothing for caliber of writing and quality” (Harvard Bookstore 00:07:08-00:07:45). Apart from the voluminous size of the book, its wealth of material is suggested through its sheer historical and spatial breadth, which might go unnoticed when casually reading the anthology. Even though “Letter from a Region in my Mind” was given central importance both in the volume and in The New Yorker’s history, the oldest piece is actually Rebecca West’s 1947 “Opera in Greenville” (Cobb and Remnick 619-626) thus symbolically extending further in time the roots for The Matter of Black Lives. If the number of pieces selected from each decade can fluctuate quite a lot—with for example, none from the 1950s, five from the 1990s, or seventeen from the 2010s—they reveal nonetheless a steady and growing concern with African American lives in the magazine. Through a wide variety of voices, the book offers a kaleidoscopic view of Black life in America over the past eight decades.
21Not only does The Matter of Black Lives delineate the various temporalities in which the Black Lives Matter movement takes roots, it also subtly suggests the various diasporic spaces from which it grew. The anthology features a substantial set of international writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid, Zadie Smith, Jervis Anderson, Edwidge Danticat or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, inflecting the overall angle of the volume and hinting at a possible decentering of the perspective. Ultimately, this slight decentering reflects the fact that the BLM movement has spread beyond US borders and has morphed into a global phenomenon. In other words, The New Yorker’s anthology celebrates the diversity of Black lives, while also providing an editorial embodiment of the historical, geographical, and cultural scope taken by BLM.
22According to Pierre Bourdieu, the table of contents of any review or magazine is an “exhibition of the symbolic capital available to the company” (448, my translation). Likewise, the public reputation of a publishing house or of a magazine has an impact on the way readers will receive a message or a text (Goulemot 95-96). The Matter of Black Lives does have a table of contents with several authors known all over the world—Morrison, Baldwin, Ngozi Adichie or Smith for instance—and is also connected to one of the best-known cultural magazines in the world. As a result, the anthology lends some of the symbolic capital attached to The New Yorker to BLM.
23After World War II, Manhattan emerged as a global hub likely to assume the cultural leadership of the world, and The New Yorker, which has often prided itself with its unique reporting, became an ideal embodiment of its cultural finesse (Yagoda 211-213). If its editorial policy towards race has radically changed over the course of sixty years, its preeminence in US culture has been left virtually untouched. Having an anthology published by such a magazine offers BLM a stark counterpoint to the type of discourse typically pushed by right-wing leading figures, organizations, and media, in which it is caricatured, reviled or intentionally misunderstood. Suffice it to say that Donald Trump characterized BLM protesters as “killers, terrorists, arsonists, thugs, hoodlums, looters, and ANTIFA in his Twitter feeds” (Nacos et al. 8), that Milwaukee County sheriff David A. Clarke created a stir at the 2016 Republican National Convention when he opened by saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear: Blue Lives Matter!” (Biesecker 411), or that Fox News show host, Tucker Carlson, once spent twenty-five minutes claiming the protests ensuing George Floyd’s death were “definitely not about black lives” (Chiu). The mere size of the book shatters the claim that what has been happening in the US for all these years is nothing but an epiphenomenon. By honoring Black lives, emphasizing their cultural and political legacies and accomplishments or capturing their hopes, fears, and aspirations, the anthology deftly stirs away from simplistic representations of BLM: the powerful voice of The New Yorker helps both amplify and complexify the discussion around the movement in the US media.
24The anthology also artfully pays tribute to the role played by women in BLM. The movement famously coalesced under the impulse of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal (now Ayo) Tometi. In his interview for Harvard Bookstore, Cobb explained that it was a deliberate choice on the part of the editors to include a substantial number of women, given the wealth of material they had to work from. He also considered the final list of contributors as a motive for satisfaction, “a good representation of what [they] set out to do” (Harvard Bookstore 00:45:08-00:47:38). The voices of women are present throughout the anthology, chronologically, geographically, and in terms of sheer number. Women signed pieces covering all decades—except for the 2000s—and they also represent the largest proportion of non-US-born authors in the book. Out of the thirty-five writers included, one of them appears to be non-binary, fourteen are men, and twenty are women. In other words, around sixty per cent of contributors are women, underlining Cobb and Remnick’s commitment to emphasize the contribution of women to the BLM movement.
