19. Feminist Digital - Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Femi ni stDi gi t al Humani t i es: Theor et i cal , Soci al ,and Mat er i al Engagement s El i z abet hLos h J es s i c aM J ohns on

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Home

Courses

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DHSI@ & Events

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Archive

Saturday, 3 June 2017 [Workshop: A Brief Introduction to DH] 9:00 to 4:00

Workshop: A Brief Introduction to DH (MacLaurin D115, Classroom)

Sunday, 4 June 2017 [DHSI Registration, Meetings, Workshops] Full Day Workshops - Data Wrangling for Digital Projects (MacLaurin D111 Classroom) - Intersectionality and Surveillance (David Strong C124, Classroom) 9:00 to 4:00

Early Class Meeting: 3. [Foundations] DH For Department Chairs and Deans (David Strong C114, Classroom) Further details are available from instructors in early May to those registered in the class. Registration materials will be available in the classroom.

12:30 to 4:30

DHSI Registration (NEW LOCATION: MacLaurin Building, Room A100)

1:00 to 4:00

3-hour Workshops - DHSI Knits: History of Textiles and Technology (David Strong C108, Classroom) - Use Apache Spark to Explore and Process Large Datasets for Humanities Research (David Strong C114, Classroom) - 3D Visualization for the Humanities (MacLaurin D105, Classroom) - Archives for Digital Humanists (MacLaurin D010, Classroom) - Dynamic Ontologies for the Humanities (MacLaurin D016, Classroom) DHSI Welcome BBQ (Get the details, and let us know you're coming, via this link!)

4:30 to 6:00

After the welcome BBQ, many will wander to Cadboro Bay and the pub at Smuggler's Cove OR the other direction to Shelbourne Plaza and Maude Hunter's Pub.

Monday, 5 June 2017 Your hosts for the week are Ray Siemens and Dan Sondheim.

7:45 to 8:15

Last-minute Registration (MacLaurin Building, Room A100)

8:30 to 10:00

Welcome, Orientation, and Instructor Overview (MacLaurin A144) Classes in Session (click for details and locations)

10:15 to Noon

1. [Foundations] Text Encoding Fundamentals and their Application (Clearihue A102, Lab) 2. [Foundations] Digitisation Fundamentals and their Application (Clearihue A108, Lab) 3. [Foundations] DH For Department Chairs and Deans (David Strong C114, Classroom) 4. [Foundations] Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists) (Clearihue A103, Lab) 5. [Foundations] Understanding The Predigital Book: Technology and Texts (McPherson Library A003, Classroom) 6. Out-of-the-Box Text Analysis for the Digital Humanities (Human and Social Development A160, Lab) 7. Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities (Human and Social Development A170, Lab) 8. CloudPowering DH Research (Clearihue A012, Lab) 9. Digital Storytelling (MacLaurin D111, Classroom) 10. Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities (MacLaurin D105, Classroom) 11. Text Processing - Techniques & Traditions (Cornett A229, Classroom) 12. 3D Modelling for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (MacLaurin D010, Classroom) 13. RDF and Linked Open Data (David Strong C108, Classroom) 14. Conceptualizing and Creating a Digital Edition (MacLaurin D103, Classroom) 15. Visualizing Information: Where Data Meets Design (MacLaurin D107, Classroom) 16. Drupal for Digital Humanities Projects (MacLaurin D109, Classroom) 17. Introduction to Electronic Literature in DH: Research and Practice (MacLaurin D115, Classroom)

18. Accessibility & Digital Environments (MacLaurin D101, Classroom) 19. Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements (David Strong C124, Classroom) 20. XML Applications for Historical and Literary Research (MacLaurin D016, Classroom) 21. Open Access and Open Social Scholarship (MacLaurin D114, Classroom) 22. Ethical Collaboration in the Digital Humanities (Clearihue D131, Classroom) 24. Digital Games as Interactive Tools for Scholarly Research, Communication and Pedagogy (MacLaurin D110, Classroom)

12:15 to 1:15

Lunch break / Unconference Coordination Session Undergraduate Meet-up, Brown-Bag (details via email)

1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session Institute Panel: Perspectives on DH (or, #myDHis ...) Co-Chairs: Emily Murphy (Queens U) and Randa El-Khatib (U Victoria) (MacLaurin A144) Jessica Otis (Carnegie Mellon U): "DH In The Big Tent." Abstract: As a Digital Humanities specialist at Carnegie Mellon University, I experience the "Big Tent" of digital humanities on a regular basis. I support professors and students using everything from computer simulations for philosophical research to machine learning for studying old texts, while my own projects run the gamut from text encoding to network analysis to software containerization. For me, working in DH is a balancing act between pushing the borders of humanities knowledge while still maintaining a meaningful core of "what is DH?" David Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi / American U Beirut): "#myDHis messy" Abstract: As a digital medievalist working with a textual record where orthographic variance is the norm, living in environments with complex multilingual medleys, and contributing to a number of local DH cultures across countries, my DH is perpetually messy. Some infrastructure can make things easier, but I would like to speak in praise of bricolage: making do with what you have, when you have it and for as long as you have it. Whereas some might argue that confusion is the mother of error, let us consider it instead as a necessary step towards creativity. Meaghan Brown (Folger Shakespeare Library): "#myDHis Dusty" Abstract: As the Fellow for Data Curation at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the digital project I manage and the projects I coordinate with are deeply engaged with and indebted to our physical holdings. While Digital Humanities is often accused of being entranced with the shiny and new, I have found that descriptive bibliography and other ‘dusty’ disciplines have a great deal to offer as we create, curate, and connect digital objects. I want to ask how forms of scholarly description and organization can help us structure digital collections and think about the material implications of digital humanities work.

4:10 to 5:00

Angel David Nieves (Hamilton C): "Engaging Social Justice Pedagogy and Scholarly Practices in the Digital Humanities." Abstract: An emerging critical discourse applying social justice theory and practice to digital/media scholarship is claiming growing interest. What might an intersectional framework accomplish with respect to digital humanities when an analysis with respect to race, class, gender, sexuality and difference is provided? Nieves will provide some points and reflection for further debate and discussion. Corina Koolen (U Amsterdam): "The Downside of Difference." Abstract: Computational methods and models generally focus on differences between data sets, even though the overlap between data sets can be large. I argue that we miss part of the truth – and might even practice a form of cherry picking – when we overlook the commonalities. My argument will take the form of an example: the ‘gap’ between female and male authors in Dutch literary award nominees. Jacob Heil (C of Wooster): "#myDHis edgy and therefore slow" Abstract: Hoping that you’ll forgive an admittedly fast-and-loose borrowing from graph theory, I want to wonder (with you) whether or not, in the work that we do and in our discourses of “collaboration,” we privilege the node over the edge. Do we think more about, say, expertise than we do about the natures of the relationships between experts? In these brief remarks I want to draw upon my experiences building up (and building upon) cultures of DH as a way of recentering the humanness of digital humanities. Michelle Schwartz (Ryerson U): "#myDHis radically inclusive" Abstract: My entry into the digital humanities came via a community archive, rather than through traditional academia, and the focus of my work thus far has been to use DH tools to recreate the feeling of that community space online. Rather than working from a specific research question, my goal has been to use DH to make radical history relevant and accessible, and to inspire in people the joy of discovery. One starting point for that mission has been to work with undergraduate, rather than graduate students, to let those students set their own path, and to use their personal journeys to guide the project. Opening Reception (University Club)

5:00 to 6:00 We are grateful to Gale Cengage for its sponsorship of the reception.

Tuesday, 6 June 2017

9:00 to Noon

Classes in Session Lunch break / Unconference "Mystery" Lunches ETCL 'Brown Bag' Lunch Talk: Corey Davis, "Building Collaborative Models (and Relationships) for LongTerm Digital Preservation" (Hickman 105) Research libraries have always played an important role in the long-term preservation of society’s documentary heritage. And while maintaining large collections of print resources over time is not without its difficulties, the challenges of managing digital materials for the long-term are enormous. New methodologies for building and sustaining our cultural heritage are being developed, and this talk will explore a variety of shared services being deployed by research libraries in Canada in support of digital stewardship and preservation activities.

12:15 to 1:15

Our collective cultural memory is increasingly stored in transitory bits and bytes, leading some to warn of an approaching digital dark age, where the historical record is slowly but inevitably overwritten in a thousand airconditioned server rooms across the globe. Combine this with an environment of increasing political and environmental uncertainty, and the challenges associated with saving our cultural memory can seem daunting. So what can libraries do about it? This presentation will define digital preservation as a complex set of systems and organizational activities required to ensure the long-term viability of digital materials over time, and provide an update BIO: Corey Davis is the Digital Preservation Network Manager for the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL), a consortium of 22 university libraries in Western Canada, where he works to develop the technical and policy infrastructure to support long term preservation of digital objects for all COPPUL members. He is also Systems Librarian at the University of Victoria Libraries.

1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session

4:15 to 5:45

DHSI Colloquium Session 1 (MacLaurin A144)

6:00 to 8:00

DHSI Newcomer's Beer-B-Q (Smuggler's Cove)

Wednesday, 7 June 2017 9:00 to Noon

Classes in Session

12:15 to 1:15

Lunch break / Unconference "Mystery" Lunches

1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session

4:15 to 5:45


6:00 to 7:00

"Half Way There!" Birds of a Feather Get-Together (Felicitas, Student Union Building)

Thursday, 8 June 2017 9:00 to Noon

12:15 to 1:15

Classes in Session Lunch break / Unconference "Mystery" Lunches [Instructor lunch meeting]

1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session

4:15 to 5:45

DHSI Colloquium Session 3 (MacLaurin A144) DHSI Librarians Reception Digital Scholarship Commons, Mearns Centre for Learning /McPherson Library 3rd Floor

5:30 to 7:30

About one third of DHSI attendees are librarians and archivists, or are in training for library and archival positions. This year, for the first time, the University of Victoria Libraries are pleased to welcome our colleagues to the DHSI Librarians Reception. We invite all librarians, archivists, and friends to join colleagues from across

North America and the world for drinks and appetizers in our brand new Digital Scholarship Commons. This event will take place on the third floor of the Mearns Centre for Learning /McPherson Library on Thursday June 8th from 5:30-7:30 pm. RSVP here.

7:30 to 9:30

(Groovy?) Movie Night (MacLaurin A144)

Friday, 9 June 2017 [DHSI; SHARP Opening] 9:00 to Noon

DHSI Classes in Session

11:00 to 1:30

SHARP Conference Registration (MacLaurin A100) Late registration is available at the SHARP information desk, at this same location.

12:15 to 1:15

DHSI Lunch Reception / Course E-Exhibits (MacLaurin A100)

1:30 to 1:50

DHSI Week 1 Farewell (Hickman 105)

2:00 to 2:45

SHARP Conference Opening, Welcome (MacLaurin A144) Joint Institute Lecture (SHARP and DHSI): Julia Flanders (Northeastern U): “Cultures of Reception: Readership and Discontinuity in the History of Women's Writing.” Chair: Sydney Shep (Victoria U Wellington) (MacLaurin A144; the lecture will also be live-streamed, with love and care, to Hickman 105)

2:45 to 3:45

4:00 to 5:00

Abstract: The work of textual recovery and republication for which the Women Writers Project is well known is to all appearances an effort to rediscover a textual and artifactual history: a history of books, once in circulation, now lodged invisibly in remote libraries and inaccessible to scholars and students, but brought back into the light by digital remediation. But the more significant and difficult rediscovery has to do with readership. In republishing these texts we are also seeking to reinsert them into a cultural landscape that has forgotten how to read them. And in republishing them digitally we are also reopening the question of what it means to read. Our challenge is to develop mechanisms of circulation that avoid reproducing the original conditions of invisibility and disappearance in which women's writing circulated. This presentation will examine the WWP's work on readership and reception in the context of digital technologies of reading and textual circulation. Joint Reception: SHARP and DHSI (University Club) DHSI Colloquium Poster/Demo Session SHARP Digital Demo and Poster Session

Saturday, 10 June 2017 [SHARP Conference + Suggested Outings!] 8:30 to 9:00

Late Registration (at the SHARP information desk) (MacLaurin A100)

8:45 to 5:00

SHARP Conference Sessions SHARP Lecture: Lisa Gitelman (NYU): “Emoji Dick, Prequels and Sequels.” (MacLaurin A144)

5:00 to 6:00

Abstract: This is the second in a sequence of talks that takes a 2010 "translation" of Moby Dick into emoji as an opportunity to consider the conditions of possibility that might delimit books and literature in the contemporary moment. A massive white codex and extended work of crowd-sorcery, Emoji Dick points toward the varieties of reading and--especially--of not reading that characterize our ever more digitally mediated and data-described world. Here I proceed by locating Emoji Dick alongside a key group of precursors and successors. Some ideas, for those who'd like to explore the area! Suggested Outing 1, Botanical Beach (self-organised; car needed) A self-guided visit to the wet, wild west coast tidal shelf (and historically-significant former research site) at Botanical Beach; we recommend departing early (around 8.00 am) to catch low tide for a better view of the wonderful undersea life! Consider bringing a packed lunch to nibble-on while looking at the crashing waves when there, and then have an afternoon drink enjoying the view from the deck of the Port Renfrew Hotel. Suggested Outing 2, Butchart Gardens (self-organised) A shorter journey to the resplendently beautiful Butchart Gardens and, if you like, followed by (ahem) a few minutes at the nearby Church and State Winery, in the Saanich Penninsula. About an hour there by public bus from UVic, or 30 minutes by car.

Suggested Outing 3, Saltspring Island (self-organised; a full day, car/bus + ferry combo) All day Suggested Outings

Why not take a day to explore and celebrate the funky, laid back, Canadian gulf island lifestyle on Saltspring Island. Ferry departs regularly from the Schwartz Bay ferry terminal, which is about one hour by bus / 30 minutes by car from UVic. You may decide to stay on forever .... Suggested Outing 4, Paddling Victoria's Inner Harbour (self-organised) A shorter time, seeing Victoria's beautiful city centre from the waterways that initially inspired its foundation. A great choice is the day is sunny and warm. Canoes, kayaks, and paddle boards are readily rented from Ocean River Adventures and conveniently launched from right behind the store. Very chill. And more! Self-organised High Tea at the Empress Hotel, scooter rentals, visit to the Royal BC Museum, darts at Christies Carriage House, a hangry breakfast at a local diner, whale watching, kayaking, brew pub sampling (at Spinnaker's, Swans, Moon Under Water, and beyond!), paddle-boarding, a tour of used bookstores,and more have also been suggested!

Sunday, 11 June 2017 [SHARP + DHSI Registration, Workshops] 8:30 to 9:00

Late Registration (at the SHARP information desk) (MacLaurin A100)

8:45 to 5:00

SHARP Conference Sessions

9:00 to Noon

DHSI Workshop: Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods (MacLaurin D110, Classroom)

12.30 to 5:00

DHSI Registration (NEW LOCATION: MacLaurin A100) After registration, many will wander to Cadboro Bay and the pub at Smuggler's Cove OR the other direction to Shelbourne Plaza and Maude Hunter's Pub.

1:00 to 4:00

DHSI 3-hour Workshops - DHSI Knits: Using Design Technology (MacLaurin D010, Classroom) - Intersections of DH and LGBTTIQ+ Studies (MacLaurin D105, Classroom) - Regular Expressions (MacLaurin D111, Classroom) - Digital Publishing in the Humanities (MacLaurin D101, Classroom) - Steering the XPath (MacLaurin D103, Classroom) - Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research and Public Engagement (MacLaurin D107, Classroom) - Web Annotation as Critical Humanities Practice (MacLaurin D016, Classroom) SHARP Lecture: Robert Bringhurst: “The Mind-Book Problem.” (MacLaurin A144)

5:00 to 6:00

6:00 to 9:00

Abstract: I used to hear a lot, in philosophical circles, about the mind-brain problem and its cognate, the mindbody problem. More recently, in pedagogical circles, I hear about an issue which I’ve come to call the mind-book problem. It is, briefly, the failure of so many human minds, in a hyperliterate society, to find any deep, lasting, and fruitful engagement with the book. All these problems (mind-brain, mind-body, and mind-book) seem to me related to one another. They are also related to something larger: the mind-world problem, familiar to philosophers and medical practitioners in all times and places. There are many who feel that the mind-world problem has reached epidemic proportions today, especially in the humanities. This may have something to do with the prevalence of the mind-book problem there as well. The book has been praised as the ark of civilization, the measure of the human heart, and the voice of God incarnate. It has also, of course, been damned as a form of dalliance or the invention of the Devil. More recently, it has been patronized as an archaic cultural relic in need of replacement or technological upgrading. I will not deny that upgrading is possible, and on several fronts desirable. But a book without a mind – like a mindless brain, a mindless body, or a mindless civilization – is a problem for which a technological upgrade may not be the answer. I will explore the mind-book problem from this and other angles.

SHARP Banquet (University Club)

Monday, 12 June 2017 [SHARP + DHSI] Your hosts for the week are Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens and Dan Sondheim.

