Racing the archive: Will the real William DuBois please stand up?

English Language Notes

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 103-110

  Riley, Shannon Rose ^a  

^a Saint Mary's College

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949819588     PISSN: 00138282     EISSN: 00138282     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00138282-45.1.103     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Reviews of the 1938 production correctly attribute the work to the white journalist. See particularly Brooks Atkinson, "The Play: William Du Bois's [sic] 'Haiti' Opens in Harlem - There's Always a Breeze' Opens Downtown," New York Times 3 March 1938;
2. and Howard Barnes, "'Haiti' Play by William Du Bois [sic] Produced in Harlem," Herald Tribune 3 March 1938. Historical clippings are from the Hallie Flanagan Papers (Billy RoseTheatre Collection, New York: NYPL Library for the Performing Arts).
3. Mary Renda, Glenda Gill, VèVè Clark, and FTP archivists John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown attribute the work correctly to the white playwright. See Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001) 286;
4. Glenda Eloise Gill, White Grease Paint on Black Performers: A Study of the Federal Theatre, 1935-39 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988) 97;
5. VèVè A. Clark, "Haiti's Tragic Overture: (Mis)Representations of the Haitian Revolution in World Drama (1796-1975)," Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography and Art, ed. James Heffernan (Hanover: UP of New England, 1992) 255;
6. and John O'Connor and Lorraine Brown, eds., Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1978) 117.
7. William DuBois, "Thanks to the FederalTheatre," New York Times 20 March 1938: 150.
8. O'Connor and Brown 117; Renda 286.
9. O'Connor and Brown 117.
10. The term "cracker" originally signified someone who lies, but not long after the Civil War came to signify someone poor and white, particularly from Georgia or Florida. See OED Online, 2007, Oxford English Dictionary, 22 Mar. 2007 .
11. "Review of 'Haiti'," Time 31.10 (1938): 34.
12. "'Haiti' Viewed by 74,000," Daily Mirror22 May 1938, Hallie Flanagan Papers. The play also traveled to Boston.
13. William DuBois, "Haiti," eds. Pierre de Rohan and U.S. FederalTheatre Project, FederalTheatre Plays (New York: Random House, 1938) 3-80.
14. Library of Congress Online Catalog, United States Library of Congress, 10 Dec. 2006 .
15. W. B. Du Bois, Haïti, trans. Nicole Vincileoni (Abidjan: Editions CEDA, 1983).
16. O'Connor, Brown, and LOC librarian John Cole discovered lost FTP archives in an airplane hanger and helped organize the material at George Mason University. See O'Connor and Brown, introduction, vii-viii.
17. Nicole Vincileoni, "Notes a propos de la traduction," Haïti, by W. B. Du Bois 8.
18. "William DuBois, 93, Playwright and Editor," New York Times, 19 March 1997, late-final ed.: B11. Copyright © 1997 by The New YorkTimes Co. Reprinted with permission.
19. "Congress, Library of," Britannica Online, 2006, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14 Dec. 2006 .
20. American Memory Collection, 2005, United States Library of Congress, 10 Aug. 2005 .
21. Catalog of the Schomburg Center, 2006, New York Public Library, 10 Dec. 2006 .
22. Jean Kemble, "African American History and Life: 1877-1954: A Selective Guide to Materials in the British Library," The British Library Online Catalog, 2006, The British Library, 10 Dec. 2006 .
23. World Cat, 2006, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., 10 Dec. 2006 .
24. "What is World Cat?" World Cat, 2006, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., 10 Dec. 2006 .
25. Catalogue Bn-Opale Plus, 2006, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 10 Dec. 2006 .
26. The British Library Online Catalog, 2006, The British Library, 10 Dec. 2006 .
27. Kennedy Miller Schultz, Haitian H/(h)istories: Representations of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in the Plays of Glissant, Césaire and Dadié, diss., U of Wisconsin, Madison, 2000 (UMI, 2000), 61-3, 126, 260;
28. Suzanne Jacqueline Spoor, Searching for a Black Republic: TheTextual Invention of Haiti by U.S. Black Artists in the 1930s, diss., U of Maryland, College Park, 1999 (UMI, 1999), 156-57, 322-23, 352. Schultz cites the French translation as source and Spoor perhaps copies the misattribution of the 1938 Random House publication from the LOC.
29. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998) 4, n.1.
30. Andrea L. Foster, "Elsevier Announces New Procedures for Retracting Online Articles," Chronicle of Higher Education 28 Feb. 2003: A35.
31. DianaTaylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke UP, 2003) 20.
32. "Misattribution," OED Online, 2007, Oxford English Dictionary, 22 Mar. 2007 .The citation is originally from a 1941 philosophy resource.