Abstract

This essay examines how the editorial staff of the Crisis positioned readers as collaborators and literary activists. Looking at letters to the editor, I argue that readers helped reevaluate representations of blackness in American literary taste. These letters bridge past, present, and future issues of the magazine and, therefore, evoke a temporality that exceeds the critical capacities of close reading. To address how editors, readers, and authors responded to each other over time, I combine close reading with topic modeling, a method of computational text analysis. This mixed methodology shows how readers participated in the magazine’s cultural campaign against racism by calling for socially progressive depictions of blackness.

You do not currently have access to this content.