7:45 to 8:15

DHSI Last-minute Registration (MacLaurin A100)

8:30 to 10:00

DHSI Welcome, Orientation, and Instructor Overview (MacLaurin A144)

8:45 to 4:00

SHARP Conference Sessions DHSI Classes in Session (click for details and locations)

10:15 to Noon

25. [Foundations] Intro to Computation for Literary Criticism (Clearihue A105, Lab) 26. [Foundations] Developing a Digital Project (With Omeka) (Cornett A229, Classroom) 27. [Foundations] Models for DH at Liberal Arts Colleges (& 4 yr Institutions) (MacLaurin D109, Classroom) 28. [Foundations] Introduction to Javascript and Data Visualization (Clearihue D131, Classroom) 29. Wrangling Big Data for DH (Clearihue A108, Lab) 30. Stylometry with R: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Literary Texts (Clearihue A102, Lab) 31. Sounds and Digital Humanities (MacLaurin D111, Classroom) 32. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Integration in the Curriculum (Cornett A121, Classroom) 34. Creating LAMP Infrastructure for Digital Humanities Projects (MacLaurin D107, Classroom) 35. Understanding Topic Modeling (MacLaurin D105, Classroom) 36. Palpability and Wearable Computing (MacLaurin D016, Classroom) 37. Building a Professional Identity and Skillset in the Digital Humanities (MacLaurin D101, Classroom) 38. Digital Editing with TEI: Critical, Documentary and Genetic Editing (MacLaurin D114, Classroom) 40. Understanding Digital Video (MacLaurin D103, Classroom) 41. Beyond TEI: Metadata for Digital Humanities (David Strong C114, Classroom) 42. Extracting Cultural Networks from Thematic Research Collections (Clearihue D132, Classroom) 43. Digital Public Humanities (MacLaurin D010, Classroom) 44. Using Fedora Commons / Islandora (Human and Social Development A160, Lab) 45. Practical Software Development for Nontraditional Digital Humanities Developers (David Strong C124, Classroom) 46. Documenting Born Digital Creative and Scholarly Works for Access and Preservation (MacLaurin D115, Classroom) 47. An Introduction to Computational Humanities: Mining, Machine Learning and Future Challenges (MacLaurin D110, Classroom) 48. Games for Digital Humanists (David Strong C108, Classroom & Human and Social Development A170, Lab) 49. Introduction to XSLT for Digital Humanists (Cornett A128, Classroom)

12:15 to 1:15

DHSI Lunch break / Unconference Coordination Session DHSI Undergraduate Meet-up, Brown-Bag (details via email)

1:30 to 4:00

DHSI Classes in Session

4:10 to 5:00

Joint Institute Lecture (SHARP and DHSI): Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) and Jo-Ann Roberts (CBC): "A Conversation with Brewster Kahle, moderated by Jo-Ann Roberts.” Chair: Jonathan Bengtson (U Victoria) (MacLaurin A144; the conversation will also be live-streamed, with love and care, to Hickman 105) SHARP Conference Closing Remarks

5:00 to 6:00

Joint Reception: SHARP and DHSI (University Club)

Tuesday, 13 June 2017 9:00 to Noon

Classes in Session

12:15 to 1:15


1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session

4:15 to 5:45


6:00 to 8:00

DHSI Newcomer's Beer-B-Q (Smuggler's Cove)

Wednesday, 14 June 2017 9:00 to Noon

Classes in Session

12:15 to 1:15


1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session

4:15 to 5:45


6:00 to 7:00

"Half Way There (yet again)!" Birds of a Feather Get-Together (Felicitas, Student Union Building)

Thursday, 15 June 2017 9:00 to Noon

12:15 to 1:15

Classes in Session Lunch break / Unconference "Mystery" Lunches [Instructor lunch meeting]

1:30 to 4:00

Classes in Session

4:15 to 5:45


7:30 to 9:30

(Groovier?) Movie(r) Night (MacLaurin A144)

Friday, 16 June 2017 9:00 to Noon

Classes in Session

12:15 to 1:15

Lunch Reception / Course E-Exhibits (MacLaurin A100) Awards and Bursaries Recognition Institute Lecture: Elena Pierazzo (U Grenoble Alpes): “The Disciplinary Impact of the Digital: DH and 'The Others'” Chair: Daniel Powell (Kings College London) (MacLaurin A144)

1:30 to 2:45

2:45 to 3:00

Abstract: The Digital Humanities have developed in two main institutional contexts: within dedicated research centers and within more traditional discipline-based faculties -- with those in the former case in danger of closing themselves within ivory towers of a think-alike community and the “lone wolves” of the latter case most likely to have suffered isolation and lack of real engagement with their peers. More recently, these disparate experiences are seeing some convergence as, slowly but steadily, DH has raised its profile and its impact within the Humanities, with external and internal pressure on other fields now mounting (as demonstrated by intensification of newspapers articles, manifestos and positions being advertised). We are now at a turning point: will the experience of DH feed back and enrich disciplines such as English, Spanish, History, and so on, or will brand new disciplines stem from it, as has happened for Computational Linguistics as a clearly separated entity with respect to Linguistics? These are some of the questions that this lecture will address.

Closing, DHSI in Review (MacLaurin A144)

Contact info: [email protected] P: 250-472-5401 F: 250-472-5681

Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2017

Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements around Making and Breaking Computational Media Elizabeth Losh, William and Mary University Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins University Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, projects like FemTechNet and Fembot Collective argue that such history is often hidden and feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. In order to address this, the seminar will offer a set of background readings to help make visible the history of feminist engagement with technology, as well as facilitate small-scale exploratory collaboration during the seminar. Our reading selections bring a variety of feminist technology critiques in Ethnic/Africana Studies, Women & Gender Studies, Media Studies, HumanComputer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, and related fields into conversation with work in Digital Humanities. Each session is organized by a debate in feminist digital humanities, coalescing around a term that is central to feminist theoretical and practical engagements with technology. We will begin each day with a discussion of that debate in light of our readings. The remainder of each session will be spent learning about and tinkering with Processing, a programming tool that will allow participants to engage in their own critical making processes. Pushing against instrumentalist assumptions regarding the value and efficacy of certain digital tools, we will be asking participants to think hard about the affordances and constraints of digital technologies. While we will be engaging with a wide range of tools/systems in our readings and discussions, we anticipate that the more hands-on engagement with Processing will help participants think about operations of interface, input, output, and mediation. In addition to the expanded theoretical framework, participants can expect to come away with a new set of pedagogical models using Processing that they can adapt and use for teaching at their own institutions. Our daily schedule will involve 1-2 hours of discussion of the readings in light of our question of the day, discussions of the making/breaking sessions of the previous day, a short intro to a technology or tool and then some tinkering. The “reference texts” are not included in the reader – we will bring copies of these for participants to refer to as needed.

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Day 1: Whos Feminism? Whose Code? Critiquing Feminism and Code Culture • McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics Black Life.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (July 1, 2014): 16–28. • Wendy Chun, “Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory” http://bit.ly/2qwO0bG • – selections from Programmed Visions “On Sourcery and Source Code” • Annette Vee, “Coding Values in Enculturation” http://enculturation.gmu.edu/node/5268 • Tara McPherson, “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century” in Race After the Internet • Crockett, I’Nasah. “ ‘Raving Amazons’: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media.” Model View Culture. Accessed January 12, 2017. Click here • Bailey, Moya. “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics” 9, no. 2 (2015). Reference Texts: Getting Started with Processing Critical Code Studies – Basic Language Rules in Processing Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists Day 2: Do Feminists Play? Games, Sounds, Images • Lisa Nakamura – “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital” http://adanewmedia.org/2012/11/issue1-nakamura/ • Janine Fron, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, “The Hegemony of Play” http://lmc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/PearcePubs/HegemonyOfPlayFINAL.pdf • Weheliye, “Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness” Small Axe • cárdenas, micha. “Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts, and Algorithms.” S&F Online 13, no. 3. Accessed September 19, 2016. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/micha-cardenastrans-of-color-poetics-stitching-bodies-concepts-and-algorithms/. • Pumzi (dir. Wanuri Kahiu) 2009. Watch here: http://bit.ly/2p3MkVk • Wangechi Mutu: http://wangechimutu.com/ Reference Text:The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing Day 3: Whose Technology? Discipline/Access/Surverillance, Feminist Critiques of Technoculture • Simone Browne, “Everybody’s Got a Little Light Under the Sun.” Cultural Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 542–64. 2

• Jules, Bergis. “Surveillance and Social Media Archiving.” Documenting DocNow, October 4, 2016. • Anne Balsamo, “Feminism for the Incurably Informed,” Ch. 6 in Technologies of the Gendered Body • Katherine Hayles, “Prologue: Computing Kin,” in My Mother Was a Computer “Prologue” and “Toward Embodied Virtuality,” in How We Became Posthuman • Lisa Nakamura “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture” http://bit.ly/2puYkT5 • Harry, Sydette. “Everyone Watches, Nobody Sees: How Black Women Disrupt Surveillance Theory.” Model View Culture. Accessed January 12, 2017. Reference Text: Arduino Cookbook Day 4: Whose Archive? • Jacqueline Wernimont, “Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives” DHQ • Deb Verhoeven “As Luck Would Have It: Serendipity and Solace in Digital Research Infrastructure” Feminist Media Histories 2016 • Patterson, Sarah. “Toward Meaning-Making in the Digital Age: Black Women, Black Data and Colored Conventions.” Common-Place 16, no. 1 (2015). • Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, “Seek the Roots: An Immersive and Interactive Archive of Black Feminist Practice,” Feminist Collections (Winter 2011) • T-Kay Sangwand “Human Rights Archiving: From Postcustodial Theory to Praxis” University of Texas Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative • Kim Gallon, Black Digital Humanities, “Debates in the Digital Humanities” 2016 Reference Text: Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment Day 5: Whose Feminism II: Media/te Feminism and Theories of the Media Apparatus • Chude-Sokei, Louis. “The Uncanny History of Minstrels and Machines, 1835-1923,” edited by Stephen Johnson, 104–32. Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2012. • Irma van der Ploeg “The Body as Data in the Age of Information” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies • Lucy Suchman, “Human/Machine Reconsidered,” published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc040ls.html 3

• Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish “Contextualizing Ubiquitous Computing,” in Divining a Digital Future • Haynes, Tonya. “Mapping Caribbean Cyberfeminisms.” Sx Archipelagos, no. 1 (May 1, 2016). • Garza, Alicia. “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza.” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014. Reference Text: Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot

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Mathematics Black Life Author(s): Katherine McKittrick Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 16-28 Published by: Paradigm Publishers Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0016 . Accessed: 28/09/2014 23:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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Mathematics Black Life Katherine McKittrick

We aspire to be modern, as if this were some how a new position and as if blacks and nonwhites were not already clearly and uncomfortably modern, as if modernity were sustainable without the nigger and the fluid in/convenience that is blackness lying, albeit differently, both inside and outside its borders. —Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, p. 288

The promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, but none that are capable of resuscitating the girl. —Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” p. 13

It’s a trap. That much is plain. Still, maybe send snapshots of all your sweet pain. Playin’ tortuous games. It goes: Lens. Light. Fame. Read my names on your lips. When the man cracks the whip. And you’ll all shake your hips. And you’ll all dance to this. Without making a fist. —TV on the Radio, “Red Dress,” 2008

In Saidya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” she returns to the deaths of two young African girls who were both violently and brutally killed on the middle passage. Raped, strung up, whipped to death, dying alone: This is the information Hartman pieces together from the ship’s ledger and financial accounts, the captain’s log book, and the court case that dismissed the charges of murder against Captain John Timber, the

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man who caused the deaths of the girls. The archive of black diaspora is, as Hartman rightly suggests, “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of a violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise . . . an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.”1 The asterisked archives are filled with bodies that can only come into being vis-à-vis racialsexual violence; the documents and ledgers and logs that narrate the brutalities of this history give birth to new world blackness as they evacuate life from blackness. Breathless, archival numerical evidence puts pressure on our present system of knowledge by

Katherine McKittrick researches in the areas of black studies, anti-colonial studies, cultural geographies, and gender studies. Her interdisciplinary research attends to the links between epistemological narratives, practices and texts that focus on liberation, and creative text. McKittrick also researches the writings of Sylvia Wynter, with part of this work being put forth in her edited collection, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press, 2014). McKittrick wrote Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and coedited with the late Clyde Woods Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Between the Lines Press/ South End Press, 2007). Additional publications can be found in Small Axe, Mosaic, Gender, Place and Culture, and the Journal of Social and Cultural Geography. Her forthcoming monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories, will look at the promise of science in black poetry, music, and visual art.

THEBLACKSCHOLARTBS • Volume 44 • Number 2 • Summer 2014


affirming the knowable (black objecthood) and disguising the untold (black human being). The slave’s status as object-commodity, or purely economic cargo, reveals that a black archival presence not only enumerates the dead and dying, but also acts as an origin story. This is where we begin, this is where historic blackness comes from: the list, the breathless numbers, the absolutely economic, the mathematics of the unliving. Recall then, aboard the ship Peggy, aboard the ship Prosperous Amelia, aboard the brig Nancy. The ledgers read: Samuel Minton, 60 years, nearly worn out . . . Formerly slave to Thomas Minton, Norfolk, Virginia . . . Gilbert Lafferts, 21 years, likely lad, Mr. James Henderson’s possession, proved to be the property of Mr. James Henderson . . . Master & Bill of Sale produced . . . Anny Bolton, 42, stout wench, (James Alexander). Formerly the property of Thomas Bolton, Nansemond, Virginia . . . Jenny Frederick, 32 years, ordinary wench . . . Certified to be free by Jonah Frederick of Boston, New England . . . Betty Rapelje, 21, stout wench, (Peter Brown) . . . Says she was born free at Newtown, Long Island.2

Worn out, bill of sale produced, certified to be free, ordinary wench, proved to be the property of, formerly slave to, formerly the property of, all with parenthetic possessors. New world blackness arrives through the ordinary, proved, former, certified, nearly worn-out archives of ledgers, accounts, price tags, and descriptors of economic worth and financial probability. The list of slaves upon these ships is a list of propertied commodi-

ties. The slave is possession, proved to be property. Yet a voice interrupts: says she. It follows that black freedom is embedded within an economy of race and violence and unfolds as an indeterminate impossibility: wench, property of, likely lad, nearly worn out; certified to be free, says she was born free, formerly slave to. Says she was born free. The brutalities of transatlantic slavery, summed up in archival histories that give us a bit of (asterisked-violated) blackness, put meaningful demands on our scholarly and activist questions. While the tenets and the lingering histories of slavery and colonialism produced modernity as and with and through blackness, this sense of timespace is interrupted by a more weighty, and seemingly truthful (truthful and truth-telling because iterated as scientific, proven, certified, objective), underside—where black is naturally malignant and therefore worthy of violation; where black is violated because black is naturally violent; where black is naturally unbelievable and is therefore naturally empty and violated; where black is naturally less-than-human and starving to death and violated; where black is naturally dysselected, unsurviving, swallowed up; where black is same and always and dead and dying; where black is complex and difficult and too much to bear and violated.3 The tolls of death and violence, housed in the archive, affirm black death. The tolls cast black as impossibly human and provide the conditions through which black history is currently told and studied. The death toll becomes the source. The tolls inevitably uncover, too, analyses of histories and narratives and stories

Katherine McKittrick

Mathematics Black Life


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and data that honor and repeat and cherish anti-black violence and black death. If the source of blackness is death and violence, the citation of blackness—the scholarly stories we tell—calls for the repetition of death and violence. The practice of taking away life is followed by the sourcing and citation of racial-sexual death and racial-sexual violence and blackness is (always already and only) cast inside the mathematics of unlivingness (data/scientifically proven/certified violation/asterisk) where black comes to be (a bit).4 Indeed, if blackness originates and emerges in violence and death, black futures are foreclosed by the dead and dying asterisks. And if the dead and dying are the archival and asterisked cosmogonies of blackness, within our present system of knowledge—a system, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, where the subhuman is invited to become human on terms that require antiblack sentiment—scraps and bits of black life and death and narrative are guaranteed to move toward, to progress into, unlivingness and anti-blackness.5 With this in mind we would do well to notice that scholarly and activist questions can, at times, be so tightly tied to bits and pieces of narratives that dwell on anti-black violence and black racial death—seeking out and reprising “terrible utterances” to reclaim and recuperate black loss and somehow make it all the less terrible—that our answerable analytical futures are also condemned to death.6 Put differently, historically present anti-black violence is repaired by reproducing knowledge about the black subjects that renders them less than human. It is a descriptive analytics of violence. The cyclical and death-dealing numeration of the condemned remains

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in tact, at least in part, through analytical pathways that are beholden to a system of knowledge that descriptively rehearses antiblack violences and in this necessarily refuses decolonial thinking. How then do we think and write and share as decolonial scholars and foster a commitment to acknowledging violence and undoing its persistent frame, rather than simply analytically reprising violence? How do we ethically engage with mathematical and numerical certainties that compile, affirm, and honor bits and pieces of black death? In order to underscore the urgency here, it is worth thinking about the ways in which slave ship and plantation ledgers unfold into a series of crude and subjugating post-slave accounts: The rule in the courts was that a drop of blood made you black; just walking around looking about/This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something; the accusation was beginning to take on a familiar tone . . . Emmett Till . . . Scottsboro . . . Armed with his new political powers Diluilo came to have access to billions of dollars in public funds to launch a program to reform the superpredators by exorcising the evil he saw in them; three-quarters of the persons arrested for such crimes were Negro . . . in Detroit, the same proportions held. . . . Negro males represent 2.1 percent of all male technicians while Negro females represent roughly 10 percent of all female technicians. . . . It would appear therefore that there are proportionately 4 times as many Negro females in significant white collar jobs than Negro males; these assholes, they always get away; it would



come to be based on degrees of selected genetic merit (or eugenics) versus differential degrees of the dysselected lack of this merit: differential degrees of, to use the term made famous by The Bell Curve, “dysgenicity.”7

