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

[Noble, Richard]

A minor correction not affecting the point made: it was Plessy v. Ferguson
that was decided in 1896.

RICHARD NOBLE :: RARE MATERIALS CATALOGUER :: JOHN HAY LIBRARY
BROWN UNIVERSITY  ::  PROVIDENCE, R.I. 02912  ::  401-863-1187
<Richard_Noble at Br <RICHARD_NOBLE at BROWN.EDU>own.edu>


On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:59 PM Bob Kosovsky <bobkosovsky at nypl.org> wrote:

> Hi Erin,
>
> It's a problem that I and many others have wrestled with for years.
> There's no LCSH term for racist material - or even one that comes close.
> And even what you find is sometimes inappropriate.  Example:  portrayals of
> performers in blackface.  We know that until the end the 19th century,
> blackface performers were white.  Yet you'll often find the heading:  *African
> Americans* $x *Songs and Music*.  I feel it's incorrect to apply this
> heading to racist, demeaning or negative content.
>
> What I've done in the past is have one heading for *African Americans*
> and another heading for *Stereotypes (Social psychology)** $z **United
> States. *At times I think I've added a third heading (which I can't
> recall at the moment). Clumsy yes, but I've yet to find something better.
>
> More recently (for this songster project), I've been able to use *Minstrel
> music* $z *Texts *- both the subject and genre headings indicate that
> this is work performed by people in blackface.  Those headings avoid the
> issue of whether the content is problematic, perhaps leaving us to suggest
> that *all* minstrel music is problematic (I believe it is, even if it's
> instrumental music parodying or fantasizing about how African American
> might have played - no texts needed).
>
> When it gets to images, that's also something that makes me feel
> uncomfortable.  Fortunately there's a heading *Blackface entertainers*.
> The heading for Blackface itself provides a good number of scope notes
> explaining the social context of blackface and minstrelsy.   Another
> heading would appear to be *African Americans* $s *Caricatures and
> cartoons*.  I add the stereotype heading to that too.
>
> [Excursis:  Having done a digital project involving over 1,000 pieces of
> sheet music of the 1890s, I was always very puzzled why suddenly beginning
> in 1895 there is an explosion of racists covers.  Then recently someone
> suggested a possible explanation:  The Supreme Court's Dred Scott case
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott> was decided in 1896, so the
> arguments would have occurred in 1895.  I've yet to hear a better
> explanation.]
>
>
> Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Librarian, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
> Music & Recorded Sound Division
> The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts - Dorothy and Lewis
> B. Cullman Center
>
> 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023
>
> www.nypl.org
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:14 PM Erin Blake <erin.blake.folger at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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  |
>> www.folger.edu
>> <https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/-t5RCjRgpBtArRXC7R7_2?domain=urldefense.com>
>>   |  Pronouns: she/her/hers
>>
>>
>>
>
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