Digital Black Atlantic
Roopika Risam will talk about the Digital Black Atlantic on June 16, 18:45 (CEST)
In the third Digital Americas Conference "warm-up" talk, Roopika Risam (an associate professor for secondary and higher education and English at Salem State University) will discuss the Digital Black Atlantic.
Drawing on her experience co-editing the volume The Digital Black Atlantic for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) with Kelly Baker Josephs, this talk will explore the challenges of putting postcolonial digital humanities into practice by producing a volume on African diaspora digital humanities. From series editors who struggled to see the difference between our proposed volume on the digital Black Atlantic and another proposed volume on global digital humanities to difficult editorial choices we encountered, the process of assembling the volume raised the critical question of how "the digital" travels throughout the African diaspora, changing and being changed by local contexts for digital knowledge production. The roots and routes of the digital in the African diaspora--from Nigeria to Dominica to South Africa to the United States to Jamaica and on--offer a critical transformation of digital humanities praxis that is a practice of cultural survival necessary to ensuring a central place for the African diaspora in the digital cultural record.
Roopika Risam is an associate professor for secondary and higher education and English at Salem State University. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2018). Risam is also the co-editor of the volumes The Digital Black Atlantic (with Kelly Baker Josephs; U of Minnesota P, 2021), South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations Across Technology's Cultural Canon (with Rahul K. Gairola; Routledge, 2020), and Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (with Barbara Bordalejo; Arc Humanities Press, 2019) and co-editor of the journal special issues "Minimal Computing" (with Alex Gil; Digital Humanities Quarterly, forthcoming) and "Gender and Digital Labor" (with Carolyn Elerding and Rahdhika Gajjala; First Monday vol. 23, no. 3) and editor of the journal special issue "Gender, Globalization, and the Digital Humanities" (Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, vol. 8).
This talk is brought to you as a collaboration between the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz and the Austro-American Society for Styria.
RSVP via email.