—Tara McPherson, from Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation, 2012
By ArnoldReinhold – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82500222
November 6, 2023
It would take me weeks to examine and thoroughly explore all of the texts referred to by the authors of these four papers; accordingly, I am required to take a great deal on faith and without question which I’d prefer to dig into with a big shovel. For instance, who wouldn’t want to read in its entirety the paper Kim Gallon refers to by Moya Z. Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists are White”? Or watch all of Mark Alan Neal’s webcast, Left of Black. Yet, if I keep clicking on all the tantalizing links in these papers and their bibliographies, I’ll never be able to figure out something to say about it all by 3 p.m. tomorrow…
Kim Gallon asserts:
“I seek to set in motion a discussion of the black digital humanities by drawing attention to the “technology of recovery” that undergirds black digital scholarship, showing how it fills the apertures between Black studies and digital humanities. Indeed, the black digital humanities help to unmask the racialized systems of power at work in how we understand the digital humanities as a field and utilize its associated techniques…”
and
“Recovery rests at the heart of Black studies, as a scholarly tradition that seeks to restore the humanity of black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization…”
and
“’Ultimately, the task of black digital humanities is to ask, ‘What aspects of the digital humanities might be made more “humanistic” if we were to look at them from the perspective of blackness?’ The black digital humanities raises the question, ‘How can digital tools and processes such as text mining and distant reading be justified when there is so much to do in reconstructing what it means to be human?’”
To even begin to parse all of these and many other claims like them, the first development I can see is that the bar for what an academic and cultural discipline called “Black Digital Humanities” will be expected to do seems very high indeed.
In Tara McPherson’s 2012 blog post quoted above, the questions were just as probing but the aspiration seemed more modest: she wanted to ask not just
“why are the digital humanities so white?”
but also
“why American studies is not more digital.”
Miriam Posner, on the other hand, in her 2012 blog post, “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code” moved in the opposite direction— seeming to answer back to McPherson’s query about technical knowledge that if women and people of color want to succeed in the “DH” they need to learn to code, etc., learn about systems and the use of technology, but that women and people of color haven’t entered the digital humanities with those skills.
Posner opens her post with this cartoon—
from “xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language, to begin her discussion of what she views as the unfriendly climate for women and people of color in technology:
“But I wanted to talk here about why men are the ones who code, so that we can speak openly about the fact that programming knowledge is not a neutral thing, but something men will tend to have more often than women.”
and:
“So I am saying to you: If you want women and people of color in your community, if it is important to you to have a diverse discipline, you need to do something besides exhort us to code.”
By the time Kim Gallon is coming at all of this from the perspective of 6-10 years later, in 2016, she’s asking for so much more than her predecessors, expressing ideas and feelings that are almost religious in tone; a need for recovery and restoration, exhorting the discipline and its practitioners to reconstruct what it means to be human, to see humanity as “an evolving category,” “a contingent idea,” “a construct.” She calls for “a black epistemology” to generate questions about these concepts. Is there, as she posits, a connection between “the racialization of humanity” and “the digital as power”?
One could reasonably ask: what’s changed in America since the years 2008-2016? and you would feel right at home in Jessica Marie Johnson’s 2018 and Safiya Umoja Noble’s 2019 essays, with their invocations of violence from the outset. I wondered whether Johnson, who opens with the grisly story of the execution of the enslaved Neptune, in Suriname, in the 1770s, realized that she has echoed almost exactly the opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which focuses in similar detail on the contemporaneous 1757 public drawing and quartering of a white European commoner, Robert-Francois Damiens in Paris. Whether the parallel is intentional or not, both her and Noble’s writing radiates the heat of conflict on the streets of the United States after 2016. Noble quotes Jarret Drake, the former digital archivist leaving Princeton in 2017, expressing his bitter explanation of why he’s pursuing a PhD in anthropology in order to study,
“how communities in the US are using memory projects in the fight against state violence” since he cannot stomach how his white professional colleagues have stayed “complicitly silent as state agents slaughter Black people in the streets.”
Yikes! There’s lots of what I’d call “hot rhetoric” in both of these essays, closer in time as they are to events like the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and in contrast to the considered, sincere engagement of Chambliss and French, 2022, in A Generative Praxis: Creation, Curation, and Black Counterpublics. Yet one can feel the intense gravitational pull on all of this work of the American political and cultural events of 2016-2020, and of the looming election of 2024.
Geospatial Librarian 