Slowly resharing material from the malware attacked and now disappeared DH the Blog (Diaspora in Hypertext). For the archive and the algorithm. Below are both parts of a two-part post on citation and image use from the first days of the blog. If I think of where this post appeared in the age of the Black feminist internet (and many thanks to Dr. Catherine Knight-Steele whose book Digital Black Feminism is bringing back so many memories), we were adolescents—feeling cunt, confident, and chaotic; emotional, trusting and idealistic. What a time to be alive.
Citation was a significant part of how we expressed our love for each other and how we signaled to others on the internet who we were and what kind of new world we wanted to build.
Attribution Part I: The Art of Folasade Adeoso
This post is from July, 26, 2013 and originally appeared at diasporahypertext.com. Missing and broken links are scratched out.
The artwork gracing the header of this blog, the blog icon, and the @jmjafrx header on Twitter are all courtesy of the creative brilliance that is Folasade Adeoso!
The image (on view here) accompanies a poem by Leigh Bella Jenkins:
I am a being a being made from the ground and man’s flesh They say I’m capable of greatness They say I have unlimited possibilities But I don’t see what they say And who they are I’m just a being grounded so deeply in the earth Confused swallowed by the darkness of this earth I aspire to be like Mother nature a single mother woman
Inspiration for and title credit is given to Luke Bennett.
I could spend an entire class period dissecting this visual and what it says about Atlantic slavery and the role black women's reproduction and sexuality played in the making of the New World. Everything, everything is here. (Syllabus Sidenote: If I did, I'd pair it with Jennifer Morgan's essay, 'Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder.' Of course. Because what wouldn't I pair with that essay?)
Nigerian-Canadian Folasade, who is also a model, discussed her work with Derica Shields of OkayAfrica:
People know you as a model, but you also make pieces of digital art which I first saw on tumblr. When did you start creating in this way, what compelled you to start and where are you hoping to take your art?
I’ve been making work on my computer in my room for a long time. Way back it was manipulating images of Pharrell or Beyonce. I stopped for a while because I took some time to model and then took time off from modelling for personal reasons. But since taking time off from modelling my work has been getting so much better. I’m not just a model, whatever “just a model” means to you, I have a vision and my vision is my voice. I plan to go to back to school and study graphic design and eventually I want my work to be exhibited. Mainly I want my work to start a dialogue, that’s one of the most important things. For my generation of kids it’s so easy to make something and put it on the internet for some ‘likes’. I’m beyond that now [laughs].
Read the entire interview here.
More of her work below: [2018 Edit - links to these images are now broken; I am not reposting them to respect the artist's decision to disappear them]
Motherhood (lovefola.com)
Foxxy Lady (lovafola.com)
Flower Power 2 (lovefola.com)
I love how Fola takes advantage of tech tools to hack her own brain and defy limits:
"I can’t draw, I can’t even draw a stick figure! But everything is drawn in my head, my mind is always working. So when I see an image I like, I might stare at it for a day, then save to my computer and start working on it."
I love how she remixes images more often associated with the period of slavery, colonization, or an 'iconic' Africa to tell new stories about women and children of African descent. I love how she grew up listening to Pharrell and Beyonce, and how, like Badu, she's 'sensitive about her sh*t' (see her image for "Out my Mind, Just in Time" created on her iPhone here).
I love it all! I'm absolutely enthralled and can't wait to see what she does next.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to Fola for giving me permission to use this image in the DH Universe. Please visit her site and explore her work at lovafola.com!
Attribution Part 2: Reflecting on the Politics of Citation
This post is from August 1, 2013 and originally appeared at diasporahypertext.com.
This post began as thank you to Folasade Adeoso for allowing me to use an image she created as my Twitter cover image (@jmjafrx) and as the Diaspora Hypertext, the Blog icon. [link was to part one, posted above]
But it became something more as I reflected on why a post like that was necessary and on what it means to make media and scholarship in the presence of and in the shadow of power. What does it mean for me to ask permission, to receive it, to attribute ideas to their proper owners? To make sure every blog post carries citations or credit for any images, quotes, and screen captures? Artist-thinkers from Bettina Judd to Moya Bailey to Katherine McKittrick have discussed the politics of citation before. Adeoso discussed some of the same herself in her interview with OkayAfrica:
One thing that’s so sad about tumblr is that credits get lost. I’m learning: I keep the original photoshopped file; I set up my tumblr page; I’m owning this. I made this image of Grace Jones, using the Bulletproof album cover which I cropped. One day I went on tumblr and this image had like 2000 reblogs, and I would never had known! People don’t understand, it hurts! I probably didn’t sleep all night because I was making that and you just took it and put it on your blog. Like Erykah Badu said, I’m an artist and I’m sensitive about my shit. [The person apologized & added a credit]
Read the rest of the interview here.