We can think of more accounts, more numbers, more math. In Demonic Grounds, I suggest that the markers of captivity so tightly adhere to the black body that seeing blackness involves our collective willingness to collapse it into a signifier of dispossession.8 While I certainly suggest there, as I do here, that black dispossession reveals the limits of our present geographic order and opens up a way to imagine new modes of black geographic thought, it is challenging to think outside the interlocking data of black erasure, unfreedom, and anti-black violence. Putting pressure on archive numbers that, particularly in the case of the middle passage and plantation life, are the only documents that tell us about the ways in which the practice of slavery set the stage for our present struggles with racism, is difficult. So, what do we do with the archival documentation that displays this unfree and violated body as both naturally dispossessed and as the origin of new world black lives? How do we come to terms with the inventory of numbers and the certain economic brutalities that introduce blackness—the mathematics of the unliving, the certification of unfreedom—and give shape to how we now live our lives? And what does it mean that, when confronting these numbers and economic descriptors and stories of murder and commonsense instances of anti-black violence,

some of us are pulled into that Fanonian moment, where our neurological synapses and our motor-sensory replies do not result in relieved gasps of nostalgia or knowing gasps of present emancipation (look how far we have come/slavery is over/get over slavery/ post-race/look how far) but instead dwell in the awfulness of seeing ourselves and our communities in those numbers now?9 This is the future the archives have given me. Yet, the Fanonian moment also disturbs to ask not how we get over the awfulness and brutality, but rather how do we live with it, differently, right now and therefore imagine what Sylvia Wynter describes as “being human as praxis”?10 In what follows, I move with the numbers and begin to work out how the uncomfortable mathematics of black life can inform current and future formations of black studies. I suggest that black studies not only names and posits the violent arithmetics of the archive, but that this citation of violence also can and should no longer ethically repeat this violence. Indeed, while not always honored, the intellectual project of black studies—with its long history of citing and surviving racial violence in numbers—provides a deliberate commentary on the ways in which blackness works against the violence that defines it. Thus, across a range of thinkers—I note Dionne Brand, Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, but there are more and many to add—there is a careful effort to show that if we are to name the violent displacement of black cultures, this must be done by both noticing and undoing the compulsion to inhabit safe and comfortable places within the very system that cannot survive without anti-blackness. Indeed,




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the research of W. E. B. Du Bois, who turns knowable racial numbers in on themselves to ask how the race is both fixed and unfixed by social conditions, is especially notable here.11 The demand of the black scholar might be, therefore, to think the violence of transatlantic slavery as a numerical moment through which anti-blackness was engendered and came to underwrite post-slave emancipation promises, just as this moment, significantly and un-numerically, also provided the conditions through which many black subjectivities articulated an anti-colonial practice that did not (and cannot and does not) twin the emancipatory terms that set blackness free. The post-slave system, its emancipatory terms, guarantees and profits from and repeats anti-black violence. I briefly cite Wynter as exemplary and complementary to this trajectory of black scholarly thought: We have lived the millennium of Man in the last five hundred years; and as the West is inventing Man, the slave-plantation is a central part of the entire mechanism by means of which that logic is working its way out. But that logic is total now, because to be not-Man is to be not-quite-human. Yet that plot, that slave plot on which the slave grew food for his/her subsistence, carried over a millennially other conception of the human to that of Man’s . . . that plot exists as a threat. It speaks to other possibilities.12

Other possibilities. The task is, then, to write blackness by ethically honoring but not repeating anti-black violences—which can be done, I suggest below, through reading the mathematics of these violences as

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possibilities that are iterations of black life that cannot be contained by black death. Other possibilities. In reading with and through archival mathematics (and the certification of unfreedom and its unenumerated openings), I suggest that it is the antiblack violence of transatlantic slavery that archived the transparent numbers that many black scholars could not (and cannot) bear as these very numbers provide data that the ex-slave archipelago climbed out of through conceptualizing blackness anew. These new categories differently work blackness as a category by noticing and reworking and mistrusting numerical data and, in this, asserting the doubly conscious/the open door of every consciousness/fantastic/being human as praxis.13 What follows, then, is a kind of intellectual work black studies opens up in numbers. Says she was born free. Says she was born free. She is not free. She says she was born free. The unfree nonperson is embedded in—at work within—the verb “says” and the noun “she.” The unfree nonperson says she was born free. She says she was born free. She says she was born free at Newtown, Long Island: she is not free. She says she is free. Trust the lies. One of the most ubiquitous representations of blackness in our archives is of the “Rear view of former slave revealing scars on his back from savage whipping, in photo taken after he escaped to become Union soldier during Civil War” (see figure 1). This image, also known as “The Scourged Back, 1863,” has been widely reproduced with the black man being identified as “Gordon.”14 For those interested in black history and transatlantic slavery, this image of Gordon is familiar. It is an image



Figure 1: “Rear view of former slave revealing scars on his back from savage whipping, in photo taken after he escaped to become a Union soldier during Civil War,” or “Scourged Back, 1863” or “Gordon” from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

that emerges throughout many research projects. We never see Gordon once, we never see him twice; we see him numerous times. The scourged back is everywhere. Here, “the unimaginable assumes the guise of every day existence.”15 For the researcher, the scourged back is commonplace and in some instances predictable. And, if we are not very careful, the image becomes so ordinary that the pleasures of looking, again and again, incite a second order of violence.16 She says.

Rachel Hall writes that the photograph of Gordon is representative of the black visual history that accompanied and in some cases replaced oral and written accounts of slavery. Indeed, Hall notes that such photographic images of suffering slaves conveyed truths—truths more truthful than written accounts—that would complement abolitionist struggles and elicit white sympathy.17 The image of Gordon, importantly, pictures “a history of violence written on the slave’s body and in the master’s hand . . . in the scarred back the viewer reads a narrative inscribed by the slave owner himself.”18 The scarred back, therefore, has little to do with Gordon himself but very much to do with the ways in which brutal acts of white supremacy actively mark blackness as they erase black lived experiences and interpretations of slavery.19 Our archival proclivities have so much embraced “Scourged Back” that it is has become a ubiquitous representation of violence—both mundane and spectacular— that can be enumerated in multiple ways: whips, lash counts, reprinted and circuitous and repetitive circulation of Gordon’s pain, calculable white disciplinary markings, another accountable pathway to our doomed future of unfreedom. Or, Gordon’s photograph is a visual archive of black suffering, deposited there precisely because it records violence, deposited there because it can tell a truth more truthful than claims written and told by black people: she says she was born free. The archives are full of truthful lies and bloodshed. With this in mind I suggest, riffing off of Merle Hodge, that we are presently living in the “shadow of the whip.”20 In these shadows—where the legacy of the plantocracy underwrites and anticipates the




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historically present persistence of anti-black violence—we might not simply access black suffering and white supremacy but perhaps generate new ways of encountering the history of blackness.21 As noted, access to new world blackness dwells on the archival display of the violated body, the corpse, the death sentences, the economic inventories of cargo, the whip as the tool that writes blackness into existence. How might we take this evidence and venture toward another mode of human being—so that when we encounter the lists, the ledgers, the commodities of slavery, we notice that our collective unbearable past, which is unrepresentable except for the archival mechanics that usher in blackness vis-à-vis violence, is about something else altogether. There are strategies in place worth noting. Carrie Mae Weems rewrites “Scourged Back” to evidence the unutterable of contours of violence.22 A different kind of strategic un-voicing of the unbearable can be found in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl— where a different unwritten narrative resides between the lines.23 Aunt Hester’s scream, too, as it “open[ed] the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom” for Frederick Douglass and post-slave populations.24 Militant slaves, mass suicide, At The Full and Change of Moon.25 The unraveled asterisk: Margaret Garner’s decision to kill her children so they would not have to endure the brutalities of slavery as recast in Beloved as a story of survival. The chokecherry tree.26 We can think of more. These strategies allow us to read the archives not as a measure of what happened, but as indicators of what else happened. Notably, the strategies above rest on encountering, think-

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ing about and articulating black absented presences: the unspeakable, the unwritten, the unbearable and unutterable, the unseeable and the invisible, the uncountable and unindexed, outside the scourge, that which cannot be seen or heard or read but is always there. We are therefore also asked to imagine those lives that are so inconceivable, so unworthy of documentation, so radically outside our archives, that they are merely psychic impressions of life and livingness: lies and truths and new stories and familiar scars that, because they are unindexed, cannot provide us with the analytical tools to analytically take black life away. In many ways, these kinds of strategies tell different stories that are tethered to the scourged back. In many ways, the racial economy of the archive begins a story that demands our betrayal of the archive itself. It gives us the scourged back as a commonly available image that is also an asterisk of history—the archive lies as it tells a truth. Which begs the question: What if we trust the lies—she says she was born free—and begin to count it all out differently? What if we harness ourselves to the brutalities of the violence that began all of this, while also honoring the impossibility of understanding exactly what the scars of history mean for post-slave diasporic peoples? Punishment during slavery was, as Gordon’s back might reveal for some, intimately linked to counting; lashings are the soundtrack to slavery, four, ten, fifty, one hundred, two hundred.27 Indeed, the black musical texts that reference this soundtrack and revisit the crack of the whip are numerous, although the work of The Wailers (“Slave Driver,” from Catch a Fire) and Nas



(“Intro” to his album It Was Written) stand out for me. To be sure, the body, the lashings, the counting, culminates to affirm crass and familiar itemization, the corporeal consequences of rational reason: counting the cracks discloses measurable discipline. But again: What if we trust the lies—she says she was born free—and begin to count it all out differently? As we all know, numbers signify measurable items, but they also invite chaos. In her essay “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics,” Simone Browne importantly asks: How do we understand the body when it is made into data? Analyzing the technologies of the border—fingerprints, passports, eye scans, facial recognition technology—Browne looks at the ways in which particular bodies are cast out of normalcy based on the “arithmetics of skin.”28 I borrow the arithmetics of skin from Browne because her work uncovers the ways in which contemporary surveillance practices are inflected with the relief of neutrality as they track biocentric human markers: race, gender, a two-sexed system. Put another way, the seeming neutrality of mathematics—the governmental trust in the technologies that calculate the textures of skin, eyes, hair—is trusted as innocuously objective, thus providing an alibi for racism. A glance above: one drop of blood/the accusation was/2.1 percent/genetic merit. As Browne’s research shows, biometrics—the measurement of the living body—are, in fact, laden with digital epidermalization wherein the logic of whiteness is the measuring stick through which other racial technologies are understood. The white living body—spacing between the eyes, fingerprint ridges, hair, skin, thickness of the mouth—is the math-

ematical measuring stick through which all other bodies are calculated. Indeed, and looking the other way, Browne’s research also importantly shows that contemporary surveillance practices can be linked to the tracking of escaped slaves—the black enslaved body, the black escaping body, was recorded and coded as biometrically knowable (or findable and searchable).29 The future of the scourged back is revealed and Nas’s album cover (figure 2) makes good sense. How then might we recast the arithmetics of skin, the truthful lies of the archive, and the making of black subjecthood that is always tethered to that status of nonperson? Or how do we, as Nourbese Philip asks, find freedom within these limitations?30 Can we really count it out differently? I hold close the technologies of slavery and the archives that produce the scourged back. I can’t let go of the incomplete stories and brutal violence, in part, because letting go might involve not seeing how these violent acts are reproduced now. It might involve reading Nas’s album cover through what Rinaldo Walcott calls “global niggerdom,” thus underscoring that the making of racial subjectivities—all kinds of racially marked subjectivities that inhabit our white supremacist planetary slums—is a process that is tethered to a violent past and therefore demands a different future.31 Indeed, I want to hold on to the numbers because “it’s the evidence of what transpired” and “the bones actually ground you.”32 The numbers set the stage for our stories of survival—what is not there is living. The numbers, the arithmetics of the skin, the shadow of the whip, inspire our insurgency as they demonstrate the ways in which our present genre of the




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Figure 2: Nas, (Untitled) LP Artwork

human is flawed. Indeed, numbers, like the archives, are truthful lies that can push us toward demonic grounds, a place not where one must choose between white supremacy and oppression, but rather honors the ways in which blackness is archived as a violent beginning and, to be sure, does not consider

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this beginning as inevitably tied to trajectory that leads to something rightful or natural or ethical. Put differently, we might emphasize how the demonic—in physics and mathematics—is a nondeterministic schema; it is a process that is hinged on uncertainty and nonlinearity because the organizing princi-



ple cannot foresee the future. This schema, this way of producing or desiring an unanticipated outcome, calls into question “the always non-arbitrary pre-prescribed” parameters of sequential and classificatory linearity.33 This forecloses the descriptive analytics of violence. The methodological and intellectual work of black studies, I am suggesting, is embedded with this organizing principal precisely because the mathematics of blackness and white supremacy are seemingly knowable (because accountable and counted) and always laden with a chaotic uncertainty. This schema understands arithmetical-epidermal history as a violent unfinishing with numeric bursts that uncover a logic that fosters the anti-colonial human being as praxis. This is the future that black studies, at its best, has given me. What is not there is living. This forces us, in my view, to wrestle with our present anew, and think seriously about what Saidiya Hartman calls the “incomplete project of freedom” and imagine that Sylvia Wynter’s being human as praxis does not, in fact, embrace a bitter return to the scourged back, breathe a sigh of presently emancipated post-race relief, or find comfort in the dismal dance of authenticity—for all of these strategies refuse to take us anywhere new.34 Instead, I trust that the unindexed lies of our world and the evidence of what transpired are not blueprints for emancipation, or maps to our future, but instead are indicators of the ways in which the brutalities of racial encounter demand a form of human being and being human that newly iterates blackness as uncomfortably enumerating the unanticipated contours of black life. She says she was born free.

Acknowledgments This piece is inspired by the writings of Saidiya Hartman. The comments and suggestions offered by Alexander Weheliye, Simone Browne, and the anonymous reviewers made this paper much stronger— thanks to all for taking time with this work. All shortcomings are mine.

Endnotes 1. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” p. 2. 2. These ship ledgers are from the Book of Negroes and can be found at www.blackloyal ist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/documents/ official/book_of_negroes.htm. Accessed May 3, 2010. Emphasis added. 3. On black modernities, see Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, and Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic. I borrow “meta-Darwin” from Sylvia Wynter. See also Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 4. Cf. Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” 5. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p, 103. 6. I discuss the dead-end analytics of racial violence at length in McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” “Terrible utterances” is from Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” p. 3. 7. The “one drop” quotation is from the memoir of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmon, as quoted in Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, p. 193n26. The “familiar tone” quotation is from Browne, The Condemnation of Little B, p. 5. The quotations regarding Negro “crime” and “technicians” are taken from Moynihan, The Negro Family. The “Bell Curve” quotation is from Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ Freedom,” p. 323. The quotations “just walking




25

around,” “up to no good,” and “they always get away,” are taken from City of Sanford, “Cellphone Call.” 8. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds. 9. Cf. McKittrick, “I Entered the Lists.” 10. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 11. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn; Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy.” Also notable for purposes of this essay is Booker T. Washington’s invitation to Du Bois to teach mathematics at the Tuskegee Institute in 1894. Du Bois declined due to his commitment at Wilberforce University in Ohio. See Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 32. 12. Scott, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism,” p. 165. 13. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 232; Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic; Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 14. Gordon’s presence in slavery and antislavery texts and histories are too numerous to list. 15. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” p. 6. 16. Ibid., p. 5. 17. Hall, “Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery.” 18. Ibid., p. 88. 19. Ibid., p. 89. 20. Hodge, “The Shadow of the Whip,” pp. 111–118. 21. Cf. McKittrick, “Plantation Futures.” 22. Jackson, “Visualizing Slavery.” 23. Whitsitt, “Reading Between the Lines.” 24. Moten, In the Break. 25. Brand, At the Full and Change of Moon. 26. Morrison, Beloved. On Sethe’s scarred back/chokecherry tree, see pp. 18, 20, 93. 27. Many thanks to A.J. Paynter for thinking about this with me. In our conversations about black modernities, A.J. imagined the tools of transatlantic slavery through black science, explaining that the whip was the first man-made tool to break the sound barrier (much like that of

26

a supersonic jet creating a sonic boom and breaking the sound barrier). She then asked: What is the relevance/significance of breaking the sound barrier while simultaneously breaking black skin and how does this connect to the who, the what, and the where of modernity’s beginnings? I will continue to take up A.J.’s challenge in Dear Science (in preparation). 28. Browne, “Digital Epidermalization.” 29. Browne, “‘Everybody’s Got a Little Light Under the Sun.’” 30. Marlene NourbeSe Philip in Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive,” p. 65. 31. Walcott, “The Problem of the Human.” See also Nas, “N.I.G.G.E.R.” Nas’s album title decisions provide another aspect of the global niggerdom unexplored here. For an overview of his decision to change the title of his 2009 album from Nigger to (Untitled), see Reid, “Nas Explains Controversial Album Title,” and Reid, “Nas Changes Controversial Album Title.” 32. “The evidence of what transpired” is Patricia Saunders in “Defending the Dead,” p. 69. “The bones” is Marlene NourbeSe Philip in “Defending the Dead,” p. 69. 33. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, p. xxiv; Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” p. 365. 34. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” p. 4.

References Book of Negroes www.blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/documents/official/book_ of_negroes.htm. Accessed May 3, 2010. Brand, Dionne. At the Full and Change of Moon. Toronto: Vintage, 1999. Broderick, Francis, L. W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959. Browne, Elaine. The Condemnation of Little B. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.



