Producing Their Own Literature: June Jordan and the Pedagogical Politics of Literary Anthologies

In 2004, two years after June Jordan passed away, Random House issued a reprint of her classic edited collection Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, described on the back cover as “a poignant, panoramic collection of poetry from some of the most eloquent voices in the art.” First published in 1970, Soulscript responded to what Jordan felt was Clarence Major’s excessive leniency in editing The New Black Poetry (1969) and the sense she shared with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) that black literary anthologies had been constrained by an imperative to protest and selected for their “sociological” rather than “literary” interest (Jordan, Letter to Milton Meltzer).¹ Her aim, in contrast, was “to demonstrate the existing literature of American black poets,” emphasizing the literary and aesthetic value of the poems she selected. On publication, Soulscript was met with critical approbation, lauded as “an exemplary, tasteful anthology” (Review) and “an enjoyable volume of thought-provoking reading” (Tarver). Reviewers praised these poems as “the best, represent[ing] a striking convergence of the vocabulary of individual recognitions and historical immediacy” (Review). Since then, Soulscript has become a foundational anthology of African American poetry.

While Soulscript has been deservedly praised, scholars rarely analyze the fact that it included student writing. In fact, the collection opens with fourteen poems written by Jordan’s students, aged twelve to eighteen years, published alongside the work of literary luminaries such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer. When Jordan’s publisher, Milton Meltzer, wanted to cut several of her students’ poems, Jordan fought back passionately, insisting in a letter to Meltzer that eleven student-poets “are necessary to support my contention that children flow among the wellsprings of poetry as much as any adult.” Their voices, she believed, were crucial for the anthology, which she hoped would serve as a corrective to the classroom’s “typical textbook” by challenging what counts as literature, who decides, and the ways education is organized to erect barriers between student writing and literature. Soulscript sold well, primarily to libraries and school systems, allowing students’ words to travel to classrooms as far as Houston and Albuquerque. While the classroom was central to the production, dissemination, and reception of this anthology, its erasure in scholarship reflects a broader scholarly tradition that privileges the political work of literature over that of teaching. Moreover, it silences the very student voices Jordan fought so hard to include.

In recent years, journals such as MELUS have countered this trend by dedicating special issues to pedagogy, as part of what we might think of as literature’s pedagogical turn.² The 2005 special issue of MELUS challenged the idea that pedagogical praxis is divorced from theory, and the 2017 special issue extended these conversations to questions of teaching multi-ethnic literature in “anxious times.” I address similar “theoretical, historical, and practical concerns” (Stanciu and Lin 9) about teaching multi-ethnic literatures but from a slightly different angle. Through analysis of Jordan’s edited anthologies Soulscript and The Voice of the Children (1970) alongside her archival teaching materials, I show how classrooms have been central to the production, reception, and dissemination of African American and multicultural literature. My analysis of this multifaceted archive reveals how Jordan undertook literary editorship and the publication of student writing as teaching practices designed to empower marginalized students. Rather than treating teaching as that which simply pays the bills to sustain an author’s “real work,” I show how teaching and writing are deeply intertwined forms of meaningful political work.

Jordan is most often studied for her poetry, essays, and news articles in The Progressive. She believed language is a means for “truth-telling” and precise communication, a way to pierce through the lies circulated by media and textbooks. She is best known for critiquing long-standing conditions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism and their manifestations in everyday life: the race riots of the 1960s; police brutality against African Americans; widespread poverty in New York City’s immigrant communities; rape culture; racial profiling; and US imperialism in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, and Palestine...