Week 11: Black to the Future
It is the 11th week of my number 11 class (AAS 371) which has 11 students which I walk to at 11:11 and then I arrive at 11:23 on the dot, without fail (and yes, the synchronicity is like that this year). This week begins the final section of the course titled “Black Digital Praxis”. Now that we have made it through the history, theory, and frameworks of Black Digital Studies as well as the media and methods of technocultural analysis, we can now begin thinking about how the field understands itself in practice. Not only through the practice of research, but greater considerations around the purpose of a Black Digital Studies i.e. What does Black Studies bring to our understanding of the digital? As Safiya Noble writes in “Towards a Critical Black Digital Humanities”, “What does the DH field know about Black Studies that could forward our aims of a critical digital humanities, and what are the key intellectual drivers that might help frame what we take up in practice”.
Bringing in a more intersectional understanding of the Digital Humanities, this week’s lecture focused on #transformDH and Moya Bailey’s "All the digital humanists are white, all the nerds are men, but some of us are brave". This piece responds to the lack of diversity in the Digital Humanities, by writing that:
The way in which identities both inform theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely overlooked [and] . . . The move from ‘margin to centre’ offers the opportunity to engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital humanities. (Bailey)
By decentering “an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity, and able-bodiedness” Bailey writes about the ways that the Digital Humanities replicates many of the same hierarchies as other fields (Bailey). Through the Black Digital Studies course, we have discussed the many areas where this politics of “whiteness, masculinity, and able-bodiedness” has made it difficult for intersectionality marginalized individuals to make a space for themselves. Whether that be in the STEM fields, the video-game industry, film/television, and many other areas this argument is a recurring theme in the course and of course within our society. Noting the Digital Humanities work that scholars are doing outside of the field, Bailey also discusses how we can make more room for scholarship that is engaged with identity and Digital Humanities that might not be immediately identified as such (for example the Black Feminist blogging of the Crunk Feminist Collective).
The workshop for the week also spoke to Bailey’s question “What counts as a Digital Humanities Project”. As someone who came to the Digital Humanities a decade ago, what counted as a Digital Humanities project then and what counts now is somewhat different. In the most general terms, I view Digital Humanities projects as projects which utilize digital tools and technologies for humanistic inquiry. However, I believe that over time, the Digital Humanities has become more associated with learning the practical skills and methods of doing technological work more than the theoretical work that initially drew me to the field. Therefore, in constructing this course, I wanted to use my position as someone who is primarily interested in the theory of the Digital Humanities to get students to think about and through questions about the nature of reality and sociocultural programming. While the weekly workshops focus on methods, I view these practical and more hands-on exercises as an addition to the theoretical work that we primarily engage in each week.
Specifically, this week’s workshop offered a brief overview of Purdue’s Digital Humanities Toolbox, and examples of the many ways that people create Black Digital Humanities (DH) projects. As one of many responses to critiques of the Digital Humanities, Black DH centers Black thought, creativity, and community through curation, critique, and collection work. For me, Black Digital Studies acts as an umbrella term for fields and frameworks like Black DH. By including the Black Digital Humanities in this course, it was important for me to discuss how Black Digital Studies is making a space for Black history and remembrance in the future. Through a preview of Afrofuturism (which will be taught in depth during Week 13), I began discussions of the relationship between the past and the future through a consideration of ancestry, speculation, and imagination.
Drawing from this week’s additional reading, Jessica Marie Johnson’s Johnson "Markup BodiesBlack [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." lecture ended with the quote:
Black digital practice . . . predates digital intervention, drawing on strategies of empowerment, joy, and kinship created out of Black freedom struggles to facilitate the use of digital tools and create new methodologies, practices, and even ethics for their use. (Johnson 68)
Instead of just positioning Black history as solely in the past and Afrofuturism as only speculation about the future, I used this quote to complicate our understanding of time and the digital. To note that a “Black digital practice” could predate “digital intervention” reminds me of the statement “There are Black people in the future” in the same way that there was Black digital practice in the past. Drawing on Grace Gipson’s chapter “Creating and Imagining Black Futures through Afrofuturism”, it is possible to utilize the concept of Afrofuturism as a form of flame keeping, with flame keeping as “acts of preserving cultural productions and bodies of knowledge” (Gipson 86). Specifically, Gipson thinks about how historical Black texts can be utilized to envision Black futures i.e. the work of Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, W.E.B. DuBois, etc. As I stated it in class, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and here we all are. Therefore, what does it mean to look to the past to construct our visions of the future? What are the afro-futures which are created in moments of resistance and how do these moments or visions create a portal or open up a timeline where we can leap towards change and action in the present and future?
Due to this focus on Black history as a premonition or prophesy of Black Futures, the workshop for this week speaks to the importance of archives. Within Black Studies in particular, research in Black history and culture is especially important so that we can remember where we are going. Thinking about what counts as Digital Humanities in our current moment, a common practice of the DH project is enlisting scholars to work with libraries and museums which have become more invested in digitizing collections and sharing them with a larger viewing public through virtual exhibits/tours, online experiences with material objects, etc. In addition, as society and cultures become more mediated by digital tools and technologies we must also collect and curate new media and digital culture. Therefore, data literacy and digital skills have become more important to research and learn. The workshop for this week ended with me sharing the Black Living Data Booklet with the class as an example of how to utilize Black Digital Studies to understand archives and collections, as well as to gain skills in data and information literacy.
As a form of activist work, the #BLDB was a perfect end to the week as it moves us into next week’s focus on digital activism. Reflecting on this week, the opening discussion question for next week acts as a bridge during which we will explore: What is the relationship between protests of the past and the present? Then, preparing the students for Week 13’s discussion of Afrofuturism, the second question is: What do you imagine protest and activism will look like in the future? Questions for us all to ponder in the current moment.
Required Readings -
Bailey, Moya Z. "All the digital humanists are white, all the nerds are men, but some of us are brave." Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1 (2011): 9-12.
Additional Reading(s) -
