Revisiting the History of Anonymous Peer Review (from Both Sides, Now)

Revisiting the History of Anonymous Peer Review (from Both Sides, Now) When I finished my doctorate and began my teaching career more than two decades ago, I wouldn't have predicted that editorial work would turn out to become so important to me.Early on I recognized that periodical print culture was central to the literary and political movements that I was interested in studying, above all the Harlem Renaissance and Ngritude, and as I began to trace the intersections, correspondences, and discrepancies between those circuits of African diasporic culture, it seemed obvious to me that newspaper, journal, and anthology editors, along with translators-all the sorts of intellectuals who "nurture [d] the inconspicuous forms" of literature "that fit its influence in active communities"-were as instrumental in the making of these movements as the authors of the towering books of the tradition. 1If diasporic consciousnessthe conviction of and investment in the notion of a shared racial background and political destiny among peoples of African descent-is produced most powerfully in print, in no small degree because of the labor of these facilitators, conduits, and compilers, then editorial work is a special sort of social dance, one of the key ways that "discourse creates the social space through which it moves," and thus a means of conjuring publics through the polyvocality of periodical form. 2 Black editors have always been highly conscious of the "publicforming dimensions" of their labor. 3The Martinican Paulette Nardal, the first Black woman to earn a graduate degree at the Sorbonne, was devout, cultivated, and disinclined to overt political activism, but she recognized that her work as the founding editor of the short-lived La revue du monde noir in the early 1930s was itself a radical political intervention: as she told an interviewer years later,