Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:01:34.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Race and Distant Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2020

Richard Jean So  and
Edwin Roland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

Type
Special Topic: Varieties of Digital Humanities
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 1: Special Topic Varieties of Digital Humanities , January 2020 , pp. 59 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.” African American Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2007, pp. 477–86.Google Scholar
Allison, Sarah, et al. “Style at the Scale of the Sentence.” Stanford Literary Lab, pamphlet 5, June 2013, litlab .stanford .edu/ LiteraryLabPamphlet5.pdf.Google Scholar
“Appall, Verb.” Merriam- Webster Unabridged. Merriam Webster, 2019, unabridged. merriam- webster .com/ unabridged/ appall.Google Scholar
Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. 1956. Random House, 2013.Google Scholar
Clement, Tanya E. “‘A Thing Not Beginning and Not Ending’: Using Digital Tools to Distant- Read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2008, pp. 361–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. 42–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, Mae. “James Baldwin: Expatriation, Homosexual Panic, and Man's Estate.” Calalloo, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2000, pp. 313–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houston, Natalie. “Towards a Computational Analysis of Victorian Poetics.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2014, pp. 498–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Lauren. “Distant Reading after Moretti.” Arcade: Literature, Humanities, and the World, arcade . stanford .edu/ blogs/ distant- reading- after- moretti.Google Scholar
Long, Hoyt, and So, Richard Jean. “Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism between Close Reading and Machine Learning.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 235–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or, Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Gold, Matthew K., U of Minnesota P, 2012, pp. 139–60.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. Harvard UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Okihiro, Gary. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. U of Washington P, 2014.Google Scholar
Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton, 2010.Google Scholar
Piper, Andrew, and Eva Portelance. “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading.” Post45, 10 May 2016, post45 . research .yale .edu/2016/05/how- cultural- capital -works - prizewinning - novels - bestsellers -and -the -time -of - reading/.Google Scholar
Risam, Roopika. “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism.” Debates in Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. 359–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Underwood, Ted, and Sellers, Jordan. “The Longue Dure of Literary Prestige.” Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3, 2016, pp. 321–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, Kenneth. What Was African American Literature? Harvard UP, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar