Week 1: Black Digital Studies By Another Name
Over the course of the semester I will be using this blog space to think reflectively about the process of creating, but also teaching, the Black Digital Studies course (and some of my other syllabi). As educators, we spend so much time crafting syllabi and thinking about the themes and ideas that we want to explore with students and our internet interlocutors, but in many ways, it is not until we are actually in the classroom engaging with students that the narrative of the course is truly written. Therefore, a large part of my teaching is built on an understanding of co-creation and mutual beneficence. Instead of positioning myself as the sole arbiter of information, I create educational spaces where everyone is given a platform to construct and share from their own perspectives and knowing. In addition, this blog space gives me the opportunity to digest the information and data that I receive both within and outside of the classroom. To sit with this process and reflect on where I am, where the students are, and where we should go from here.
This co-construction began with the first week of the course titled By Another Name: Defining Black Digital Studies. This title is a reference to the fact that Black Digital Studies is an umbrella term for a variety of fields and frameworks. Some of the keywords for the course are as follows: Black DH, eBlack Studies, Critical Race Science and Technology Studies, Black Cyberfeminism, Black Code Studies, etc. In addition, the name is a reference to the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Even in the realm of studying digital tools and technology, we do not completely leave behind the resonance or residue of the past. In the readings for this course I continue to find traces of enslavement and oppression, even as so many of the readings are focused on freedom and the future, and I am continuously working through the meaning of this reiteration.
When amongst scholars of more traditional fields and disciplines, I always make the joke that I study the Black future (or as Twitter now calls it the long 21st century). My research is firmly rooted in the 1990’s and beyond, yet, with this course, I am drawn to investigating and unpacking the digital legacy of slavery. As calls to abolish the police become commonplace within social media platforms, this is a question within the current sociocultural context. A question about the meaning of freedom and liberation for us as individuals and as a collective. The question: What do we need to do (or be) in order to get free? With one of the themes of the course being Black Speculative Futures: How do we craft a Black Speculative Future that is based in breaking free from the chains that bind us to this current reality?
In my own life, I have been navigating the tension between freedom and enslavement when it comes to my relationship to digital tools and technologies. As I think critically about data privacy and ownership, I have slowly begun to divest from personal engagement with these entities. Most notably, after 10 years of dedication to biohacking and the quantified self in all of its forms, I have thrown away all of my tracking tech, I deleted the content of my personal social media accounts, and continue to think more everyday about what it means to be free of the technological matrix that keeps us and our attention in bondage. How do we make use of the tools of the 21st century without being, or feeling, used by corporate entities for our user generated content? In crafting the Black Living Data Booklet, I have learned to develop new models of engaging with the self through more traditional methods of record keeping, and I have found through my own observations that these practices create less anxiety and allow for a greater connection to self and feelings of empowerment.
These themes of empowerment and self-determination continued in the reasons why many of my students chose to take this course and other courses in African American Studies. They articulated an almost afrocentric understanding of what technology could do for the Black community. I was encouraged by their optimism and reminded of my own techno-utopian leanings as a college student studying the Digital Humanities. As we work on collaborative digital praxis projects this term, I anticipate being able to see through new eyes the glimmerings of hope for a Black digital future.
With that being said, in next week’s lectures and discussion we will explore the themes of slavery and abolition when it comes to understanding race as a technology and ideology as sociocultural programming. Much of what binds us comes as a result of that which we were taught and that with which we choose to identify. Week 2 thinks about the feeling of Blackness and being within and without community. This discussion lays the foundation for Week 3, an interrogation of the imagined Black community and the role that radical queer and femme understandings of Black identity play in deprogramming this sociocultural matrix.
Looking forward to this intellectual journey, and where we will end up as a class and as collaborators!
Faithe J. Day
Alkalimat, Abdul. "eBlack studies: A twenty‐first‐century challenge." Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics & Culture 2.3 (2000): 69-76. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10999940009362227
Johnson, Jessica Marie, and Mark Anthony Neal. "Introduction: Wild Seed in the Machine." (2017): 1-2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00064246.2017.1329608
