How do we know who we are if our literature has been erased? How do we know our history if we don't read works by the people who lived it? Centuries of African American literature have been lost, hidden, erased. But how can we responsibly reconstitute the literary canon, when doing so inevitably requires selection and exclusion of some works?
David Anderson, Associate Professor of English at University of Louisville, discusses the recovery of lost African American literary canons including centuries of writing about the sea as well as the work of the erased writer George Marion McClellan.
Music by Prismic @prismicofficial.
Cover photo: "A Conversation with Phyllis Wheatley", by Sharon Mollerus (https://flic.kr/p/etcAz), used under Creative Commons license.