On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading Laura E

134.1 ] On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading laura e. helton No library in the country has a classiication suitable for our purpose. Hence one must be created. —Howard University Record, 1916 N 1930, DOROTHY PORTER FOUND HERSELF TRACKING DOWN A Ineglected, partially lost library (ig. 1). In Washington, DC, a city deeply suspicious of its black readers,1 she had been named inau- gural curator of Howard University’s Negro Collection, also known as the Moorland Foundation. But irst, the twenty- ive- year- old Por- ter had to ind the collection—both literally and intellectually. “I had to teach myself black history,” she recalled. “hen I went around the library and pulled out every relevant book I could ind—the history of slavery, black poets—for the collection” (qtd. in McCombs). To locate materials on black literature and history that had accrued to the university since its 1867 founding but that had never been as- sembled, Porter scoured the stacks, corners, and basement of the library. She produced a dizzying array of items. “I found a number of pamphlets and books tied together which you had sent here in LAURA E. HELTON is assistant professor in the Department of En glish at the Uni- 1919,” she wrote to Jesse E. Moorland, the famed Howard alumnus versity of Delaware, Newark, where she and bibliophile for whom the collection was named. “I also found teaches print and material culture, Afri- some specimens of brightly colored butterlies, beetles, along with can American history and literature, and some native objects which may have been sent to the university from archival studies. Her current book proj- Africa or which you may have given” (Letter to Moorland).2 ect, “Collecting and Collectivity: Black Ar- Poets, butterflies, pamphlets, “proud rarities”: such were the chival Publics, 1900–1950,” examines the making of African American archives and shards out of which Porter launched a forty- year campaign to “ob- libraries to show how historical recupera- tain everything concerning the Negro” (Letter to Tanner). Moorland tion shaped forms of racial imagination advised that such a mass of material would “require careful organi- in the early twentieth century. zation,” and, indeed, by 1932 Porter’s imperative was to bring order © 2019 laura e. helton PMLA 134.1 (2019), published by the Modern Language Association of America 99 100 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA 134.1 ] Laura E. Helton 101 to this reclaimed library (Letter to Porter Foundation, annual report, 1947, 1). Her work [10 Sept. 1931]). She turned to the technolo- illustrates how the tools that beget access to gies of her profession—catalogs, call numbers, reading objects also organize the imperatives cross- references. Yet as librarians at Howard and imaginaries that beget reading subjects. had long understood, there was no extant It is tempting to look back on Porter’s information system “suitable” for a Negro work, which contravened the routine misil- collection (“J. E. Moorland Foundation” 12). ing of blackness in libraries, as forecasting the he “name authority” lists used by catalogers suspicion of taxonomy prevalent in critical included few black authors; subject headings discourse today. In scholarly and popular ac- and “universal” taxonomies often omitted counts alike, the library and its cognates—the black topics. And so, at a moment when the archive, gallery, and record oice—recur as resounding majority of African Americans sites of racial power that guard the boundaries had no legal access to public libraries—much of knowledge (see, most recently, the museum less to books specifically “by and about the scene in the 2018 Afrofuturistic blockbuster Negro” (“Negro Materials”)—Porter decided movie Black Panther).5 From Jorge Luis Bor- to dismantle the tools she learned in library ges’s short story “Library of Babel” to con- school and remake them to capaciously de- temporary art exhibitions, artists and writers lineate blackness.3 She began with a new card have challenged taxonomic regimes through catalog, a classiication of her own invention, fantasies of disorder that parody the underly- and a typewriter to compose bibliographies ing arbitrariness of any classiication system (Porter, “Tentative Plans”). Undertaking this (Pisciotta; Enwezor; Springer and Turpin). work, she asked questions that, writ large, ex- Porter seemed to anticipate such a critique, ceeded their seemingly technocratic origins: for she brazenly altered information regimes What was the logic of blackness that tied in the face of oicial prohibition. But while together these collected texts and artifacts? Porter well understood the politics of cul- What might people ask of these materials, tural authority, she was as orthodox as she and how might the collection reply? was heretic. She never doubted the ideals of Against an information landscape that standardization and order.6 She exhibited full exiled black readers and texts alike, Porter’s faith in