COVE and Open Assembly: How to Deal with the Structural Racism of the Traditional Print Anthology

COVE and Open Assembly: How to Deal with the Structural Racism of the Traditional Print Anthology Dino Franco Felluga (bio), Priyanka A. Jacob (bio), and Rebecca Nesvet (bio) The traditional print anthology is a perfect example of structural racism: it has in the past canonized a corpus of white, largely upper-class male authors, making it difficult even to see, let alone value, the full diversity of literary culture. The Victorian poetry collection used to teach many scholars who completed their undergraduate training in the 1970s and 1980s is a good example: Victorian Poetry and Poetics (1968), edited by Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. All the authors included in it are white men, with the sole exception of a few poems by Christina Rossetti, largely included because of that author's connection to the—appropriately named—Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Print anthologies have spent the last fifty years expanding their offerings by including more female, working-class, and racially diverse authors; however, any such anthology is always, by structural necessity, limited by the choices of its editors and the sheer size and weight of the printed volume. This essay considers how a structural change in how we approach such anthologies can help us diversify our course offerings. We will explain how COVE's approach to anthology-building, what we term open assembly as distinct from open source and open access, allows teachers to explode our previous understanding of the "canon."1 Open assembly applies not only to the assembling of texts into an anthology but also to the assembling of people into groups: by creating a platform for commentary on a text by way of annotation rather than just face-to-face conversation, COVE can facilitate the discussion of thorny subjects such as race while accommodating a diverse variety of media (images, audio, video) and teaching modalities (in-person, hybrid, virtual). We will provide one fascinating use-case: a cross-institutional annotation project taught by Priyanka Jacob (Loyola University, Chicago) and Rebecca Nesvet (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay), which, during the COVID-19 pandemic, helped two separate house- and dorm-bound groups of students connect and have a spirited discussion about race through a text that itself [End Page 12] explores the ravages of disease: Mary Seacole's 1857 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole. THE CALL TO UNDISCIPLINE Inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, ninety-three graduate-student members of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) called on the organization to address the issue of structural racism: Victorian Studies continues to be a field in which white authors dominate reading lists and white scholars vastly outnumber scholars of color, and particularly Black scholars. Moreover, we must come to grips with how white supremacist logics under-gird much of our everyday business, as researchers and as members of academic institutions. (Letter to NAVSA, 12 June 2020) As the authors of the letter go on to write, "We must turn our full attention to making our conferences and our classrooms into anti-racist spaces in which the realities of Victorian literature and history are persistently faced." Shortly thereafter, in July 2020, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong published "Undisciplining Victorian Studies" in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), followed by a fuller article published in Victorian Studies in September of that year. Many articles in this collection discuss that article's challenge to "all scholars, and not just scholars of color": we should all be addressing "the racism that undergirds Victorian Studies." We wholeheartedly agree. However, neither the letter from graduate students to NAVSA nor the LARB essay makes it perfectly clear how best to accomplish this feat in the everyday classroom. COVE AND OPEN ASSEMBLY Hearing these calls, COVE, which was created under the aegis of NAVSA, has dedicated significant effort over the last two years to encode more and more texts by people of colour, while making this work easily available for the creation of custom anthologies. The work, completed in collaboration especially with Adrian Wisnicki's One More Voice and Pearl Chaozon Bauer, Ryan D. Fong, Sophia Hsu, and Wisnicki's Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, has been aided by...

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