Shippensburg University professor of English Michael Bibby gave a lecture on April 9, about his research into the identification of institutional racism involving the literary modernism movement.

Modernism focuses on the works of literature produced in North America and Europe from the late 19th century to the about the end of World War II.

Bibby examined how black poets had their work ignored by the majority of scholars and organizations that specialized in modernist poetry.

The point of the lecture was not to critique the term modernism, or to call for a change in the canon of modernism, but rather to investigate how the field organized to exclude “new negro poetry.”

The three volume Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which was published one volume at a time starting in 1973 and finished in 2003, is a prime example of how institutional racism exists in the field, according to Bibby.

The first two volumes together mention more than 300 poets, of which less than 10 percent include any reference of black poets.

“It perpetuates this idea that somehow African-American poetry came out of nowhere after World War II,” Bibby said.

He said black and white poets during the modernist period may not have always had a strong relationship, but they surely worked together at times to improve their skills.

Bibby also cited The Modern Studies Association (MSA) annual conferences as another example of how institutional racism was established.

MSA is an organization “devoted to the study of arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the later nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century,” its website states.

“They are not a bunch of racists,” Bibby said, clarifying the racism he found was not necessarily intentional, but rather the cause of MSA’s traditional practices.

Bibby examined how modernist poetry was evaluated by MSA — particularly, how frequently the group discussed the works of black poets in the group’s conferences.

“Overwhelmingly, what I found in both the MSA conferences and also in their journal, ‘Modernism/modernity’, is that the focus tends to be on fiction for African-American writers — not on poetry,” he said.

He believes the reason for this is that poetry is abstract and does not necessarily reflect the reality and life of blacks in the modernist period.

Bibby said the cause for institutional racism in this field stems back generations, because scholars today are simply following in the footsteps of their predecessors.

Bibby noted that the scope of modernist poetry should change to include to black poets — an act he began to see happen with MSA after he published a research paper on the topic.

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