[DCRM-L] Cataloging American songsters, and other racist material

[Zinkham, Helena]

Does the genre heading “Ethnic stereotypes” help?   I realize that the phrase is not as strong as you’re indicating. And, the term ‘ethnic’ has its own issues.  Just jogging the conversation along, because what you’re describing is of strong interest for photography as well as prints.

Scope note: “Images that depict stereotypical traits of people classed according to shared racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural background.  The cross references are  “Racist stereotypes” and “National stereotypes.”   Thesaurus for Graphic Materials:   http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=stereotypes&co=tgm


Helena Zinkham
Chief, Prints & Photographs Division

[http://staff.loc.gov/sites/librarylink/files/2018/08/Email-LOC-logo.jpg]

From: DCRM-L <dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu> On Behalf Of Erin Blake
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2020 6:14 PM
To: DCRM Users' Group <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
Subject: [DCRM-L] Cataloging American songsters, and other racist material

This is a follow-up on Bob Kosovsky's description of the American songsters he's cataloging in the "Machine-press special collections" thread, where he wrote "if anyone doubts the racism rampant in the second half of the 19th century, one need not go further than a typical American songster."

I'd love to learn more about how catalogers are surfacing racist content as a genre in special collections. Most of the resources I'm finding relate to archives or to subject headings, but the items I have in mind aren't technically "about race" they're simply "racist."

With songsters, you can get pretty far in surfacing racist content by transcribing all the titles into the table of contents: researchers can search for well-known derogatory keywords in direct quotes. But I'd love to have a genre term that would convey something along the lines of  "655 _4 $a Deeply disturbing racist material that would have been considered perfectly ordinary by most middle-class white Americans at the time" when the ostensible subject is simply "650_0 $a Country life."

I'm particularly interested in how to bring racist content in prints and figurines to light, given that there's usually nothing to transcribe, so keyword searching for directly-quoted derogatory terms won't help. There are also times where the racist content is technically just a minor part of a generic "background" ... but I don't want to omit mentioning the background racism when summarizing the visual content in the 520. Not only is it currently a topic of great interest to researchers, but ignoring it would make me complicit in treating it as unremarkable.

Thanks for any thoughts and ideas....

Erin.

______________________
Erin Blake, Ph.D.  |  Senior Cataloger  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |  201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu<mailto:eblake at folger.edu>  |  www.folger.edu<https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/-t5RCjRgpBtArRXC7R7_2?domain=urldefense.com>   |  Pronouns: she/her/hers

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