Tumblr is my preferred blogging platform and what she said resonated with me. It's the LatiNegr@s Project home base and where I'm trying to build the Codex. But tension around politics of citation, especially where it involves women and genderqueer people of color, social media, and proper attribution has flared white hot for weeks now. These politics were on display, again, just a couple weeks ago when Genie Lauren (@MoreandAgain) created a petition to stop Juror B37's book deal, posting the name and phone number of her literary agent on Twitter. The offer was rescinded, but the event was reported by major media sites like BuzzFeed as though the book deal ended because of a near spontaneous decision made by the Juror B37--not as though Lauren played a significant, activist role in having the offer pulled.
More recently, in an article for Gawker, Cord Jefferson plagiarized, nearly word-for-word, analysis and wit by longtime Twitter wordsmith @thewayoftheid. When Jefferson and Gawker were confronted by @thewayoftheid on social media, their first response was to condescend to and denigrate both the accusation and the accuser. Tracy Clayton reported on the situation for The Root:
"Whoever was manning Gawker's Twitter account shot down the accusation, calling it "bulls--t." They went on to counteraccuse the Twitterer of plagiarism, and Gawker writer Rich Juzwiak joined in the fray, screaming about how nobody knows who @TheWayOfTheId is. (I guess because big news outlets never take from smaller nameless content producers?)"
[The storify referenced is available here courtesy of Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady on Twitter and Senior Legal Analyst at RH Reality Check)] (2022 edit - Storify has since shut down its servers and so this link is no longer available]
Politics of citation are coming up again and again and again as big media triangulates with social media and the intellectual genius of woc and qpoc on the internet. The appropriation of ideas across the internet requires the willful unseeing of non-white voices online--making it clear that yes, in fact, racism does still exist, even on the internet. This willful unseeing is made even more possible through a racialized condescension toward and demeaning of the way woc and qpoc interact online. Cursing, twerking, yelling (writing in all caps) or using shorthand internet slang, snarking in 140 character bursts--our dozens are fun, sexy, and intellectual only to the extent we stay in our lane (referencing pop culture or very current events like #PaulaDeanDishes). But it isn't seen as serious work.
The very act of inhabiting social media sites like Twitter or Tumblr, as opposed to writing for a major publication or hosting a blog (or teaching in a classroom) seems to give big media sites and other readers/watchers/lurkers permission to dismiss those speaking/tweeting/Tumbling as though they have nothing worthwhile to say even as their labor is subsumed by others more credentialed, capitalized, with bigger megaphones.
Even among digital humanists, with notable exceptions like Chris Long (@cplong), social media is seen as a means to an end or a fun corollary to more serious #dh work like databasing or coding.
Social media is fun but it is also labor. It is how I (and many others) engage the digital humanities. It is time-consuming and messy, often vulgar and full of typos. That doesn't mean it doesn't deserve proper acknowledgement or isn't intellectual.
Social media or otherwise, attribution is a baseline for scholarly production and should be a baseline for online interaction. Providing footnotes, requesting permission, and adding citations isn't difficult. It isn't time consuming. It does require forethought and a recognition that there is real work behind everything found on the internet. It means acknowledging a politics of citation, of discussing, sharing, attributing work is always at play when we share online and in the midst of those politics some voices are always rendered invisible. It means challenging internalized assumptions--likely imported from 'real life' and the way society privileges politics created in the classroom, the boardroom, and the senate chamber over the corner, the barber shop, or the laundromat--about where knowledge is being created online and the role social media plays in intellectual production. And for those of us blogging and sharing as academics, it requires a determination to face down our own ability to oppress and silence even in our most well-meaning discussions.
When I discussed #femfuture in a previous post [new link], I wrote a coda to academic feminists. That coda was also meant to ping academic bloggers in general, especially those making media related to black history and Atlantic slavery. We deal in memory and policy as often as we deal in archive, marking and remarking on territory soaked in blood but covered over in wet cement. We have an obligation to ask ourselves, daily, hourly, and by the Twitter bird minute, "Why and for whom do you work (online)?"