Browne, Simone. “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics,” Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 131–150. ———. “‘Everybody’s Got a Little Light Under the Sun’: Black Luminosity and the Visual Culture of Surveillance,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 542–564. City of Sanford, “Cellphone Call to the Sanford Police Department by George Zimmerman Before the Shooting of Trayvon Martin,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trayvon_Martin_ Shooting_Ca111.0gg (accessed July 14, 2013). Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1970. ———. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage, [1903] 1990. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, [1952] 1967. ———. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, [1961] 1963. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Hall, Rachel. “Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery: The Slave Notice as Keepsake,” Camera Obscura 21, no. 1 (2006): 71–103. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14. Hodge, Merle. “The Shadow of the Whip: A Comment on Male-Female Relations in the Caribbean,” Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. Orde Coombs. New York: Anchor Books, 1974, pp. 111–118. Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Jackson, Cassandra. “Visualizing Slavery: Photography and the Disabled Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural In-

terventions, ed. Christopher M. Bell. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011, pp. 31–46. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. “I Entered the Lists . . . Diaspora Catalogues: The List, The Unbearable Territory, and Tormented Chronologies—Three Narratives and a Weltanschauung.” XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics 17 (2007): 7–29. ———. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947–963. ———. “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 42 (November 2013): 1–15. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Moynihan, Daniel P. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1965. www.dol. gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan .htm (accessed July 14, 2013). Nas, “N.I.G.G.E.R.” (Untitled). New York: Def Jam/Colombia, 2008. Reid, Shaheem. “Nas Explains Controversial Album Title.” October 18, 2007. www.mtv.com/ news/articles/1572287/nas-explains-contro versial-album-title.jhtml (accessed June 10, 2012). ———. “Nas Changes Controversial Album Title.” May 19, 2008. www.mtv.com/news/arti cles/1587737/nas-drops-controversial-albumtitle.jhtml (accessed June 10, 2012). Saunders, Patricia. “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 63–79.




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Scott, David. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119–207. Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post Slavery Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. TV on the Radio. “Red Dress.” Dear Science. Chicago: Touch and Go Records, 2008. Walcott, Rinaldo. “The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and ‘The Coloniality of Our Being,’” in Postcoloniality/Decoloniality— Black Critique, ed. Carsten Junker and Sabine Broeck, forthcoming. Whitsitt, Novian. “Reading Between the Lines: The Black Cultural Tradition of Masking in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 31, no. 1 (2010): 73–88.

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Wynter, Sylvia. “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman.’”Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990, pp. 355–372. ———. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, To Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.



MODEL VIEW CULTURE (/)

SOCIAL MEDIA (HTTPS://MODELVIEWCULTURE.COM/ISSUES/SOCIAL-MEDIA)

“Raving Amazons”: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media I can’t help but see historical parallels in the multiple forms of antiblack backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years. —by I’Nasah Crockett (https://modelviewculture.com/authors/inasah-crockett) on June 30th, 2014

“[David Marriott is] not trying to condemn Black people for an unconscious that has as a constituent element hatred of blackness, but he’s trying to suggest that there is violence in the world which is coordinated with Negrophobia. There’s the fantasy of a Black as a phobic object, an object that will destroy you and you don’t even know how it will destroy you, just an anxious threat, you know. And he says, okay, that’s a fantasy, but what’s important, what psychoanalysis hasn’t really gured out, is that what’s important about this fantasy is that it is supported and coordinated with all the guns in the world . . .” Frank Wilderson, interview (http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/frank-wildersonwallowing-in-the-contradictions-part-2/)

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the a erlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to healthcare and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” Saidiya Hartman, “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route” (http://www.amazon.com/Lose-Your-Mother-Journey-Atlantic/dp/0374531153), p. 6

Antiblackness, in a rough-hewn nutshell, is the structuring logic of the modernity and the foundation of the contemporary world we live in. It is the glue and the string running through our conceptions of what it means to be free, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be a legitimate and productive member of society, what it means to be Human, and what it means to be the anti-Human. Antiblackness is the structural positioning of the Black (“the Black” here being a marker for a certain type of subjectivity comparable to Marx’s “the worker” – shoutout Frank Wilderson) as an object that is fungible and able to be accumulated like any other wicket churned out by the process of

capitalism; it is the fact of Black folks being open to perpetual and gratuitous violence that needs no de nitive prior provocation or “reason;” the “reason” is the fact of Blackness (see: getting shot for walking home with some Skittles, (http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jul/15/skittles-trayvon-martinzimmerman-acquittal) getting shot while being handcu ed in the backseat of a car, (http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/21/autopsy-arkansas-man-shot-himself-while-cu ed-inback-of-police-car/) getting shot for calling 911, (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/08/2748561/police-kill-man-a er-ambulance-call/) being beaten for staring at someone in a “dehumanizing” way, (http://thegrio.com/2013/05/30/miami-police-put-14-year-old-holding-a-puppy-in-chokehold-for-dehumanizing-stares/) and on and on (http://mxgm.org/operation-ghetto-storm2012-annual-report-on-the-extrajudicial-killing-of-313-black-people/)). It is, to echo Hartman, the a erlife of slavery: a logic that collapses the past and the present and places violence towards the Black within a range of acceptable daily practices. Certainly antiblackness is attitudinal – see the libidinal economy, i.e. the systems of desire and instincts and fantasies and repulsion around skin tone, hair types, bodies that makes itself apparent in Eurocentric beauty standards or the fact that lighter-skinned African American women receive shorter prison sentences than their darker-skinned counterparts. But that’s how logic and structures operate, they imbue everything that springs forth from them. Our lives and societies (because when we speak of the a erlife of race-based chattel slavery, Arab and trans-Atlantic, we are speaking of the entire world) are fundamentally shaped by it, not only institutionally, but also at the level of the everyday, including crossing the street. (http://www.blackyouthproject.com/2014/06/poll-drivers-in-portland-show-racial-biastowards-pedestrians/) So of course it makes itself apparent in the supposedly brave new world (so di erent from any world that came before!) of social media.

Antiblack Backlash on Social Media I myself joined both Twitter and Tumblr back in 2009, a er experiences stretching back to high school with BlackPlanet.com, Myspace, Livejournal, and of course Facebook. With Twitter and Tumblr, however, I joined a er spending a year or two lurking on the edges of a particular group of (mostly) women of color, and moving onto social media around the same time they did allowed me to connect with them in ways I wasn’t able to when the main platform was, say, WordPress. For us, and for the many Black women I have since connected and built with since 2009, social media o ers us yet another way to build our “beloved communities,” to extend the networks of love, camaraderie, and joyous support that have long existed in our meatspace communities – hair salons, churches, Black student unions, kitchen tables, etc. Social media also becomes a central site for much of our activism, from the multinational #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to holding media outlets accountable for publishing blatant racism. We are also theory houses, circulating and challenging discourses and practices that negatively impact our lives as Black women, and making critical connections that are o en missing from the media that surrounds us. I can’t help but see historical parallels to, say, early 20th century Pullman Porters secretly distributing copies of The Chicago Defender (http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/defender.html) to the Black folks they came across. What we’re doing is nothing new, but being on social media means that this networking is happening in the public eye. I also can’t help but see historical parallels in the multiple forms of antiblack backlash Black women have received on social media over the past few years. The topic of surveillance in social media has been a hot one lately, but many discussions on it stop and end at the Edward Snowden/NSA type revelations over post-9/11, post-War on Terror invasions of privacy at the

hands of an overzealous government. However, if we were to extend the idea of policing and surveillance further back in time, and expand it beyond the trope of it being primarily carried out by government employees, it becomes apparent that surveillance has already been a central part of the experience of Black women on Twitter. Recall that in the U.S., the police have their roots in slave patrols; policing and management of the potentially unruly Black bodies underlies the call for law and order and the constituent need for police. To quote Wilderson again, in society there is a “fundamental anxiety over where is the Black and what is he or she doing,” (http://percy3.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/frank-wilderson-wallowingin-the-contradictions-part-2/) and in an antiblack world, every non-Black is deputized to patrol and manage the Blacks.

4chan comment, since deleted Consider the #EndFathersDay hoax carried out by 4chan (http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/222933/no-feminists-are-not-trying-to-endfathersdayits-a-4chan-hoax/) and the resulting Black feminist #YourSlipIsShowing counter-attack. (http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/223102/4chan-plans-to-continue-hoax-hashtag-war-onfeminists-and-women-of-color/) 4chan’s attack was fundamentally on feminism itself, #EndFathersDay as a hashtag was meant to make feminism look like a form of anti-male

extremism, turning moderates away from feminism while strengthening its opponents. While many mainstream media outlets swallowed the hoax hook and all, several individual Twitter users, led by @sassycrass (http://www.twitter.com/sassycrass) and including myself, instead began to do some basic detective work. What we uncovered was an extended yearlong plan, where 4chan users were to set up fake accounts where they would pretend to be Black women, women of color, trans women, and otherwise marginalized folks, in ltrate our spaces, study how we operate, then wage hashtag war.

4chan comment, since deleted They were successful, not just because they capitalized on the ever-present misogynoir within the mainstream feminist movement, but because stalking Black women online at this point is a common, acceptable practice.

The Mainstream Feminist Party Line Consider this article from 2010, long before the 4chan operation and even before Twitter had gone fully mainstream. The title itself says it all:“Why I Stalk A Sexy Black Woman On Twitter (And Why You Should Too).” (http://gizmodo.com/5586970/why-i-stalk-a-sexy-blackwoman-on-twitter-and-why-you-should-too) Written by Joel Johnson, a white guy, it’s a brief description of an anonymous Black woman on Twitter that reads like an anthropological description of an animal in the wild. “She’s a Christian, but isn’t afraid of sex. She seems to have some problems trusting men, but she’s not afraid of them, either. She’s very proud of her scal responsibility.” “Sometimes I nd her faith charming; other times it is frustratingly childish. ‘Thanks Lord for letting me see another day!’ can be followed by a retweeted ‘God is THE MAN!’” The faux-intellectual condensation is easily skewered, but the sheer violence underlying the words makes it di cult to do so. It makes for a terrifying game of “is this 2010 or 1910?” Of course this misogynoir-fueled stalking is usually done in the “name” of something, and that something is always implied as being better and greater than Black women. Johnson wraps up this essay with an upbeat note on the wonder of social media, how it can expand one’s insular circles and bring “the joy of discovery that can come by weaving a stranger’s life into your own.” But this joy and the newly expanded contact list is birthed through enacting violence against a Black woman. This is fundamentally the same idea put forth by 4chan, though the new world they hope to create is di erent than that of Johnson’s, I’d imagine. Yet, when the means are the same, how di erent are these supposed new worlds really? Online spaces o ered by the Le , including (and especially) those created by the mainstream feminist movement, rarely grant a reprieve to Black women. Instead, time and time again, the impulse towards surveillance and harassment of Black women is fully articulated and encouraged, rather than challenged or uprooted. In many ways, the language used to describe this group echoes 4chan, who painted us as hordes of near-mindless “black bitches” who have “the most power to cause chaos,” even as their violent campaign against Black feminists and the colluding silence from mainstream feminists on their campaign proved this to be untrue. But, if 4chan had indeed been paying attention to media surrounding the racism in feminism, could we blame them for this reading? They’re merely echoing the mainstream feminist movement party line.

The trope of Black women browbeating white feminists into submission, for example, formed the central argument of Michelle Goldberg’s article entitled “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.” (http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars) Her description of Black feminist twitter activity shares the ethnographic gaze of Johnson and fantastic language of 4chan. In describing the critique of the #Femfuture report, she says: “Online, the Barnard group—nine of whom were women of color—was savaged [emphasis mine] as a cabal of white opportunists.” Other descriptors throughout her piece include “trashing,” “threatening,” “chastisement,” and “perpetual psychodrama.” The Black feminist social media users, in Goldberg’s mind, seek not safety or liberation, but solely the “preening displays of white feminist abjection.” This nearly echoes 4chan word for word. I think this bears repeating – both 4chan and a leading Le ist publication have looked at the evidence – social media use and organizing done by Black women, utilizing Black women’s networks and informed by Black radical traditions including but not limited to Black feminism – and drawn the same conclusion: the true objective of all this Blackness is the abjection of white people. To be fair, and if not fair at least historically accurate, neither Goldberg nor 4chan are the originators of this particular narrative. One hundred and four years ago, Howard Odum, in his opus Social and Mental Traits of the Negro: Research into the Conditions of the Negro Race in Southern Towns, (http://archive.org/stream/socialmental00odumrich/socialmental00odumrich_djvu.txt) described Black women thusly:

“Anger is found in its most violent form among negro women in their quarrels and ghts, if appearances are to be relied upon. These negroes show absolutely no restraint. No adequate description of them can be given. At once ridiculous and pathetic, they stand in a class of their own. Torrents of the most violent abuse imaginable, words coined and used for the occasion, cursings and every form of profanity these are the prelude. Threats are more common than actions and the usual conviction can be only for disturbing the peace or for assault and battery. . . . During excitement of this kind such negroes are raving amazons, as it were, apparently beyond control, growing madder and madder each moment, eyes rolling, lips protruding, feet stamping, pawing, gesticulating with the usual accompaniments of anger. This frenzied madness, containing also a large degree of pleasurable feeling, seems beyond control to all powers of the negro community.”

Round two: what year is it again? The similarities between Goldberg and Odum’s rhetoric is almost eerie; almost, because this is how antiblackness operates. As the structuring logic of modernity it is trans-temporal, perpetuating itself through discourse as much as direct action. Goldberg might have taken umbrage at the comparison to Rebecca Latimer Felton, but if the language has barely changed? And more importantly, if the structural and relational position of Black women in comparison to the rest of Humanity has remained fundamentally unchanged? Then the comparison is accurate, and a vital one to make.

Self Defense and the “New” Worlds There is much more that could be said about these historical continuities, including the continued erasure and pilfering of Black women’s labor (Golberg failed to cite any of the Black feminist responses to #Femfuture, (http://diasporahypertext.com/2013/04/12/femfuture-history-loving-each-other-harder/) which of course gave a more nuanced reading than she portrayed). However, I want to end by drawing attention to a key fulcrum that this discourse of Black Woman As Rage Beast That Must Be Quarantined And Controlled is dependent upon: the disavowal of injury. As a range of historians (http://books.google.com/books? id=kqr4H0sqEPYC&dq=saidiya+hartman&source=gbs_navlinks_s) have shown, (http://books.google.com/books?id=PQG67jlpeKUC&source=gbs_navlinks_s) this particular construction of Black women can only stand if pain is understand to be beyond our experience. In other words, it’s impossible to hurt us. Slave law and society, and the many post-Emancipation laws that have followed it (to say nothing of the society), recognized Black women as having no selves to defend. (http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2014/05/14/preview-no-selves-to-defend-marissaalexander-and-a-legacy-of-criminalizing-women-of-color-for-self-defense/) Any act of selfdefense is viewed as aggression, or at the very least it is misread and seen as unwarranted, if not outside the boundaries of civility entirely. Goldberg participates in this disavowal of injury when she rewrites the origins of the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag as being a delayed response to #Femfuture, when in fact it was in response to a speci c instance of interpersonal, misogynoir-fueled abuse – abuse that was facilitated by white feminists (shoutout Mizz Felton). But rather than address this event, which would inevitably lead to a discussion of institutionalized antiblackness within feminism, Goldberg instead displaces the violence onto the gure of the “savage” Black woman, e ectively erasing her injury and the legitimacy of her response.

But such is the logic of antiblackness. In the end, though, I have my own historical continuities as well. For instance, I look to Felton’s contemporary, Ida B. Wells, who advised Black folks to “ponder the lesson” (http://www.gutenberg.org/ les/14975/14975-h/14975h.htm) o ered by African American communities who chose to arm themselves against violent whites: “a Winchester ri e should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” #YourSlipIsShowing was an o shoot of Ida’s ri e, as is the number of means Black women have conjured up to protect each other online, especially in the absence of similar protections from either the platforms we’re on or our “allies” who share these spaces with us. In an antiblack world, and the “new” worlds that come from it, self-defense may still be against social and civil law, but if we are to live, then it’s what we must do.

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DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 2015 Volume 9 Number 2

#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics Moya Bailey , Northeastern University

Abstract My research highlights the networks contemporary Black trans women create through the production of digital media and in this article I make the emotional and uncompensated labor of this community visible. I provide an added level of insight into my research process as a way to mirror the access I was granted by these collaborators. I use Digital Humanist Mark Sample’s concept of collaborative construction to demonstrate my own efforts to enact a transformative feminist process of writing and researching in the Digital Humanities (DH) while highlighting the ways in which the communities I follow are doing the same in their spheres of influence.

As I began to work on my book, Misogynoir: Black Queer and Trans Women Redefining Representations as Health Praxis, I prioritized transparency. I used my own blog and the Digital Humanities blog at Northeastern University to provide readers with insights into the academic publishing process and my efforts to shape this process into a more just experience for my research collaborators [I'm Back 2014]. My research highlights the networks contemporary Black trans women create through the production of digital media and in this article I make the emotional and uncompensated labor of this community visible. I provide an added level of insight into my research process as a way to mirror the access I was granted by these collaborators. I use Digital Humanist Mark Sample’s concept of collaborative construction to demonstrate my own efforts to enact a transformative feminist process of writing and researching in the Digital Humanities (DH) while highlighting the ways in which the communities I follow are doing the same in their spheres of

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influence. The networks built through digital media production are significant attempts to redress the lack of care

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that Black trans women receive from the health care community and society. I argue that these processes of digital media production produce more than just redefined representations but also connections that can be understood as a form of health care praxis themselves. To reach these conclusions I have charted a new methodology that incorporates theoretical perspectives from Black queer theory, digital humanities, and feminist theory and transforms my relationship to the people producing these digital representations. Media and cultural studies scholars have long understood the epistemological and pedagogical significance of popular media [Hall 1993]; [Jones 2003]; [Jenks 1995]; [Sperling 2011]; [Macdonald1995]. Similarly, marginalized groups have often used media production to challenge dominant scripts within mainstream outlets, and the rise of digital platforms makes this task even easier. Black trans women’s use of Twitter, an existing digital media platform, creates new and

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alternate representations as a practice of health promotion, selfcare, and wellness that challenge the ways they are depicted in popular culture. I focus on a digital project by Black trans women that involves the collaborative creation of images, links, and other digital media that trouble problematic representations through a curation process that also works to enrich the lives of those participating. I look at trans advocate Janet Mock’s twitter hashtag #girlslikeus and discuss the many issues of trans women’s collective survival signaled via the tweets marked by the tag. I focus on Mock’s use of the hashtag because I sought and achieved her permission to work on the

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project. I parse my process for achieving informed consent and how it differs from the paternalism of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process. I acknowledge the negotiated terms under which this project is discussed to signal my own queer feminist praxis in conducting this research. I build towards an understanding of what I call digital alchemy as health praxis designed to create better representations for those most marginalized in the Western biomedical industrial complex through the implementation of networks of care beyond its boundaries. Alchemy is the "science" of turning regular metals into gold. When I discuss digital alchemy I am thinking of the ways that women of color, Black women in particular, transform everyday digital media

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into valuable social justice media magic that recodes failed dominant scripts. Digital alchemy shifts our collective attention from biomedical interventions to the redefinition of representations that provide another way of viewing Black queer and trans women. I argue that this process of redefining representation challenges the normative standards of bodily representation and health presented in popular and medical culture.