classiication, a faith that begs Simon catalog was a site where radical taxonomy Gikandi’s provocation: “Could one be a revo- met readerly desire. his essay reconstructs lutionary and still love the library?” (11). the creation of that catalog to tell a story of Porter might have answered Gikandi by race, interface, and imagination. It follows pointing out that to love the library, as a black Porter’s decimal sequences, her cataloging woman taxonomist in the 1930s, was already FIG. 1 protocols, and her reference correspondence to be a revolutionary. Her work asks us to Mrs. Dorothy B. to reveal the seemingly nonliterary work apprehend technologies of order not only as Porter of Howard of building infrastructure as a high- stakes disciplining mechanisms, as recent scholar- University, photo- form of literary practice.4 As evidenced in ship has productively done, but also, in David graph by Carl Van the thousands of letters Porter received from Scott’s formulation, as “at once conserving Vechten (Carl Van across the African diaspora—from read- and a condition of criticism, revision, and Vechten Papers, ers who could not pose their questions else- change” (xiv). Such a tension resounds in Af- Yale Collection of American Litera- where—her efort to enlarge and enumerate rican American literature, where the library ture, Beinecke Rare the intricacies of blackness as a category of is a key setting of literacy’s contradictory Book and Manu- knowledge fueled a broader sense of what a promise. For every Langston Hughes—who script Library, Yale black archive, or what Porter once called a recalls the 135th Street branch of the New University; © Van “literary museum,” might aford (Moorland York Public Library as his exalted irst desti- Vechten Trust). 102 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA nation ater he arrived in Harlem (395)—there performed by women, that enlarged black is a Richard Wright, for whom the subterfuge print culture’s ield of vision in the twentieth necessary for a black boy to access the library century. If book historians have richly docu- lingers as a bitter and indelible memory of Jim mented the routes of textual transmission and Crow “ethics” (Black Boy 214–16 and “Ethics” prohibition that structure readers’ encounters xxvii).7 Alongside a pervasive romance of the with particular texts in time, turning to the library there is a countervailing understand- catalog raises questions about how readers ing that “the beacons of the library conceal navigate an archive of texts, in print and out unpleasant foundations” (Gikandi 14). For of print, that accrues over time.10 A catalog is those readers who, unlike Hughes, could a site through which people come to the very not access a repository of black books, and idea of navigation, a sense of which “ques- who instead mailed their queries to “Negro tions merit investigation” (Collins 252). For Collection, Howard University, District of that reason, Porter understood it as an epis- Columbia,” Porter served as interface. Her re- temological battleground where one could imagined decimals and catalog entries opened remap knowledge structures that erased or a bibliographic poetics for reading blackness. flattened blackness. Her acts of redirection he card- tray cabinets that Porter used and relabeling led readers across the expanse are iconic symbols of twentieth- century li- of black writing wherever it might be found, braries, but they rarely command a central even if it was embedded in, but unmarked by, plot line in studies of reading. To be sure, the white libraries’ notion of the universal. Such history of information is of increasing inter- acts were not always credited to Porter, for if est to scholars of literacy, who have shown, for catalogs have no readers, they also have no example, that there is no story of early mod- authors. Nor have they been a frequent sub- ern knowledge production without its zeal for ject of critical analysis—an oversight perhaps inventories, or of American public libraries as gendered as it is generic. But, as this essay without Melvil Dewey’s decimals, or of con- argues, to understand reading’s conditions of temporary textuality without algorithms.8 In possibility, we must turn to literary workers, such accounts, catalogs come into focus as like Porter, who authored infrastructure. analog databases that backill the media history of our own “information age.”9 And yet, 325.26: The Negro Question and the true scenes of literary practice are usually Universal Classiﬁcation cast as encounters between readers and writ- ings, not between readers and index cards. As Porter sought to order the thousands he search for evidence of reading moves past of items brought together in the Moorland the catalog to artifacts like commonplaces, Foundation, the most popular system of li- marginalia, and memoir—inscriptions that brary arrangement was the Dewey Decimal record the intimacies of what was read rather Classification, a late- nineteenth- century than how it was found.

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