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LATEST NEWS!
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel.
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| The Project on the History of
Black Writing (PHBW), originally known as the Afro-American
Novel Project, began in 1983 at the University of Mississippi,
Oxford. Organized to compile a comprehensive bibliographic history of
largely neglected and out of print novels published by
African-American writers, the initial objective was to create a study
guide for both teachers and students to facilitate the use of
African-American texts in the classroom for traditional, comparative,
and inter-disciplinary study. The
Afro-American Novel: A Guide for Teachers and Students,
appeared in 1986, and was later revised and expanded with a two-year
grant from the Ford Foundation. The guide included a bibliography of
novels published between 1853 and 1980, compiled by the Project. The
significant number of titles listed between the Reconstruction and
Urban Migration periods (1865-1910) did much to challenge assumptions
that African-Americans throughout the nineteenth century left only
oral records as a result of widespread illiteracy. In 1989, The Project relocated to Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. Funded by a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PHBW became affiliated with the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. The Project continued to expand their holdings to create A Checklist of the Afro-American Novel, 1853-1990 (1990). In 1996 the PHBW received a two-year grant from the Lemelson Foundation of Hampshire College for innovation and invention in Higher Education. Gaining an affiliation with the Smithsonian's Museum of American History and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, the PHBW spent these two years developing a prototype for a CD-ROM. This CD-ROM, Neither Bond Nor Free: An Anthology of Rare African-American Texts, digitized one complete novel, with information about the author and the period. It was our intention to continue digitizing the novels in the collection to make them available as a full CD-ROM set. With the technology still developing, funds were not sufficient at that time to move the entire database to the digital platform. Neither Bond Nor Free, however, pointed the way for the success of later projects. In 1998 the Project moved to the University of Kansas, and with funds provided by Microsoft and the Kansas Endowment Association, completed the first full phase of its digital project. The full texts of seventy-five African American novels written and published between 1853 and 1919 are now available through Encarta Africana: Library of Black America. Funds remain crucial to the survival of the PHBW. Currently efforts are underway to secure support from corporate and federal agencies to update the Project's equipment and to hire a technical staff to maintain the PHBW website, complete a line of digital projects, and expand the Project's outreach programs. To Date, the project has the most comprehensive database of largely-out-of-print and neglected novels published by African Americans and has developed a range of activities for teaching and researching African-American literature at the high school and college level and beyond. PHBW is based in the Department of English at the University of Kansas and provides internships and assistantships for qualified graduate and undergraduate students. As PHBW expands into other literary genres, it continues to create and disseminate through print and new technologies. The Principal component of the PHBW is its manuscript collection. There are photographic copies of 480 texts dating from 1861 to present, a growing archive of over sixty rare books, and more than one hundred rare and out of print journals. In addition the project has collected bibliographic information for over 1,500 items of literature written by African Americans to serve as the foundation for collection development. Bibliographic information acquired by the project has been published and distributed a number of times, thus serving in conjunction with the texts to create a means of providing a strong research base for the study of lesser known African American literature from the last two centuries.
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