Connection through #girlslikeus Black trans women negotiate unique threats to life and health as those multiply marginalized by gender, race, sexuality, and the disproportionate amounts of violence their communities face. On

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December 5, 2014, Deshawnda Sanchez, a Los Angeles area Black trans woman, was killed while trying to escape her murderer. Her death was one of 225 murders of trans women in 2014. The LGBTQ magazine The Advocate reported that in 2015, one trans woman has been murdered every week and the majority of these deaths are of women of color [Miami 2015]. These statistics do not reflect the frequent harassment, abuse, and harm that trans women of color survive. The deadly violence that Black trans women negotiate is often perpetrated by intimate partners, many of whom when asked claim they were "duped" or "tricked" by their partners, and then justifiably enraged to the point of murder [Gay2015]. The popular media trope of trans identity as a form of deception is iconized in the 1992 film The Crying Game, a film that shows a man vomit when he realizes that Dil, the Black woman he loves, is trans. Laverne Cox, a Black trans woman portraying a trans woman on the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black, notwithstanding, the generally portrayal of trans women and trans women of color in popular culture is one of hypersexual tricksters who deserve to be victimized for deceiving cis men [mattkane2012]. It is again in the area of representation, in visual assessment, that trans women of color are judged and then responsible for the resulting violence it elicits from the people closest to them [Lee 2014]; [Lee 2008]; [Steinberg 2005]. These acts of violence also coincide with increasing visibility and advocacy by trans women of color, particularly through digital media outlets and in online media. In 2012, Mock was moved to become a more outspoken trans activist because of the rise in the number of murders and suicides of queer and trans youth. She has used her platform as a former web editor for Marie Claire as well as digital tools like videos and hashtags to reach out to other trans women in society. In explaining the origin of her hashtag #girlslikeus, Mock describes her support of Jenna Talackova, a contestant disqualified for the

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Miss Universe Pageant for in the words of the pageant officiates, "not being a natural born female" [Miss Universe 2014]. Mock’s desire to help Talackova achieve her dream lead to the creation of the hashtag. On her personal blog Mock wrote, So I shared Jenna’s petition on Twitter, and said: Please sign & share this women's rights petition in support of transgender beauty queen Jenna Talackova & #girlslikeus: ow.ly/9TYc6 27 Mar 12 And that was the online birth of #girlslikeus. I didn’t think it over, it wasn’t a major push, but #girlslikeus felt right. Remarkably a few more women — some wellknown, others not — shared the petition and began sharing their stories of being deemed unreal, being called out, working it, fighting for what’s right, wanting to transition, dreaming to do this, accomplishing that... #girlslikeus soon grew beyond me... my dream came true: #girlslikeus was used on its own without my @janetmock handle in it. It had a life of its own [Why I Started]. Other trans women have embraced the tag, including Laverne Cox; they use it to discuss everything from the desire to transition and the violence of being outed in unsafe situations as well as the banality

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of everyday living and dreams of job success. Computational Scientist Alan Mislove created a database that collects a random ten percent of all tweets tweeted since Twitter began. As scholars in sociology and DH have noted, a ten percent sample of such a large database can provide statically significant information about the representative population [Mislove 2011]; [Gerlitz 2013]; [Twitter Usage]; [Bruns 2013]. I examined all publically accessible tweets using #girlslikeus between Mock’s first uses in March 2012 until October 2014. With the help of computer science graduate student Devin Gaffney, we created a script that gathered all instances of the hashtag within this database. With over 11,000 tweets stored that used the hashtag I could begin to assess significance. I used Voyant, a webbased textual analysis tool that can generate word visualizations and measure the frequency and occurrence of words in a corpus, to mine the texts of the collected tweets. The most popular hashtags used with the hashtag #girlslikeus were other words of identity affirmation, including #trans and #transgender, #twoc (trans women of color).

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Figure 1. Voyant Screen capture of the instance of the hashtags #trans, #transgender, and #twoc.

These hashtags fluctuated in use over this two year period, with #transgender having fallen below its 10 initial prevalence and #twoc significantly increasing. Words related to representation were very popular, ultimately marking the content of nearly every tenth

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tweet. Variations of the words picture, selfie, as well as types of media and news outlets drove this significance, often pointing to pictures and links that affirmed trans women in ways that counter their portrayal in mainstream media. News outlets might provide a mug shot, or a picture of a trans woman offered by a family member that illustrates her appearance at an earlier point of transition. By being able to control their own images, trans women are able to subvert societal impulses to lock them into representation that recalls their assigned sex at birth. These acts of digital alchemy affirm the twitter user and the network built via the hashtag. For example, Janet Mock in May of 2013 attended the celebration of Laverne Cox’s Time magazine 12 cover, captioning their photo together, "Celebrating Laverne Cox’s time cover tonight in NYC. Sisterhood in action! #girlslikeus [Laverne 2015]."

Figure 2. Janet Mock Tweet

Though celebrating a friend’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine is not something that we can necessarily relate to, celebrating friends and their success through posting a picture on Twitter is very

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common. I won’t provide visual referents of the types of images that these daily life photos subvert, but think about the trauma and violence that befalls Dil in The Crying Game or the way trans women are often made to account for their genitalia in popular culture by journalists in order to be invited guests [Laverne 2015]. Tweets like this one, which show the daily and collective joys that trans women experience, challenge the proliferation of media representations that focus solely on their anatomy and victimization. Despite this tendency to over represent trans women in a salacious way, mainstream media continues to under report and misgender transwomen in the news [Michaelson 2012].

Transforming Methodology Through Collaborative Consent Given the frequent attacks on trans women, particularly trans women of color, I wanted to be sure that my scholarly inquiries about the hashtag were welcome and did not bring undue negative attention to the community. I reached out to Mock via Twitter to see if she was interested in my researching the tag. I told her I was interested in how it has been used and what sorts of actions have developed through its use. She said she would be excited for me to work on the project. I also asked her what sort of information would be most useful to her to know about the hashtag. She was specifically

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interested in the most popular retweets and users along with gathering a sense of where the hashtag has shown up in mainstream media. Though Mock welcomed my research on the hashtag, I wanted to give her the opportunity to say no to

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the project. My own interest was not enough justification for pursuing this type of potentially risky research that could expose an already vulnerable community to more vitriol and negative visibility. Trans women of color are not understood as one of the vulnerable communities identified by the Institutional Review Board that assesses the potential harms of academic research on those researched. The IRB recognizes prisoners, people with diminished capacity, women, particularly in their capacity as potential child bearers, and minors themselves as populations that could be unduly harmed by human subjects research. Trans women of color are represented within these populations yet are not recognized as their own contingent in need of more nuanced ethical study. I don’t wish to see trans women of color represented in this list of vulnerable populations; however, I do think that the IRB's mandate to cause no undue harm to research participants requires researchers to think more carefully about emergent communities where people’s very humanity is being questioned in society writ large. The intentions of the IRB are quite noble and necessary. IRBs are charged with ensuring that human subjects research conducted at institutions that receive federal resources is ethical and does not

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cause harm to participant [Kim 2012]. In response to human rights abuses of marginalized groups within the US, the IRB was established to ensure that human subjects research did not cause undo harm to those participating in studies [Williams 1984]; [Bradley 2007]. This function of the IRB tends to result in a paternalistic orientation towards research subjects, predicated on benevolence and the idea that "many prospective subjects are vulnerable to a range of decisional defects or impairments that render them unable to protect their own interests, and thus we are right not to rely exclusively on informed consent" [Miller 2007]. The IRB evaluates the proposed research to ensure that investigators have thought through the potential impacts of the research on the people being researched, assuming that there are potential risks that the average research subject might not be able to detect if it weren’t brought to their attention. This paternalism may be a valid position for the researcher to take given the type of research to be conducted but in the digital landscape, a more nuanced and fluid understanding of the way power flows between researcher and researched is needed. Social media users are not the traditionally infantilized research subjects that the IRB assumes. As

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people who are actively engaged in the ongoing generation of their digital content, social media users require a level of forethought that extends beyond the purview of the IRB. While IRB review might be able to forestall some of the harms that are involved in academic research, issues of consent beyond an initial yes to participate in a research project or plans to address issues that may not be anticipated by the IRB are obfuscated. Previous studies have attempted to address IRB paternalism and its impact on research subjects in several ways. In the social sciences, there have been efforts to shift research from a top down orientation to one that is side to side or bottom up [Sabatier 1986]; [Erickson 2006]; [Plesner 2011]. These methodologies attempt to undo the power imbalance by shifting people’s relationships to power. Participation observation or becoming an observing participant are other ways that this conversation is framed, relying on the researchers shifting location into the research as the mechanism which disrupts the traditional flow of power [Maguire1987]; [McCall 1969]; [Weasel 2011]. My experience in trying to shift my relationship to power involved collaboration even before developing my research methodology.

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By speaking with Mock, before even designing my research plan, I ensured that the findings are useful 19 to her as the creator of the hashtag. In addition to speaking with Mock directly, I spoke with my online community of friends and activists to create an advisory panel. I reached out to Black women and queer thought leaders within the arenas of Twitter and Tumblr, which included a diverse group of activist, artists, and academics, who have created some of the most popular hashtags related to social justice issues. Twitter and Tumblr users like Sydette Harry and Jamie Nesbitt Golden have been central to the creation and popularity of many social justice related hashtags. Many of them have direct experience with journalists and scholars using their social media posts without their consent. These incidents range from annoying to outright dangerous. Many amongst this group of twelve have had their work stolen by journalists, interpreted by scholars all without attempting to contact them. They have experienced rape and death threats for simply voicing their opinions online. Given these histories, I did not want to repeat a pattern of beginning work without asking for permission first nor giving them the opportunity to ask their own research questions. I plan to ask within the networks using #girlslikeus what users think about the project and what

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questions they want answered about how it moves through cyberspace and the world. Even though tweets are understood as public, I err on the side of privacy and anonymity for Twitter users of the hashtag. I will not use the handles of users without first attempting to contact them. By allowing Twitter users to shape the project and their participation at multiple points, I create a more flexible process, one that is dynamic and shifting. But the collaboration doesn’t end there. My experience with issues of ongoing consent suggests that the way we do digital humanities needs to 21 shift. Digital Humanists interested in conducting research that is ethical and feminist must go beyond the simple politics of citation, as citation itself may be the thing that creates the harm to the community. As noted in The #TwitterEthics Manifesto, "both academics and journalists should ask each individual user on Twitter for consent. They should explain the context and the usage of their tweets" [Twitterethics2014]. This allows a Twitter user to prepare for a potential onslaught or simply say no. Consent is a form of collaboration, a collaborative process which means that a no may come later in the course of the collaboration. Similarly, the process of doing this research necessitates an ongoing commitment to understanding dynamics that emerge through engagement in the medium. To that end, the advisory panel proved to be more dynamic than even I could have anticipated.

Collaborative Construction: What transforms in the doing I sent the potential members of my advisory committee an email asking if they’d like to participate. Those who agreed were invited to join a listserv where I post questions and solicit help as needed. While this group was initially created to ensure that my work was ethical and useful, it has already been repurposed for needs I could not anticipate. One member of the group is an internationally renowned journalist. She queried the collaborators, asking for their thoughts on a story she was writing about the ways that the media has represented Black people, particularly Black women in coverage of the Ebola outbreak. Many in the group responded to her request, providing important quotes that shaped her article in really helpful ways. When I envisioned the group, I imagined what I could do for them and what they could do for me. Even in creating a collaborative space it didn’t occur to me that there might be things that we could collectively do for another member of the circle. I knew what I wanted from the group and assumed that I could anticipate the group’s needs from me. However, this emergent need and purpose for the group was possible through the creation of the network itself. Even before I could use the network in the way I envisioned, my collaborators were able to leverage it to meet their own needs.

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Stressing a nonhierarchal circular collaboration is what helped make this possible. I had transformed

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the traditional top down approach of my research but I had only imagined a relationship that was side by side, a horizontal relationship with me on one side and my collaborators on the other. This moment allowed for the realization that we had cocreated a three dimensional space with multiple directions of flow. What I appreciate about the language of collaborators as opposed to research subjects is that it provides the potential for multiple levels of relationship between those participating in the research; the structure is dynamic. Those of us who participated in interviews for the journal article were not compensated, and there were a few minor errors in the article that I believe in another context would have been hurtful. However, the initial transparent ask, the openness to feedback, the knowledge that we were all

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participating in a process that extends beyond the published article and even my book, created a level of trust that allowed for forgiveness and correction among peers. Many of these collaborators have experienced the unsolicited appropriation of their words by people they did not know. By developing a new community, albeit a short lived one, the power differentials among the members are mitigated. While I still maintain epistemic privilege as the gatherer and convener of this circle, I am interested in using that privilege for the collective good [On 1993]. Because academic books make very little money, I endeavored to find meaningful ways to compensate this group for their work and time. This includes using university research money to help convene gatherings for existing digital networks that may have trouble connecting in another capacity.

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Creating a fund from honoraria received in relationship to the work, in addition to coauthoring articles with interested collaborators. are a few of the ways I am exploring transforming my relationship to my collaborators. I’ve been able to leverage my position within academic communities to write grants that include budget opportunities for these collaborators and more. As the project continues I am creating more opportunities that challenge the ways that researchers have traditionally compensated and shared in the benefits that come from doing research. One of the important aspects of DH work is the emphasis on collaboration. Scholars in the humanities 26 are still primarily rewarded for single author texts. Tenure and promotion committees regard books and articles that have one author more favorably than mutliauthored texts. One of the ways that DH is creating a different methodological practice is by supporting connection through collaboration across multiple aspects of digital projects. Digital Humanist Mark Sample discusses this idea in relationship to student work through his concept collaborative construction. He writes, [B]y collaborative construction, I mean a collective effort to build something new, in which each student’s contribution works in dialogue with every other student’s contribution. A key point of collaborative construction is that the students are not merely making something for themselves or for their professor. They are making it for each other, and, in the best scenarios, for the outside world [Sample 2012]. I adapt this idea of collaborative construction such that it has import outside the realm of the

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classroom; it is critical to the way that I shape my research project. Consequently, a transformation of the goals of my academic work was necessary, as well as my relationship to the usually distinct categories of research subject, researcher, and audience. My work has multiple audiences. There are scholars in fields like women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and digital humanities who might be interested understanding the networks contemporary Black trans women create through the production of digital media. However I am

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interested in creating a book that also and perhaps most importantly, is useful to the communities on which my examples draw. More than just the world outside the academy, I want to create a resource for the communities with whom I am collaborating on the research. This practice involves a more intentional form of collaboration than I have attempted before. I am creating a new way of practicing the relationships I am developing through my the advisory panel,

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transforming a researcher/researched relationship into one of collaboration, thereby shifting out of the position of researcher into a more equal role. This process also includes developing new models of expressing the value of everyone’s contributions. For me, the process is the product, meaning that the process itself is productive, creative, and transformative of the conditions we are seeking to understand through the research [Twitterethics2014]. We are building collaboratively in ways that build community and shift existing dynamics. We are actively shaping the project of collaborating through our collective participation so that an end product, while potentially very useful, is not the only thing created by this collaborative investigation. The example of trans women of color’s digital activism demonstrate the power of digital media to

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redefine representations of marginalized groups and their ability to impact a white supremacist, heterosexist, and trans misogynist media culture without that being their primary goal. The practices of reclaiming the screens of our computers and phones with content is not simply one of creating new representations but is a practice of selfpreservation and health promotion through the networks of digital media. While often celebrated for the rehabilitated images, this media is not often interrogated as processes that support the development of community and individual health strategies. Trans women of color aren’t simply naming the violence they experience but are building networks of support and recognition for their work that helps them have safer environments in which to live. I understand trans women of color’s production of media as an act of selfpreservation and one of 31 health praxis that is not centered on appeals to a majority audience. The creation of media by minoritarian subjects about themselves and for themselves can be a liberatory act. These acts of image redefinition actually engender different outcomes for marginalized groups and the processes by which they are created build networks of resilience that far outlives the relevant content. Black women and queer and trans folks reconstruct representations through digital alchemy. #Girlslikeus rejects the assimilationist invisibility of another potential hashtag like #imagirltoo, in favor of a declaration that makes trans women the undeniable center of their own project, where they are

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their own referents, not cis women. #Girlslikeus signals a conversation that is for, by, and about trans women and not their proximity to another group of relative power. #Girlslikeus exemplifies the magic of digital alchemy through this practice of shifting from margin to center utilizing established mediums to create literally transformative realities. The added benefit of creating this community online is that it is visible to those outside the identity and 33 does the work of humanizing inadvertently and without draining energy from the more important work of supporting each other. Digital media is creating and supporting a network of connection among communities that have traditionally had trouble finding each other let alone reaching a larger audience. By doing the work of community building online, groups are leveraging both visibility and education at once. Trans women of color are telling their own stories but in the process are forcing more recognition for their identities in mainstream publics.