25In spite of all these qualities, The Matter of Black Lives also suffers from what I would term editorial blind spots. My contention would be that these blind spots do not automatically derive from ill will or negligence, but rather inevitably surface when assembling an anthology. First, if some of the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement were respected in the conception of the anthology—the centrality of love, the importance of women in the fight, the diasporic dimension of the movement—other tenets could not. For example, it is impossible to mirror and convey the importance of decentralization in the composition of the book when all the texts virtually converge to form a single volume. On top of that, having all the texts come together can give the impression that BLM is a much more cohesive, much more cohered movement than it is in reality. Anthologies typically project a sense of intrinsic unity while they are, at best, essentially fragmentary (Benedict, 2003 232). If this is a monolith of a book, the movement it covers is far from being monolithic.
26Second, the association of David Remnick and Jelani Cobb as co-anthologists is certainly warranted, but it also conveys deeper historical resonances in the case of anthologies dealing with African American culture or literature. Indeed, for most of the twentieth century, the question of who was legitimate in assembling such an anthology was a pressing one, especially from the 1960s onward. US traditional publishing houses and White anthologists used different tactics to enhance their legitimacy in producing this kind of book and thus avoid potential criticisms or accusations of cultural appropriation.
27With the emergence of Black studies departments and the potential new market for anthologies they represented, US publishing houses got quite creative in order to deflect any accusation of greedy exploitation (Lucas 187-192). One of the very common strategies used by publishing houses was to have a Black artist write a foreword to the assembled anthology in order to reassure the readers of its worth—Arnold Adoff’s anthologies, I Am the Darker Brother released in 1968 and The Poetry of Black America issued in 1973 exemplified this practice. Otherwise, White anthologists—such as Budd Schulberg for his 1967 From the Ashes—would reassure their readers by emphasizing their lifelong interest in Black literature and culture, listing novels and studies they had read about Black life or citing jazz bands whose entire career they had followed. Another common strategy was when publishing houses decided to pair a White anthologist with a Black anthologist (Rambsy 56) thus making sure that they would both enhance the perceived legitimacy of the other in the field of African American literature—such was the case of Macmillan’s 1968 Dark Symphony. In and of itself, this practice represented a modern variation of the nineteenth century tradition in which slave narratives were typically authenticated by a white person. Invariably, the white presence in the paratext basically framed Black voices, with the idea of making them more palatable to the white reading public (Smith 9-10; Castronovo 241). The editorial paradigms from the nineteenth century or from the 1960s and 1970s may well have disappeared today, but they still retain a historical significance.
28During his twenty-five-year editorship, Remnick has been involved in various anthologies published by The New Yorker, including Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker coedited with Susan Choi in 2000, Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker co-edited with Henry Finder in 2001, or The Fragile Earth: Writings from the New Yorker also co-edited with Finder in 2020. In a word, this process of pairing him with another staff writer was well-established before the publication of The Matter of Black Lives. Yet, these historical precedents may cast a different and unwanted light on the practice, thus creating some unfortunate and uneasy echoes with past editorial practices.
29Lastly, Remnick and Cobb were careful to include more women than men in the anthology, thus paying heed to the latest social and political debates around gender representation at large. However, upon closer inspection, the place allocated to women in the book is less favorable than it may seem. If women represent the majority of writers, they do not sign the majority of essays in the volume. From a statistical standpoint, there is a sharply uneven distribution between men and women in terms of pages.
