The Digital Black Atlantic

2021

Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, Editors

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WATCH: THE GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY'S M.A. PROGRAM IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES EVENT WITH ROOPIKA RISAM, KELLY BAKER JOSEPHS, SONYA DONALDSON, DANIELLE OLSON, JAMILA MOORE PEWU, AND TONIESHA L. TAYLOR

Exploring the intersections of digital humanities and African diaspora studies 

This timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies offers critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production. It spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies.

How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production.

The Digital Black Atlantic
spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies.

Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both.

Contributors: Alexandrina Agloro, Arizona State U; Abdul Alkalimat; Suzan Alteri, U of Florida; Paul Barrett, U of Guelph; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Agata Błoch, Institute of History of Polish Academy of Sciences; Michał Bojanowski, Kozminski U; Sonya Donaldson, New Jersey City U; Anne Donlon; Laurent Dubois, Duke U; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M U; Schuyler Esprit, U of the West Indies; Demival Vasques Filho, U of Auckland, New Zealand; David Kirkland Garner; Alex Gil, Columbia U; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College, Columbia U; D. Fox Harrell, MIT; Hélène Huet, U of Florida; Mary Caton Lingold, Virginia Commonwealth U; Angel David Nieves, San Diego State U; Danielle Olson, MIT; Tunde Opeibi (Ope-Davies), U of Lagos, Nigeria; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Anne Rice, Lehman College, CUNY; Sercan Şengün, Northeastern U; Janneken Smucker, West Chester U; Laurie N.Taylor, U of Florida; Toniesha L. Taylor, Texas Southern U.

Roopika Risam is associate professor of secondary and higher education and English at Salem State University. She is author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy.

Kelly Baker Josephs is professor of English and digital humanities at York College/CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Historians have a lot to gain from this volume, particularly the ways in

which the editors and authors theorize their research inquiries while staying

thoughtful (and often critical) about the ways in which the digital can

engage with, disrupt, or make visible the cracks in disciplinary epistemologies.

Canadian Journal of History

The Digital Black Atlantic is an invaluable collection for digital humanists, as well as for students and scholars who are simply curious about the state of this discipline.

New West Indian Guide

The volume can serve as inspiration to digital humanities practitioners, but also to other scholars. It provides readers with new ideas on what digital methods can be used and in what ways to incorporate them into various study designs.

KULT Journal

This volume of diverse essays reconfigures and reinterrogates the scant sites of representations that include and embrace intersections of diaspora studies, more specifically Black and African diasporas and their connections with Digital Humanities.

Synoptique

Contents

Introduction: The Digital Black Atlantic

Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam

Part I. Memory

1. The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital

Abdul Alkalimat

2. The Ephemeral Archive: Unstable Terrain in Times and Sites of Discord

Sonya Donaldson

3. An Editorial Turn: Reviving Print and Digital Editing of Black-Authored Literary Texts

Amy E. Earhart

4. Access and Empowerment: Rediscovering Moments in the Lives of African American Migrant Women

Janneken Smucker

5. Digital Queer Witnessing: Testimony, Contested Virtual Heritage, and the Apartheid Archive in Soweto, Johannesburg

Angel David Nieves

Part II. Crossings

6. Digital Ubuntu: Sharing Township Music with the World

Alexandrina Agloro

7. Text Analysis for Thought in the Black Atlantic

Sayan Bhattacharyya

8. Austin Clarke’s Digital Crossings

Paul Barrett

9. Radical Collaboration to Improve Library Collections

Hélène Huet, Suzan Alteri, and Laurie N. Taylor

10. Digital Reconnaissance: Re(Locating) Dark Spots on a Map

Jamila Moore Pewu

Part III. Relations

11. Heterotopias of Resistance: Reframing Caribbean Narratives in Digital Spaces

Schuyler Esprit

12. Signifying Shade as We #RaceTogether Drinking Our #NewStarbucksDrink “White Privilege Americana Extra Whip”

Toniesha L. Taylor

13. Slaves, Freedmen, Mulattos, Pardos, and Indigenous Peoples: The Early Modern Social Networks of the Population of Color in the Atlantic Portuguese Empire

Agata Błoch, Demival Vasques Filho, and Michał Bojanowski

14. Digitizing the Humanities in an Emerging Space: An Exploratory Study of Digital Humanities Initiatives in Nigeria

Tunde Opeibi

15. Black Atlantic Networks in the Archives and the Limits of Finding Aids as Data

Anne Donlon

Part IV. Becomings

16. Africa and the Avatar Dream: Mapping the Impacts of Videogame Representations of Africa

D. Fox Harrell, Sercan Şengün, and Danielle Olson

17. Musical Passage: Sound, Text, and the Promise of the Digital Black Atlantic

Laurent Dubois, David Kirkland Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold

18. What Price Freedom? The Implications and Challenges of OER for Africana Studies

Anne Rice

19. On the Interpretation of Digital Caribbean Dreams

Kaiama L. Glover and Alex Gil

Acknowledgments

Contributors