Putting Process into Practice

As a member of the Allied Media Projects community, I have been shaped by the organization’s values

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and principles. Allied Media Projects mission is to "cultivate media strategies for a more just and creative world" (n.d.). The annual Allied Media Conference that highlights work from activists, artists, and organizers in service of this mission, highlights the words create, connect, and transform in their advertising for the event. I find these verbs particularly useful in marking the different components of this project that trouble more traditional methodologies in my fields of study. I see these three components of connection, creation, and transformation as the template for the types of questions we should be asking about our digital research. I have identified the questions these verbs raise for me in my own research which may be a good starting place for others who are interested in the same.

Connect 1. Who are your collaborators? 1. What community is your research accountable to beyond your academic community? 2. How will you demonstrate your desire to be accountable to them? 3. Are there people you can talk to about the impact of your research beyond the IRB? 2. How does everyone benefit from the research? 1. What questions does the community want answered? 2. Can people be compensated in ways that honor their time and skills? Create

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1. What tools and or methods encourage multidirectional collaboration? 1. What mechanism of accountability can you create? 2. Are there ways that collaborators can use the research process to their own ends? 2. What kind of process can you create for your research? 1. Is there room for collaborators to give and rescind consent at different times during the research process? 2. Does the pace of the project meet your needs and your collaborators needs? Transform

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1. How will you take care of yourself in the research process? 1. What do you and your collaborators need to stay sustained while conducting the research? 2. What happens after the research product is complete? 2. How will you be transformed? 1. Will the research strengthen your connection to your collaborators? 2. Did you and your collaborators come to new understandings? I offer these questions as a starting place for conducting digital research within a feminist ethical 37 frame. I am reminded of Octavia Butler’s aphorism "all you touch you change; all you change, changes you" [Melzer2002]. With this tenant in mind, I think that the important take away here is that the very process of conduct research creates shifts in the landscape. These shifts have incredible potential to

be both helpful and harmful, depending on how you frame your project and interactions with your collaborators. The Research Justice collective at the AMC frames their work with the question "is this just research or just research?" I want my research to be just and I had to set my parameters for what that means. I realized that I can’t answer these questions by myself. I am close but not embedded in these digital

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networks I study. I’ve tried to shape the process of my investigation in a way that honors the principles set out in the Allied Media Project mission. My project is collaborative and builds connection; it’s creative in that I’m generating something useful in the media; and it’s transformative in that my collaborators and I will be changed by the process of doing the research.

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Williams 1984 Williams, Peter C. 1984. "Success in Spite of Failure: Why IRBs Falter in Reviewing Risks and Benefits." IRB: Ethics and Human Research 6 (3): 1–4. doi:10.2307/3563870. mattkane2012 mattkane. 2012. "Victims or Villains: Examining Ten Years of Transgender Images on Television." Text. GLAAD. November 20. http://www.glaad.org/publications/victimsorvillains examiningtenyearstransgenderimagestelevision.

Small Axe

Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness Alexander G. Weheliye

I am extremely grateful to Tavia Nyong’o for his generous and elegant engagement with the central ideas of my Phonographies and Julian Henriques’s Sonic Bodies and to the editor of Small Axe, David Scott, for providing the forum to participate in this conversation.1 It is perhaps fitting that someone like me, who tends to exhibit symptoms of intellectual nomadism, would be given the opportunity to reflect on a text ten years after its writing. Revisiting Phonographies on the eve of the publication of my second book, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, I find that the first text seems far removed from my current thinking, with regard to the objects of analysis, yet also proximate in terms of its conceptual underpinnings.2 Habeas Viscus concerns the relationship between black studies, black feminist theory, political violence, and alternate conceptions of humanity, elaborating the central place of blackness in modernity from angles different from Phonographies. First, Habeas Viscus is not concerned with sound but with the visual, and, second, it focuses more squarely on the theoretical frameworks for analyzing how race shapes the very idea of what it means to be human. Although present in Phonographies, these ideas are not front and center in the same way as they are in Habeas Viscus, which is primarily about theoretical discourses and their attendant institutional politics. The two books may seem dissimilar in their 1 2

Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (New York: Continuum, 2011). Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

small axe 44 • July 2014 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-2739947 © Small Axe, Inc.

Published by Duke University Press

Small Axe 44 • July 2014 • Alexander G. Weheliye | 181

objects of study, but they proffer parallel arguments about the significance of race and blackness for the study of modernity. On the whole, Habeas Viscus insists on the importance of black studies and black feminist perspectives in the study of modern humanity. In what follows, I will address some of the insightful points raised by Nyong’o, using these as an occasion for a metameditation on Phonographies’s place in my thinking and recent developments in black studies. In particular, my comments will concentrate on the analytics of blackness as it relates to Western modernity and decolonial critiques, the absence of Africa and African cultures from Phonographies, and the conceptual provenances of black feminist approaches.

Be Real Black for Me Nyong’o accurately states that despite recent appeals for decolonial critiques, neither Henriques nor I are fearful of claiming Western modernity from an Afro-diasporic vantage point, that we do not feel “compelled to indigenize” our “thought is noteworthy at the present moment, wherein calls for a decolonial aesthetics are frequently heard (if less frequently carried through).”3 For me, claiming, though not owning, the centrality of blackness and black cultures to the genesis of the West is as important as it is necessary for the particular decolonial critique developed within black studies. As C. L. R. James and Hortense Spillers, among many others, have shown, to construe blackness, black studies, and black feminism as local, ethnographic phenomena—rather than as “the history of Western Civilization” or a “vestibular moment” in the engendering of the West—feeds the very racialized coloniality we are trying to demolish.4 Given that blackness is frequently thought to reside beyond the iron grip of the West and modern technologies, despite being a product of these forces, one significant way to dismantle the coloniality of being in Western modernity is to continually insist on just how fundamental blackness, black people, and black cultures are to this territory, albeit without falling prey to a politics of recognition, which merely adds window dressing to the systemic colonial territoriality of the modern West. This, however, occurs not by removing the specificity of black life but by using the liminal yet integral spatiotemporal positioning of blackness as a way to call into question modernity as such. The central concern of my writing has been to theorize how blackness functions as an integral part of modern Western thought and life. That is, instead of imagining Afro-diasporic cultures as disconnected from the heart of modernity’s whiteness, I demonstrate how black cultures have contributed to the very creation and imagination of the modern, interrogating the facticity of blackness, that is, how certain groups of humans became black through a multitude of material and discursive powers. Blackness is an effect of Western modernity, although not reducible to a colonialist imposition on black people. Following theorists such as Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Hortense 3 4

Tavia Nyong’o, “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions: Black Sound Studies after the Millennium,” this issue of Small Axe, 174; hereafter cited in the text. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” in Anna Grimshaw, ed., The C. L R. James Reader (1969; repr., Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 397; and Hortense J. Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” CR 6, no. 3 (2006): 25. See also Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-date,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (1994; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 428–70.


Small Axe 182 | Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness

Spillers, my writing calls attention to blackness as an ontological formation that not only forms a part of the modern West but must be understood as constitutive of this domain; the emphasis on sound, technology, and blackness in Phonographies represents one particular part of that larger intellectual project. The Middle Passage, transatlantic racial slavery, the plantation system, and the gendered racial terror erected on black people were not one-time events; they spanned almost five hundred years, from the early fifteenth century to well into nineteenth century, and their reverberations can still be felt around us not only in the Americas but also in many other places around the globe, including continental Africa. Although the “proper” colonization of continental Africa did not extend over the same period, it must be seen as part of this continuum if we consider that the “scramble for Africa” took place almost contemporaneously with the abolition of slavery in Brazil, thus extending this form of racial terror to the 1970s, when Portugal “ceded” its African colonies. The subjugation, expropriation, enslavement, rape, and killing of black life continues today under different guises in, among other places, the prison industrial complex in the United States and the economic neocolonization of many African nations by the West. Blackness as a category of analysis does not disappear black bodies as much as it highlights how black subjects are positioned in relationship to this abstract force differently from other groups and internally differentiated depending on gender, sexuality, class, phenotype, nationality, elocution, and so on. Understanding blackness as an abstract force or assemblage also allows us to see how it can be abstracted from and appropriated by people not categorized as black (e.g., the history of US popular music or blackface minstrelsy). As a category of analysis, blackness, just as whiteness, then, is not primarily about cataloging the existence of racial groups (map) but addresses a spectrum of power along which all racial groups are unequally positioned (territory).5 Put schematically, the closer the group is presumed to be to whiteness, the more power it possesses, and the closer the group is thought to be to blackness, the less power it has access to. In other words, the ontological territory of blackness actualizes the mirage of the empirical existence of racial groups, which makes possible the categorization and hierarchization of different groups so that the unequal access to resources and power remains in place. One of the many reasons recent invocations of “diaspora” in black studies remain inadequate for understanding the complexities of blackness and black life in the modern world is that they elide the map of specific African-descended populations around the world with the territory of blackness that enables their legibility as identifiable black communities.6 Thus, the idea of diaspora in black studies—in its rush to cook up a conceptual and nominal ointment to heal to constitutive ontological fracture of blackness in Western modernity—transmogrifies into a flight from the uneven territory of 5 6

See Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project,” in Lewis Ricardo Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, eds., Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 107–69. On the limitations of diaspora discourse in black studies, see Alexander G. Weheliye, “My Volk to Come: Peoplehood in Recent Diaspora Discourse and Afro-German Popular Music,” in Trica Danielle Keaton, Stephen Small, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., Black Europe and the African Diaspora (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and on black studies and the ontological sphere of blackness, see Weheliye, “Introduction: Black Studies and Black Life,” forthcoming in “States of Black Studies,” special issue, Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014).



blackness.7 Stuart Hall insists on this global perspective when writing about the idea of postcolonialism: “The term ‘post-colonial’ is not merely descriptive of ‘this’ society rather than ‘that,’ or of ‘then’ and ‘now.’ It re-reads ‘colonisation’ as part of an essentially transnational and transcultural ‘global’ process—and it produces a decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation-centred imperial grand narratives.”8 Correspondingly, critically examining blackness facilitates the comprehensive reconfiguration of Western modernity as opposed to extending the ethnographical confinement of particular black cultures. Nonetheless, the two strategies are far from mutually exclusive, and this is not an emigration from black cultures but rather a comprehensive recalibration of their preordained place in the modern West. For accepting this destined place of primitive outsiders for those who are darker than blue would leave unspoiled the larger territory of modernity. Through the ruptures of technology and sound, Phonographies offers one particular conceptual path in thinking together blackness and what it means to be human in Western modernity. Technology is construed as at once necessary to the dominance of West over the rest and antithetical to authentic Western unfettered individualism. Similarly, sound, speech, and music, while considered natural to the being of Man, threaten his self-perception as rationality and disembodiment incarnate, since these structures are sublated through the technology of writing.9 It is important that although Phonographies includes discussions of musical artifacts in literature, film, and recorded sound it is decidedly not a book about music, which is how it has been read by some critics, but is instead concerned with the nexus of black culture, sound, and technology. If the text were a study of black musical cultures (map), then the ontological dimensions (territory) that make possible the apperception of black music as an entity putatively distinct from Western music would remain deafeningly inaudible. As Hortense Spillers notes, “Because it was set aside, black culture could, by virtue of the very act of discrimination, become culture, insofar as, historically speaking, it was forced to turn its resources of spirit toward negation and critique.”10 Ergo, before exploring the specificities of black culture, we would do well to interrogate how it became black and under which conditions certain acts carried out by black people transmuted into culture. Not a text about black music per se, Phonographies unearths the historical, conceptual, cultural, and technological grounds that sanction black music’s functioning as a foundation for modern consumer culture and as a hub of identification for black populations across the globe. While several works have been published that analyze the intersections of sound, race, and technology—by Julian Henriques, Kara Keeling, Andreana Clay, Louis Chude-Sokei, Edwin Hill, Francesca Royster, Adam Banks, Guthrie Ramsey, and Tavia Nyong’o, among others—I would be 7

As Hortense Spillers remarks, “They simply redescribe some prior hegemonic sense of priority that I find troubling.” Hortense Spillers et al., “ ‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’: Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’; A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, nos. 1–2 (2007): 306. 8 Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘the Post-colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (New York: Routledge, 1996), 247. 9 Following Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to designate the modern, secular, white, heteromasculine, and Western version of the human that differentiates full humans from not-quite-humans and nonhumans on the basis of biology and economics. See, for instance, Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 10 Spillers, “Idea of Black Culture,” 26.



hesitant to say that a field such as “black sound studies” exists.11 For, what unites these texts and those that Nyong’o mentions as laying the groundwork—“Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Fred Moten’s In the Break, Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun, and Lindon Barrett’s Blackness and Value (alongside now classic references such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Amiri Baraka’s Blues People)” (174), is their absence from most genealogies and anthologies in the bourgeoning subfield of sound studies. I can also say with certainty that the vast majority of responses and reviews of Phonographies have been from scholars of black studies rather than sound studies, which is partially because of the racialized institutional structures that we labor under, but also because I did not write the book with a sound studies audience in mind. Granted, this would have been impossible, because sound studies was barely a nascent idea during the writing of the book. As a result of my training and politico-intellectual investments in black studies, I situated my particular intervention within this context. Put more simply, I was not trying to understand modern sound via the detour of black music; instead I sought to magnify some of the ways blackness—and thus modernity—is constituted by sound and technology. The most extended critical conversation in Phonographies is with Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, which provided me with a template for thinking together black music and literature as well as for exploring how black sounds from the United States and the Caribbean circulate among black diasporas in Western Europe.12 Despite my criticism in Phonographies of some of Gilroy’s ideas, it cannot be understated just how much of a space Gilroy’s text provided for the articulation of my own work. That is, I endeavored to expand the terrain diagrammed by Gilroy, especially those parts pertaining to technological embodiment of black musics, which remained marginal to The Black Atlantic. Phonographies also chronicles my search for writing styles that take on the technical specificity of academic English and mix it with other vernaculars, sounds, and sensations so as to amplify the objects of study and ideas under discussion from perspectives not possible in 11 See Henriques, Sonic Bodies; Kara Keeling, “Electric Feel.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2014): 49–83; Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, eds., “Listening to American Studies,” special issue, American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011); Andreana Clay, “Like an Old Soul Record: Black Feminism, Queer Sexuality, and the Hip-Hop Generation,” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2007): 53–73; Louis Chude-Sokei, “When Echoes Return: Roots, Diaspora, and Possible Africas (A Eulogy),” Transition 104 (2011): 76–92; Edwin C. Hill, Black Soundscapes, White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011); Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Tavia Nyong’o, “ ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin’: Queer Assemblages, Lyrical Nostalgia, and the African Diaspora,” Performance Research 12, no. 3 (2007): 42–54; and Tavia Nyong’o, “I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents,” Criticism 50, no. 1 (2008): 101–12. See also Daphne A. Brooks, “ ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2007): 180–204; Daphne A. Brooks, Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2006); Daphne A. Brooks, “ ‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 617–27; Jayna Brown, “Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse,” Social Text 28, no. 1 (2010): 125–46; Michael Hanson, “I’m a Brotha’ but Sometimes I Don’t Feel Black,” in Anna Everett and Amber Wallace, eds., Afrogeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for Black Studies Research, 2007), 13–27; Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Meta DuEwa Jones, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Gustavus Stadler, ed., “The Politics of Recorded Sound,” special issue, Social Text 28, no. 1 (2010); and Michael E. Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007). 12 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).



straight-up “academese.”” Given that Standard American English was the third language in which I acquired verbal fluency, Phonographies records my process of creatively grappling with a particular variant of written English so that—since the book shows speech and text cannot be opposed—the prose could approximate the different idiomatic tongues that inspired me and that I had inhabited, if uneasily so. It helped that the struggle with and creative utilization of major languages, whether spoken, screamed, sung, written, ululated, whispered, danced, or rapped, has been a hallmark of black cultural production in and beyond the academy. Rest assured, though, I still shudder when reading some of those Germanic sentences. (#ItIsWhatItIs) In some quarters, the response to Phonographies has progressed through an emphasis on the black musical cultures I discussed—and some that I did not, it must be said—and a concomitant oversight of its technological dimension, which, for me, is just as, if not more, important to the conceptual architecture of the book. Although it is impossible and undesirable to regulate how one’s ideas are taken up once they circulate in the intellectual commons (I conceive of scholarly inquiry as a collective effort, and it has been gratifying to see what other scholars have done with the ideas in the book), this mode of reception simultaneously neglects and replicates precisely Phonographies’s principal critique: we cannot conceive of blackness and technology as opposed. If anything, the disavowal of technology proves my point that blackness and technology are often still considered antithetical opponents in the ongoing war that is Western modernity. Or, to put it in more quotidian terms, after writing Phonographies it has become incredibly exhausting to be repeatedly asked whether I explore jazz music as a genre or what I have to say about the blues. (#Don’tStartNoneWon’tBeNone)