Fig. 2. Distribution of essays and pages in The Matter of Black Lives, based on gender
|
Gender
|
Number of contributors
|
Number of essays
|
Total number of pages
|
Page average/ author
|
|
Male
|
14
(40 %)
|
23
(51%)
|
477
(60 %)
|
34,07
|
|
Female
|
20
(57 %)
|
21
(46,6%)
|
286
(36 %)
|
14,3
|
|
Non-binary
|
1
(3 %)
|
1
(2,2 %)
|
21
(2,6 %)
|
21
|
Source: Lucas
30There are twenty women contributing to the anthology, and they penned twenty-one articles. Only Toni Morrison has two different pieces included in the book. Men, on the other hand, number only fourteen, but all combined, they sign twenty-three articles. Even though they represent forty percent of the writers included, they write more than half of the anthology. This is even more evident if we decide to count the total number of pages allotted to men and women. The writing by women covers 286 pages, while the writing by men covers 477 pages. Women represent nearly sixty percent of contributors, yet their voices can be heard a little more than a third of the time. From a theoretical standpoint, based on numbers, each author included in the anthology could be entitled to an average of 17,4 pages. Yet, the average for women is below that mark, while the average for men is nearly doubled.
31This gap is quite surprising because showcasing more women in the table of contents was a deliberate move from Cobb and Remnick (Harvard Bookstore 00:45:08-00:47:44). However, it only reflects a wider trend that is visible when one studies anthologies as a type of book. Twentieth century anthologists of African American texts privileged works by men over works by women. So much so that sometimes, female artists and scholars had to take the matter in their own hands and publish volumes exclusively dedicated to works by women in order to address the gender imbalance which existed in anthologies. For instance, in 1970, Nikki Giovanni edited the poetry volume Night Comes Softly and Toni Cade Bambara assembled The Black Woman, which mixed literature and essays, while a few years later Pat Crutchfield released Keeping the Faith (1974), and Mary Helen Washington edited an anthology of short stories written by women, Black-Eyed Susans in 1975. In the introduction to the latter volume, Washington complained about the conservative vision of anthologists in terms of gender representation: “black women have never been fairly represented in anthologies – black or white” (ix). This tendency was curbed a little whenever one of the anthologists happened to be a woman, but having a man or two men edit an anthology and include a majority of women happened less than 2% of the time (Lucas 209-210). In light of these practices, Cobb and Remnick’s book fails to fully break the conservative editorial mold typical of anthologies, actually reproducing it to a certain extent: the chronic underrepresentation of women within anthologies is addressed, but male voices statistically remain the dominant ones.
32To conclude, George Floyd’s death spurred publishing houses to produce more material about the BLM movement and race in general. In this sequence, The New Yorker embarked on a project to flesh out The Matter of Black Lives for its readers, in a way which would provide a better understanding of the movement. Retracing political, cultural, as well as personal dynamics which presided over Black lives over the seventy-four years before its publication, the anthology managed to capture some of the central tenets advocated by the BLM movement, while offering a strong and powerful commitment to elevate the media debates on and around race in the US, notwithstanding inherent shortcomings—such as the overall prevalence of male voices over women’s—that might easily fly under the radar.
33The anthology was published by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers which is itself one of the largest publishing houses in the world. Copies were printed for the American market as well as for the British one and the anthology was made available in two different formats, hardback and paperback. This suggests that the publisher anticipated wide sales and the second printing of the book in 2022 seems to confirm that the expectations on that front were likely met. These signs point to the conclusion that The Matter of Black Lives was—at the very least—a moderate commercial success. How it was received by readers in the US and elsewhere remains to be determined. Yet, thanks to the peculiar place of The New Yorker in the global intellectual village and to the prestigious international roster of writers, the chronicle offered by The Matter of Black Lives reflected the idea that the BLM movement was a phenomenon which required a global and earnest attention.
34To bring this essay to a close, it is only fair to point at some of the effects created by the angle chosen. This research deals with statistics, which can certainly help provide relevant information, shed light on the way the volume is structured, and reveal some of its inconsistencies. Yet, statistics will never provide the full picture, nor can they account for editorial intentions. For instance, the gender imbalance in terms of pages is noteworthy, but sometimes a few words might be as eloquent as a long speech, and, typically, a writer of the caliber of Toni Morrison could very well need only a couple of pages to eclipse other contributors. Just as it is important in the BLM movement to remember that behind each statistic lays a personal story, a human depth to retrieve, it is equally crucial to realize that this type of research can lay the skeleton bare but it does not deal with the flesh of the anthology: the power of its words. It is through the combination of both, statistics and human depth, bones and flesh, that this body of works can fully embrace the BLM movement and account for the matter of Black lives.
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