scrapbook post: week ending 2021 August 13

things found here & there

Skating between research, writing, and ‘rithmetic

Hosted a workshop for the Ohio 5 on Anti-Racist and Decolonial Pedagogies. Some of the material that inspired that facilitation or that I’m incubating with:

• This 2015 HASTAC Scholars forum on Decolonizing the Digital hosted by micha cárdenas, Noha F. Beydoun and Alainya Kavaloski

• Hogan, Skylee-Storm, and Krista McCracken. “Doing The Work: The Historian’s Place in Indigenization and Decolonization.” Active History (blog), December 12, 2016. http://activehistory.ca/2016/12/doing-the-work-the-historians-place-in-indigenization-and-decolonization/.

• Yomaira C. Figueroa’s Decoloniality Sandbox which was part of working draft of the Diaspora keyword for the award-winning! Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, but didn’t make it into the final version for technical reasons on my end.

• Always this essay Parham, Marisa. “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Accessed January 22, 2020. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/0fa03a28-d067-40b3-8ab1-b94d46bf00b6.

• Gaertner, David, and Melissa Haberl. “Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media.” In the Moment (blog), January 21, 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/01/21/recoding-relations-dispatches-from-the-symposium-for-indigenous-new-media/.

• Léopold Lambert’s issue (35) of Funambulist called DECOLONIAL ECOLOGIES: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/decolonial-ecologies/decolonial-ecologies-introduction

• Clapper, Jordan. “The Ancestors in the Machine: Indigenous Futurity and Indigenizing Games.” In Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, 427–72. Punctum Books, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1r7878x.16.

I also love using William and Ellen Crafts’ escape from Georgia in 1848 as an example of unstructured data and maroon knowledge. I usually reference this essay by Uri McMillan when I do: Uri McMillan, “Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion,” e-misférica 5, no. 2 (2008) http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/eng/publications/emisferica/5.2/en52_mcmillan.html. ) There’s also a webarchive of it is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20160306233435/http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/e-misferica-52/mcmillan.

Some of these readings are very familiar, some are ones I’m returning to after reading only briefly. Grateful for the time and space to be able to sit with some of these, reflect more deeply, and continue to process what decolonization is and must mean for myself and others. I haven’t read Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature yet (waiting on my copy to arrive!) but just from the title alone….it is a praxis, a manifesto, a mantra. Read over and over and over. Read until you understand. Then read again.

For those looking for an introduction to the digital humanities textbook, I added one by Drucker to my resources page that you can download as a PDF and will keep adding resources there as I think of them (and try to rebuild from the deceased dh.jmjafrx.com). In general, the resources page continues to expand so feel free to go play there at will.

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What I’m reading

“That life in Europe was nice, just nice; this life you first see at the crack of dawn is the beginning of your new birth, your new beginning, the way in which you will come to know yourself—not the conniving, delusional thief that you really are, but who you believe you really are, a virtuous man who can survive all alone in the world of a little god-forsaken island. All well and good, but why did you not just live out your life in this place, why did you feel the need to introduce me, Friday, into this phony account of your virtues and your survival instincts? Keep telling yourself geography is history and that it makes history, not that geography is the nightmare that history recounts.”

A Letter to Robinson Crusoe, from Jamaica Kincaid

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What I’m watching/listening to:

Moya Bailey has launched the podcast we were all waiting for. Transforming Misogynoir, the podcast. I listened to the first episode with Mai’a Williams (who I first encountered through her blogging on Palestine and through her work with China Martens and Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines) and it felt like warm hug from somewhere in my radical womyn of color past. I follow and followed these women for their organizing genius, their generosity, and their love of Black people and oppressed people all around the world. I have always learned so much from them and everything Mai’a said (especially about the way the internet used to be a conversation within a community and now is a different kind of “influencer” guided medium) felt so true. Can’t wait for the next episodes and will be following along. Listen below:

And if you want to listen to Mai’a and China talk about the Revolutionary Mothering in a reunion with other authors at the JHU “Critical Conversation on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future” in February 2021, see below.

There’s a new podcast out of the Barnard shop run by Kaiama Glover and Tami Navarro. Called Writing Home, the podcast speaks with Caribbean writers about how they do what they do and what it all means. I subscribe on Spotify and am catching up to the season. I love them all; especially this episode with Naomi Jackson about being ready to tell certain stories, being the person to tell the story, and how we can be generous with ourselves and others when we try but still miss the mark. It also makes me think of adrienne marie brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us, but most things make me think of that book these days.

And this quote at the end of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ interview in episode two:

"It also has to do with a rejection of certain capitalist formations of the day and units of time. And you know all of that is happening at the same time. How do I show up for what I'm supposed to do, who I'm supposed to be, to be accountable for what I'm here for, but not by reproducing what we have all been forced to survive about this idea of time that comes out of the structures Sylvia Wynter is talking about. This is what makes slavery not only imaginable, but inevitable. We can't continue to think that way, because that will continue to be the only possibility. And yet, here we are. We have been shaped by that. We have internalized it. We--and this is what I think is so amazing about Sylvia Wynter's body of work--she wants us to see we think it's natural, what we do. And there's actually whole epistemologies and ways and science that is taught that says this is nature doing this. And it's not. It's the story that we're telling about whats natural. So I think that time is such a huge part of that. Because to totally disregard it is met with violence. Even in the small scale of a parking ticket. If you don't acknowledge the time that you're supposed to pay that--and everything else. Rent? You can't just not acknowledge time in capitalism! You will be met with violence. And yet. Here we are." 

There’s also an older video on Afrofuturism I ran across as part of a research haul featuring the beautiful and brilliant Alondra Nelson! Produced by SOHO Repertory Theatre in 2010 for an exhibition.

always learning,

jmj