Africa Is My Descent, and Here I’m Not at Home Since I am a first-generation African and black European in the US academy (having spent equal parts of my life in Somalia and Germany before moving to the United States), the relationship between the African continent and its multifarious diasporas, especially as it routed through musical cultures, is never far from my mind. In fact, early in the writing process, I carried with me a memory of a television news story that crystallized perfectly some of the concerns animating Phonographies. The report about the beginning stages of the civil war in Somalia (1991–2006) aired the summer of 1992 on the German television program Weltspiegel. It featured a Somali woman—adorned with a colorful hijab and a Kalashnikov draped over her shoulder—seated in the passenger seat of an army jeep driving through war-torn Mogadishu as she nodded her head to the beat of Salt-n-Pepa’s then globe-conquering safe-sex anthem “Let’s Talk about Sex,” which was emanating from a small boom box. This brief news report poignantly underscored the global circulation of different technologies: the jeep, the Kalashnikov, the boom box, and, in particular, the recorded planetary reverberations of African American music in the late twentieth century. I was also struck by the seemingly incongruent juxtaposition, which I am sure contributed to why this particular scene was chosen by the producers of the television show, of the now ubiquitous “veiled Muslim woman” in need of rescue



by the armed forces of postmodern empire and Salt-n-Pepa’s sexually explicit lyrics. Yet the Somali woman’s and Salt-n-Pepa’s diverging positions vis-à-vis blackness complicate this scene, since the Muslim world is usually not perceived as black, and vice versa. In fact, most US news reports about Somalia around the time of the 1992 US “humanitarian” military intervention Operation Restore Hope conspicuously omitted that the country was predominantly Islamic. Conversely, Salt-n-Pepa, even if functioning here as the embodiment of Western sexual libertarianism and imagined as the ultimate counterpart to the piety and chasteness of the “veiled Muslim woman,” also unmistakably bears the burden of the hypersexualization of black women in slavery and after. Likewise, the scene echoed my own initial encounters with the sounds of black America in 1970s Mogadishu, as Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles streamed from my parents’ light-brown, fauxleather-encased portable turntable and as worn-out, imported Carl Douglas and Millie Jackson tapes emanated from my friends’ mobile cassette players. Since my friends and I could hardly be accused of commanding the English language, we frequently “indigenized” the English lyrics by phonetically sounding out what we heard in Somali. So, besides sketching the broader historical and philosophical contours of how black music in its various technological guises came to define Western modernity, I tried to conjure this moment of creative catachresis in Phonographies: What structures of feeling do technologized black sounds encode beyond lyrical content? In what ways have recording and reproduction devices, when not understood as inert conduits that immaterial sounds can transcend but as constituent forces of their affective materiality, shaped the politicosonic lower frequencies of black music? Nyong’o writes, Music is so central to traditional and modern African societies, African music is so inexhaustible . . . , that Africa could easily be nominated (although perhaps not without contention) as the sonic grounding not only of modern black music but of modern music as such. But such a nomination of Africa as the origin for (black) music would have to contend with the terms by which Western epistemology calls itself to order by consigning to Africa all that is “disordered” in the sonic, aural, oral, embodied, and ecstatic excesses of music. (175)

I consciously bracketed Africa, insofar as such a thing is possible, because I was interested in examining the global reach and technological dimensions of black American music, especially within black cultures in the Americas and Europe. On this front, Jemima Pierre offers a salient diagnosis of the absence of Africa in diaspora discourse and certain variants of black studies: “The varied critiques of Afrocentrism, black cultural nationalism, and the idea of cultural retentions within diaspora studies are what led to more than a decade of scholarship explicitly distancing itself from continental Africa.”13 Despite being in wholehearted agreement with Pierre’s statement, I cannot help but wonder whether there is not more at work in this estrangement than the missing conceptual frameworks for making “Africa” a part of black diasporic critical conversations. First, is this continental rift partially a result of the different institutional histories of black studies and African studies in the mainstream US academy given their respective roots in, on the one hand, third 13 Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 211.



world internationalism and the late 1960s student movement, and, on the other, in initially colonial anthropology and later in the Cold War creation of area studies? Second, how do we account for disciplinary training and expertise in an era of increased specialization? In other words, how do we integrate Africa as an idea and a reality into black studies responsibly without the necessary scholarly immersion that would allow us to understand the specificity on different national contexts, cultures, languages, colonial histories, and so on? To be clear, I am not advocating buying into the corporate silozation of knowledge production in the mainstream US academy, which black studies does not sit well with, as much as highlighting the institutional constraints that contribute to this rift. However, if recent texts such as Pierre’s The Predicament of Blackness and Tsitsi Jaji’s study Africa in Stereo are any indication, there is also a change afoot with regard to productively thinking together “diaspora” and “Africa.” Besides Louise Meintjes’s book about the high-tech process of producing a musical studio recording in early 1990s South Africa, mentioned by Nyong’o, Jaji’s Africa in Stereo accomplishes some of the theoretical labor required to bridge the conceptual, temporal, and spatial gaps between “Africa” and “the diaspora” in black studies. Jaji’s dazzling book centers on how African American musics have been received and remixed in three African countries—Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa—since the late nineteenth century in order to offer “a perspective on diaspora that includes and inscribes Africa as a constitutive locus rather than viewing it as a ‘source’ for diasporic populations and practices but not an active participant.” Instead of imagining Africa as a prelapsarian “natural resource” to be mined by diaspora black folk at their neocolonial will in order to claim the continent as a homeland, Jaji pursues a different path: “When considering the cultural productions of the diaspora, Africa should be understood as a constitutive component of that diaspora, rather than as a point of origin now removed from the contemporary diaspora.”14 Consequently, African cultures become players in the construction of modern blackness and black cultures, ceasing to act as premodern fountains of authentic and antitechnological black life. I also appreciate that Jaji describes the centrality of African American culture to modern blackness in Africa without acceding to the now commonplace assertion in diaspora discourse that this position constitutes a hegemonic formation or an instance of cultural imperialism. Curiously, the critique of the predominance of African American culture within black communities around the world often occurs through the centering of black US culture. In other words, when critics consider black populations outside the United States, these scholars often show how these groupings articulate themselves as diasporic via conduits of interactions with African American politics, culture, and people, which they, in turn, identify as a hindrance and use as an occasion to reject the US variant of blackness. This also presumes that established black US populations are somehow not diasporic and that US blackness is unitary, while using it as a raw interpretive resource in the scholarly codification of other black diasporas. However, this rejection can only occur if the analytics of blackness 14 Jaji, Africa in Stereo, 6, 7. For a different take on how the sonic conundrum that of the diaspora versioning of Africa “would forever be threatened by not only the messy presence of an actual Africa, but even more so by literal Africans,” see Louis Chude-Sokei’s incisive and exacting discussion of South African roots reggae singer Lucky Dubé in “When Echoes Return,” 79.



remains ensconced in the realm of the empirical (map) as opposed attempting to understand how Western supremacy resolutely maintains black subjects in the prison quarters of the not-quitehuman or nonhuman.15 (#BlackIsAn’BlackAin’t)

Look at Y’all Boys While I am thankful to Nyong’o for discerning the presence of gender and sexuality analyses in the book, and for his critical amplification of these ideas, Phonographies also exhibits some deficiencies on this front. Daphne Brooks has rightfully observed, Weheliye considers the ways that past critics have often “abandon[ed] the phone or the graph in phonograph” rather than “taking into account how sound suffuses New World black writing.” I am suggesting here that we explore the ways that Hurston’s use of sound in relation to her discursive ethnography demands that we theorize other forms of phonography, ones in which, for instance, embodied sonic performances directly engage with and complicate written texts. Likewise, we might think more about the ways that Zora’s angular voice interrupts the phonographic projects of the literary “race men” (Du Bois and Ellison) who sit at the forefront of Weheliye’s cogent study.16

In fact, in addition to not including any written texts by black female, queer, or gender nonconforming writers, Phonographies seriously lacks gendered analyses at the conceptual level, which, from my current perspective, appears as a greater methodological glitch. Even though I could attempt to retroactively market my readings of Du Bois’s and Ellison’s texts as genderqueering the African American literary canon, I will, instead, say yes, Brooks is correct in that Phonographies’s textual gallery does feature an inordinate number of great men, albeit a bit more melanated (#NoShade) than usual. Let me give you one example: gender is absent as an analytical category in my recounting of the history of Afro-German organizing in the final chapter of Phonographies. Why is this a problem, you may ask? Well, because not only does the narrative omit the integral role of black German women, both queer and straight, in this history, but also, and more significantly, my consideration fails to take into account how many women of color feminisms have not understood gender as an isolatable—or even primary—category of analysis but have grappled with the complex relationality between different forms of subjugation and offered alternatives to these.17 Because I was determined to render Afro-German history legible within the confines of a story about the maturing of race consciousness, I was unable to reflect on how taking gender into account would 15 See Weheliye, “My Volk to Come.” This is to say not that we should not investigate differences between diasporic groups, on the one hand, in North America, and, on the other hand, in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, but that it need not and should not be performed through the abjection of African American culture and politics. 16 Brooks, “ ‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?,’ ” 623n13. Brooks quotes Weheliye, Phonographies, 39. 17 See, for instance, May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1986; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory, eds., Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1990); Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983); and Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983).



have allowed me to tell a different and more interesting story about how black feminism stood at the point of origin in the context of the Afro-German political movement, that feminism was not added to a race-first undertaking. Habeas Viscus addresses this issue head-on by centering black feminism as a conceptual apparatus, Hortense Spillers’s and Sylvia Wynter’s work in particular, in the investigation of what it means to be human in the modern world. Black feminism differs from white/black masculinist discourses and white feminism because the latter often aspire to abstraction from gendered or raced particularities—for example, white, straight men speak for all humanity, while black, straight men speak all black folks, and white, straight women speak for all women. Black feminist inquiry, however, articulates its intervention from vantage points that accent the impossibility of transcending these particularities, instead enunciating its critique from perspectives that are constitutively racialized, gendered, and marked by sexualities. Take, for instance, Nicole Waligora-Davis’s recent monograph Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire, which beautifully charts how African Americans have inhabited a juridicopolitical noman’s-land situated at the juncture of native/foreigner, insider/outsider, and friend/enemy, and which has allowed the US state apparatus to violently subjugate or completely abandon its black citizens in a number of significant ways since the abolition of slavery.18 Waligora-Davis begins her study with the case of Rosa Lee Ingram, rather than Emmett Till or the Scottsboro Boys, for example, which brings to the fore the centrality of the sexual violence perpetrated against black women such as Ingram and others to the subjugation of all black people and the creation of blackness—it is not simply an exceptional occurrence but an integral part of the whole system—and also how racial violence and racial difference are always gendered/sexualized for all black subjects of a variety of genders and sexualities. In other words, although the lynching of Till was clearly gendered and sexualized, it is usually presented as primarily—and even exclusively—an act of racial violence. So, Waligora-Davis’s strategic situating of the Ingram case at the beginning of her book—and the fact that she does not introduce the sexual harassment and threats of rape Ingram faced until after she has described the case in detail—does not displace the specificity of the sexual violence experienced by black women in slavery and well after but rather shows how in “the cotton field and in the courtroom, race took center stage. The racially gendered asymmetries of power governing segregation did more than sanction the sexual harassment she endured: it permitted her injuries to be dismissed, her act of self-defense to be viewed as murder, and it diminished the weight of her testimony.” Waligora-Davis rhetorically restages how the exclusive attention to race serves to absent the different forms of gendered sexual violence so central to the workings of Jim Crow. In the second step, Waligora-Davis highlights the interdependence—but not sameness—of the sexual violence experienced by black women and men: “For more than fifty years (1900–52) ‘[n]o Louisiana-born white man had ever been executed for rape.’ Meanwhile, black males were being killed by the courts not for an actual crime, but for the ‘intent to commit rape.’ ”19 Bringing to light

18 Nicole Waligora-Davis, Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19 Ibid., 7, 9.



these continuities without erasing the uneven particularities therein is indicative of a specifically black feminist perspective, which is missing from parts of Phonographies but forms the conceptual crux of Habeas Viscus. Similarly, Beth Richie’s Arrested Justice convincingly and devastatingly demonstrates that we cannot understand the scope and depth of the prison industrial complex without considering how its tentacles ensnare poor black women, even though they do not represent the majority of those in cages.20 As a consequence, Richie’s and Waligora-Davis’s recent books stand as resplendent examples of a feminist and black perspective because they enact how these categories cannot be understood in isolation from one another and show that studies of blackness need not be incompatible with analyses of gender and sexuality. Or, in Hortense Spillers’s inimitable phrasing, Though you can’t talk about the era of sound in the US without talking about blues and black women. You can’t talk about the eras of slavery in the Americas without talking about black women, or black men without black women and how that changes the community—there is not a subject that you can speak about in the modern world where you will not have to talk about African women and new world African women. But no one wants to address them. . . . And I am saying, I am here now, and I am doing it now, and you are not going to ignore me. . . . I am here now, “Whatcha gonna do?”21

(#IfYouDon’tKnowNowYouKnow)

Acknowledgments In light of Stuart Hall’s recent passing, I was reminded that in Phonographies’s acknowledgements I thanked him along with a few others for being a teacher from afar. I want to reiterate that sentiment here, since Hall’s thinking and presence in the world have left indelible traces on everything I have written, and I dedicate my part of this conversation to Hall, who made the ideal of the rigorous yet generous debate of ideas seem both necessary and effortless.

20 Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 21 Spillers, in Spillers et al., “ ‘Whatcha Gonna Do?,’ ” 308.


Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts, and Algorithms

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S&F Online The Scholar & Feminist Online is a webjournal published three times a year by the Barnard Center for Research on Women

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GUEST EDITED BY PATRICK KEILTY AND LESLIE REGAN SHADE

TRAVERSING TECHNOLOGIES Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts, and Algorithms by micha cárdenas Find Each Other :: Local Autonomy Networks / Au‐ tonets

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On October 6, 2015, Keisha Jenkins was shot and killed in Philadelphia, becoming the twenty-first trans woman killed in the US that year.[1] 2014 saw trans women of color gaining unprecedented visibility in the mainstream media, an increase in visibility that coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of murders, up from fourteen in 2014.[2] While marginalized communities have often struggled for visibility, for trans women increased visibility may mean increased violence and increased surveillance. How can strategies for social change build safety and solidarity for those communities, such as trans women of color, who often desire invisibility? This essay looks to media art to develop a trans of color poetics that can open possibilities of life for trans people of color in movement, where movement includes urban mobility, transnational migration, performance, and social movement. Discussing media made by contemporary artists as well as my own practice-based research project Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets), I engage in a hybrid theory/practice approach, informed by media studies, transgender studies, and performance studies. There are three registers in this essay: a philosophical consideration of material/conceptual operators, a consideration of the methods of practice-based research, and a discussion of material experiments in a technological artistic milieu. I propose two operations in a trans of color poetics, the stitch and the shift, to add to the ideas of the cut and fold as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze, Joanna Zylinska, and Sarah Kember. I describe the shift in detail in the essay “Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis.” The stitch is an operation of trans of color poetics that can be used to create algorithmic methods for challenging surveillance technologies and contributing to the survival of trans people of color.[3] Laverne Cox has described the present moment as a “state of emergency for trans people,” a description that invites further consideration of necropolitics.[4] In his 2003 essay “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe offers a response to biopolitics from a global South context, stating that “contemporary experiences of human

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destruction suggest that it is possible to develop a reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject different © 2017 S&F ONLINE | PUBLISHED BY THE BARNARD CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON WOMEN from the one we inherited from the philosophical discourse of modernity. Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundational categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death.”[5] Mbembe argues that contemporary governance gains authority not only through the promise of life, but also through the guarantee of death for those populations deemed undesirable. I propose trans of color poetics as a poetics of media and movement that works to increase the chances of life for trans people of color and reduce the likelihood of death. Mbembe describes invisible killings as one way necropolitics operates today: the fact that only ten of the twenty-one murders of trans women this year have been investigated makes clear that this is a useful theoretical framework.[6] Queer of color, trans of color, and transgender studies have long been concerned with issues of invisibility and visibility. I agree with Kara Keeling’s claim that academic studies that seek to make queer and trans people visible are often problematic. As Keeling says, “a ‘looking’ for M— that begins by asking where s/he is now inevitably operates by harnessing the capacity of those temporal structures and epistemological enterprises of policing and surveillance inherent in any framing of questions of representation and visibility.”[7] In writing about trans people of color, specifically trans Chican@s, Frank Galarte points out the need for “exploring what is unannounced, listening for the iterations of silences,” which resonates with my approach to understanding modes of invisibility and imperceptibility.[8] This article takes inspiration from Aren Aizura’s claim that “invocations of invisibility and dehumanization don’t quite tell the whole story… we cannot theorize a trans necropolitics without exploring the mobility of gender variant bodies and the circuits of capital they/we exploit and are exploited by.”[9] Similarly, I claim that one cannot theorize a trans necropolitics without considering, and in this case centering, the forms of movement that constitute the survival strategies of trans people of color and allow them to escape death every day. My intention here is not to imagine trans people of color as a metaphor for flexibility, which Viviane Namaste has critiqued as an erasure of the lives of actual trans people.[10] Instead, I am looking to the politico-aesthetic strategies of trans and gender nonconforming people of color, and to artists who use similar strategies, to better understand methods of modulating perceptibility that may aid in the project of reducing violence against trans people of color. The stitch is one such method, at work in a trans of color poetics when artists stitch clothing, social bonds, codes, and concepts together with the aim of reducing violence. TThhee SSttiittcchh Physical bodies in the contemporary world are tracked through networks, biometrically analyzed and electronically surveilled, and often the results of these forms of observation is violence. I propose that an understanding of bodies as networked, and racialized gender as algorithmic, is useful for developing strategies for ending violence against trans women of color. In their book Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska look at the relationship between bodies and their surroundings in order to “make a case for a shift from thinking about ‘new media’ as a set of discrete objects to understanding media, old and new, in terms of the interlocked and dynamic processes of mediation.”[11] Here I understand processes of mediation to include digital communication networks, electronic surveillance, and medical surveillance, among others. Kember and Zylinska ask what an ethical act is in a field of mediation, and look to the cut as such an act that is both material and conceptual, arguing that “the practice of cutting is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becomingdifferent-from-the-world.”[12] Yet they are careful to state that “one must be careful not to impose moral equivalence between all practices of cutting—for example, slicing someone’s face with a knife in a street attack, remodeling someone’s face in a cosmetic surgery situation or metaphorically ‘cutting’ an aspect of reality with a still or film camera… cutting inevitably entails some degree of violence.”[13] Zylinska and Kember’s reference to the possible violence of the operation of the cut justifies the creation of a new operation for conceptualizing a poetics of anti-violence. The stitch is a material and conceptual operation, similar to the cut as discussed by Kember and Zylinska and to the fold as discussed by Gilles Deleuze. In The Fold, Deleuze considers the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which combines both calculus and philosophy, to elaborate the operation of the fold in ontology, art, and media. Deleuze states that “the world must be placed in the subject in order that the subject can be for the world. This is the torsion that constitutes the fold of the world and of the soul.”[14] Deleuze considers baroque art through Leibnizian terms such as the monad, the soul, and God in order to elaborate elements of his own process ontology, such as the multiplicity and the assemblage, building on the mathematics of objects in motion in calculus. The stitch is an operation that involves using one entity to connect two formerly separate entities. While the stitch still can contain an element of violence—penetration of the skin by a needle, for example—I imagine it as less violent than the cut, and intending to join, in the service of healing and creation, rather than in the service of destruction. Informed by a material practice of making objects by sewing, the stitch describes a poetics of object making as well as a process of making new concepts, as described by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? They state that “philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products. More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts… To create concepts is, at the very least, to make something.”[15] As sewing is a

