Week 2: How it feels to Be Black Digital Me
Picking up where we left off, this course utilizes the method of call and response. While I did not initially intend to utilize this framework, grounded theorist that I am, the theme emerged as I delved into the selected readings. Specifically, I began to notice that many of the readings call for a particular type of scholarship or understanding of the relationship between Black Studies and Digital Studies, so the syllabus and the assignments that I developed act as a response to those calls and to engage with the ways that certain readings seem to call and respond to each other. In Week 2, we see this call and response through readings on eBlack Studies, Black Code Studies, and Critical Race Science and Technology Studies.
One of the first readings that I added to my syllabus was Abdul Alkalimat’s "eBlack studies: A twenty‐first‐century challenge", which clearly states the importance of including libraries/information studies in the work that is done within Black Studies. As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation jointly appointed in the Libraries/School of Information Studies and the Department of African American Studies my own positionality as a scholar is invested in this call. It was not lost on me that the Black Digital Studies course also answers the call of eBlack studies as a “new course, a new concentration, and a new conception of mapping our existence in cyberspace” which incorporates the relationship between libraries, information studies, and Black Studies (75).
In pairing this piece with Black Code Studies as a response to eBlack Studies, I offered this sentence from the Introduction to the Black Code Studies edition of The Black Scholar by Jessica Marie Johnson and Marc Anthony Neal: “Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical.” My students and I spent the last third of the class unpacking the radical, the queer, the femme, and the fugitive through our own standpoints on tradition and normativity within academic disciplines and the African diaspora. Specifically, we grappled with the norms and traditions of American Politics and being in and of Black Community. Reflecting on the 50 Years of African American Studies research as it relates to student movements and collective organizing: Is a discipline always already radical if it was radical in its founding? Drawing parallels between the ways that corporations co-opt movements for their own benefit through social media in our current day, How does disciplinarity co-opt the spirit of revolutionary fields and frameworks?
Within my lesson plans and class discussion, I spend as much time teaching Black Digital Studies as I do teaching Critical Digital Pedagogies through being transparent with the students about the selection of readings, technologies, and how I position myself and my work within the academy. The final question for the lecture portion of the week asked: What does it mean to do radical work within academic institutions? Is it even possible? And of course, What is the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition within Black Digital Studies? One of my favorite parts of reading academic work is catching the tea and teaching students how to read the somewhat hidden critiques and implicit arguments that academics include in their work, footnotes, and other practices. In the eBlack studies article, Alkalimat states “The early adopters of the fight for Black Studies advanced their cause based on community struggle. A second generation emerged in a career stream delinked from these struggles. They cultivated academic careers rooted in the struggle for tenure” (70). This statement speaks to the radical by asking the question, when we say we are doing the work, what is the work and who is it for? Instead of seeing the fight for tenure and the struggle for community as separate, Alkalimat positions them both as ideological, therefore: What are the ideological struggles for revolution and liberation within our world(s) and How can we create space for coalition that takes into account multiple struggles at the same time?
This week, the students spoke to ideological struggles around corporations, disciplines, and political positions. We shared an understanding of the Radical as always Other, as existing far outside of boundaries and binaries, an amorphous term that could mean many things to different people, while also being a term that is associated with specific and bounded identities and ideological frameworks. Before they left lecture, I gave a reminder that we will continue to talk about what radical could mean and what the radical does through a discussion of abolition, with the specific question: What does it mean to have an abolitionist consciousness around the study of science and technology? How do you do work in science and technology that is abolitionist?
The concept of abolition moves us forward in the class, as we look back on our discussion of slavery and freedom, to begin investigating race as a technology, a techne, a creation. Race as something that is in the making, that does something in the world, that programs and configures. The question for Wednesday’s workshop: What are the mechanisms of race in our society? How do we use race, how do we instrumentalize it? I think here about my own research on Black community and the concept of the Imagined Black community. The ways in which cisheteronormative understandings of Black identity structure how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others. Programming our understanding of what blackness looks like, what if feels like, what it is, and what it could be. I offer race as a technology as one way to call out sociocultural programming. To begin an interrogation of what society and socialization may have taught us about what it means to be Black. Instead of thinking about race as inherent, genetic, or natural, we can begin to deprogram by thinking of race as inventive and constructive, as well as thinking about identity as an avatar for essence.
This week begins the transition into the second half of the History and Theory section of the course. While Week 1 and 2 introduce and build the foundation of digital understandings of Black Studies, Week 3 and 4 deconstruct these paradigms through Black queer and femme standpoints on technology, surveillance, and the carceral.
Until Next Week!
Faithe J. Day
Week 1 and Week 2 Readings