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technique of making that has been used primarily by women throughout history, and continues to be primarily the task of women in sweatshops in the global South, my proposal of the stitch as a material and conceptual operation can be seen as feminist, a way of generating new concepts by learning from people who have been subject to material inequalities because of their gender, their race, and their geographic location. The stitch can be thought of as the basis for a theory of feminist making, which values the forms of knowledge practiced daily by oppressed people as they make their lives in the face of violence. This places the stitch in the repertoire of strategies including the methodology of the oppressed, as described by Chela Sandoval, and the science of the oppressed, as proposed by Monique Wittig and elaborated by the art collectives *particle group* and the Electronic Disturbance Theater (with which I collaborate).[16] The operation of creating relations through the stitch, of finding means to connect groups of people who had been separated, can be seen as an abstraction of the work of women of color feminism, which sought to bring together women across racial lines. The stitch can be a way of imagining the community building necessary to create community-based responses to violence, as demonstrated in my project Autonets and in other prison abolitionist and transformative justice projects around the world. The project of developing a trans of color poetics can be understood as an example of science of the oppressed—and, as such, a contribution to queer and feminist approaches to technoscience, in that it seeks to use various technologies for transfeminist ends. The stitch is intended to resonate for transgender people who choose to undergo surgery. Many trans people choose, for many different reasons, to surgically modify their bodies, and all of these surgeries involve the cut, the fold, and the stitch. The stitch, in the case of surgery, is a necessary part of healing, a temporary object that holds parts of the body together in order to allow the body to find its own sustenance in a new form. The stitch brings the affect of pain into this consideration of creation and facilitates a change in shape, a shift. Often stitches received by transgender people today are temporary augmentations, dissolvable stitches, which hold the body together during a time of healing and then fall out when they are no longer needed. Stitches may be used to augment a form such as a body or to create forms out of fabric. The basis for the idea of the stitch is an experience of stitching wearable electronic garments, yet the idea aptly describes many creative practices, including science fiction and speculative writing, media, and art. Can artists and designers work for social justice by creating objects? Art and design overlap here. While one stream of the history of art has valued artistic autonomy, other artists have been motivated by a desire to change social relations. Design as a discipline has been primarily concerned with creating objects and forms intended for use. In contrast, art movements since the 1990s, including tactical media, new media, and relational aesthetics, have sought to create objects that could change social conditions. Recent movements in design such as speculative design, contestational design, and social justice design share these goals. Yet some theorists question the viability of creating objects in order to change social relations; Rita Raley employs the term “tactical gizmology” to deemphasize objects and instead emphasize tactical media as performance.[17] This article considers artists’ attempts to create objects that embody ideas about how to transform social relations, including work by Adam Harvey, Zach Blas, and Electronic Disturbance Theater, as well as my own work. These artists explore the possibilities for escaping surveillance through clothing, masks, and mobile phone applications. A Allggoorriitthhm miicc A Annaallyyssiiss Electronic objects, which are a combination of matter and logic, provide a useful model for theorizing racialized gender. The intersectional model of structural oppression, as described by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is based on an analogy with a material intersection of streets, a location identified by intersecting lines.[18] The assemblage model was proposed by Jasbir Puar to extend the intersectional model to include a concept of identities such as race and gender in transition over time, variable according to location, and destabilized by digital technologies. Puar’s usage of assemblage is based on Deleuze and Guattari’s readings of advanced mathematics, specifically calculus and complex systems, which provide a way to visualize systems in motion.[19] I propose an algorithmic model for thinking through the experiences of trans people of color. Consider an algorithm written in the C programming language. Such an algorithm commonly begins with the declaration of variables, followed by a set of instructions. These characteristics allow us to model the ways that race and gender operate in the contemporary world based on specific forms, such as an algorithm written to describe a specific curve with specific slopes at defined points of inflection based on a complex understanding of specific interactions of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality, in specific places, over time. Algorithms allow one to visualize and articulate multiple locations of intersection and combinations of elements in movement, which would add depth to analyses based on intersectional and assemblage theories. One can create an algorithm to model particular elements of a given scenario or examine the algorithms identifiable within the scenario. For example, one can analyze the algorithms used in media art, digital media platforms, and informatic systems such as biometric surveillance tools in order to make visible the ways that racialized gender violence may be challenged or reproduced in these systems. Algorithmic analysis is not intended to replace intersectionality. Taking heed of the concerns of Black feminists such as Brittney Cooper who write on intersectionality, my intention is not to move on from

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intersectionality nor to displace Black women’s academic contributions.[20] Instead, I propose this model to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the relationships between digital technologies, race, and feminism developed in the work of Black feminist scholars such as Simone Browne, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Kara Keeling.[21] One can stitch together multiple acts of shifting into an algorithm, extending Kara Keeling’s proposal for digital identity based in difference with her formula “I = another.”[22] An algorithmic method of analysis can extend the intersectional and assemblage models by offering the possibility of numerous structures, temporalities, and logics that may be identified in a moment of violence against trans people of color, based on the model of source code. Algorithmic analysis is inspired by trans women of color’s usage of digital media, such as Mattie Brice’s digital game “Mainichi,” which allows the player to experience the repetitiveness of racialized transphobic violence. Brice’s game is repetitive in a way that is both algorithmic and performative.[23] Using algorithms to model experiences of violence is a way to take into account the harmful ways that algorithms increasingly define race and class through surveillance and databases; I see this as all the more reason to understand and develop resistant algorithms. Additionally, algorithms can have a wider range of application by considering the abstract form of an algorithm, which is similar to a recipe, a ritual or a game. Algorithms do not need digital technology to exist. Algorithms can be useful ways of imagining and performing possibilities for trans of color life in contemporary mediated environments. Later in this essay, I will provide an example of algorithmic analysis. SSuurrvveeiillllaannccee aanndd C Coouunntteerr--SSuurrvveeiillllaannccee iinn M Meeddiiaa A Arrtt In Audre Lorde’s widely influential essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” she refers to “those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women,” which, in her writing, includes “those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older,” but I propose may also provide a space for trans women of color in women of color feminism, or may foreshadow a trans of color feminism.[24] She is referring here to the tools of language and academic institutions used to isolate people from one another, yet her formulation is deeply important for anyone setting out to make technological tools in the service of social justice. The artists and designers I discuss in this section create objects with the intention of transforming oppressive social relations. Many artists and designers today are responding to the news about widespread NSA surveillance with tactical responses aimed at countering and stopping that surveillance. Adam Harvey and Zach Blas have created artworks that specifically respond to these issues. I see these projects as related to projects I have worked on that take a similar political approach to changing social relations by creating new technological objects, such as the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) by the Electronic Disturbance Theater, an art group of which I am a member, as well as my project Autonets. One may see Adam Harvey’s project Stealth Wear as an act of stitching that enacts a cut in the field of surveillance by drones. Harvey, in collaboration with a number of fashion designers, uses fabrics with metal woven into them to disrupt the thermal imaging used by unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. The anti-drone garments—a hoodie, hijab, and burqa—are priced between $475 and $2,500. Harvey has stated in interviews that these projects are intended to generate conversation more than to be practically functional. Stealth Wear makes visible the ways that bodies are increasingly monitored by algorithms, such as the algorithms that control a drone, that determine who is to be the target of surveillance or violence. Harvey’s project demonstrates the work of an artist imagining an object to solve a social problem, apparently without any discussion with affected groups or any social effort made to facilitate the usage of the tools. Another artwork with the intent of disrupting surveillance is Facial Weaponization Suite by Zach Blas. The project, exhibited from 2011 to 2014, consists of a series of masks designed to disrupt biometric surveillance by digitally scanning the faces of multiple workshop participants and stitching them together in a threedimensional modeling software. Blas’s website describes the collective aspect of the project as “making ‘collective masks’ in community-based workshops that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies.”[25] In an interview with Newsweek, Blas points to the ways that biometric tools such as facial recognition software “are being developed by police and the military to criminalize large chunks of the population.”[26] In another article, Blas describes his particular concern for “queer people, people of color, transgender people, broad sets of minoritarian populations.”[27] The project eschews visibility as a political strategy for queer people, people of color, and feminists and focuses instead on a politics of opacity, informed by the writing of Édouard Glissant. Blas sees Facial Weaponization Suite as “speculative proposition and practical experimentation,” “an opaque practice, producing variations on how to become informatically opaque.”[28] Again, the act of stitching is used to create an object that enacts a cut in a field of mediation: in this case, the algorithmic stitching of data is used to create masks that disrupt the mediation of bodies through biometric surveillance. Blas’s project operates in the practice-based research mode of speculative design, since only a few masks were designed, as prototypes, and are sold for practical use. While speculative design has been critiqued by Brazilian theorists Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliviera for “willingly ignor[ing] struggles other than those that concern the intellectual white middle classes,” Blas’s work does not reproduce this limitation.[29] Similarly, the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / b.a.n.g. lab (EDT) describes its work as speculative, but keeps its distance from speculative design. I am a member of the EDT, and our project the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) has been described by one

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of our group’s founders, Ricardo Dominguez, as a “speculative disturbance” and “contestational design.”[30] The TBT is a combination of cell phone and software that intends to provide both physical sustenance, in the form of water, and poetic sustenance, in the form of recorded audio of spoken poetry, to people attempting to cross the Mexico/US border. The project began with the research question “can sub $20 phones be made useful for emergency navigation?”[31] While one goal of the project was to develop a way for people crossing the border to access GPS service without being tracked by cellular networks, enacting a cut, the project enacts the stitch in the form of collaboration, writing software and building solidarity. Collaboration was central to the project both within the EDT and without. The phone worked by mapping water caches placed in the desert by humanitarian organizations in San Diego: Border Angels and Water Stations, Inc. As such, creating the phone involved a collaborative process of accompanying members of those organizations into the desert to place water in the caches in order to create a GPS map. Additionally, the code, as a J2ME Java application, can be seen as an act of stitching that combines many code libraries in order to function. Lastly, my own writing on the TBT pointed to an affect shared by transgender people and migrant people, that of hope, the hope for being somewhere else, whether that place of inhabitation is another country or another body. Highlighting this shared affect is intended to build solidarity between immigrant justice movements and gender justice movements, which are often separate, despite the need for collaboration evidenced by the continued detention of transgender migrant people such as Marichuy Leal Gamino, a trans woman held in a detention center near Phoenix, Arizona, for over a year who was sexually assaulted while in custody.[32] The TBT has been described by the EDT as transforming the Global Positioning System run by the US military, commonly known as GPS, into a global poetic system, using a term created by Laura Borras Castaner and Juan B. Gutiérrez.[33] Consider the following excerpts from the poem “net.walkingtools.Transformer,” which I wrote as part of the TBT project and which I will use to demonstrate algorithmic analysis.

/* Fields */ private java.lang.String lifeLine; private boolean maleOrFemale; private boolean citizenOrMigrant; private java.lang.String genderDesired; private java.lang.String genderGiven; private java.lang.String oldName; private java.lang.String newName; publicAndPrivate TransCoder theSoftBody; /* Constructors */ public Transformer(net.walkingtools.j2se.editor.HiperGpsTransformerShifting , java.lang.String) { if(genderGiven != genderDesired || birthPlace != destination) { walking = true; /* attempt to enter into a queer time and place via the transcoder library */ while(theSoftBody.qTime(GogMagog)){ dancing = joy; transforming = hope && pain && fear && fantasies && uncertainty; //is the assignment operator, that of identity, binary in itself? //try some other methods like becoming serpent through poetry nepantla.open(imaginedWorld); nepantla.shift(towardsImaginedBody); uploadMyBody &~& resistLogicsOfCapital!

The poem uses the actual code of the TBT and transforms it into a poetic meditation on the intersections of transborder and transgender, inspired by cyberfeminist poetry and codework. While following the format of Java source code, the poem exceeds the bounds of computational logic that would allow it to function, instead using the syntax of the algorithms that control the mobile phones that shape so much of our lives to express emotional experience. In the poem, I describe elements that may be considered to make up an identity, such as name and birthplace, with variable declarations, creating a place in memory for those elements. Then I place those variables into an algorithm in which one can see the specific ways different parts of an identity may move and operate within trans people of color and migrant people.

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There are multiple levels of meaning at play in this algorithmic poetics. The poem opens with a long list of declarations of variables, which is standard in code, yet when read as a poem, particularly when read aloud, involves so much repetition that it hints at the ritual space of performance, or becomes poetic. The poem uses standard Java keywords such as “private” or “public,” yet to describe the body invents a new category of publicAndPrivate. Some variables here refer to aspects of an identity, such as genderDesired, that may reproduce a problematic modularity, as Tara McPherson has described is an element of racial logics.[34] Yet variables are dynamic processes in memory, maintained by electrical charges, performative in that they only exist at run time. If one imagines algorithms to be open source, they are available in a public repository, and can be modified to suit one’s particular uses. Perhaps the danger of modularity of code can be offset by its mutability and potential for collaborative editing. This example is presented here to show that there can be both precision and poetic ambiguity in an algorithm. Flow-control statements in the poem are used to express commonalities between transgender and migrant experience. The line

if(genderGiven != genderDesired || birthPlace != destination)

reads, to readers who know Java or C derivative languages, as “if gender given is not equal to gender desired, or birthplace is not equal to destination” and the code that follows inside the { brackets is executed if this statement evaluates to true for the subject in question. This line imagines elements of my life experience as a trans person encoded into Java language. One could also imagine such an algorithm being used within a video game about transgender migration, or in a Transportation Safety Administration algorithm for deciding outcomes for airline passengers. Other lines in the poem depart from coding conventions and imagine code libraries that execute the functions of Chicana feminism, taking inspiration from Zach Blas’s transcoder library. Lines such as

nepantla.open(imaginedWorld);

indicate an object that is not described here but is left to the imagination of the reader. The “nepantla object” refers to Gloria Anzaldúa’s usage of the Nahuatl word nepantla, referring to a space in between worlds, a space of transformation, a liminal space often accessed through ritual.[35] Yet in this imagining, the space is part of a code library that can be accessed when needed by a function call. One may read this as a decolonial usage of code, attempting to stitch together Aztec traditions, Anzaldúa’s queer, disabled, trans of color feminist poetry, and contemporary trans experience, through Java code on mobile devices. LLooccaall A Auuttoonnoom myy N Neettw woorrkkss // A Auuttoonneettss

Autonets was motivated by a desire to create autonomous communication networks for trans of color safety that do not rely on prisons, police, or corporations, inspired by the prison abolitionist movement. I originally built prototypes of these networks in the form of a line of clothing and accessories with conductive thread and wireless transmitters capable of forming autonomous mesh networks. Mesh networks may offer one of the few ways of avoiding the NSA’s surveillance nets that capture all internet traffic at the DNS level of communication because they route traffic between devices locally, instead of sending all data through phone companies and international DNS backbones. Using these prototypes, I held workshops and presented performances in thirteen cities in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Germany. I focused my attention on three cities: Toronto, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

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One performance of Autonets titled ‘Local Autonomy Networks: Find Each Other’ at the Zero1 Biennial in San Jose, California, used speculative design prototypes in performance in public space with participants from Gender Justice LA (GJLA). GJLA is an organization of trans and genderqueer people of color who I collaborated with on Autonets for one year. The performance built on months of Theater of the Oppressed workshops in which participants looked at prototypes of networked Autonets garments I had produced and discussed how they might use them. In these workshops, people used both verbal dialogue and embodied gestures to express how safety and violence felt in their bodies. In this case, practice-based research intersects with transgender studies as described by Susan Stryker, who states that “transgender studies considers the embodied experience of the speaking subject, who claims constative knowledge of the referent topic, to be a proper—indeed essential—component of the analysis of transgender phenomena.”[36] In this performance, trans people of color are not the objects of study, but the subjects of knowledge creation. Together we created the gestures in this performance: a visual, embodied, affective research outcome of the question of how to use technology to reduce violence against trans people. For the public performance, we collectively decided to do an evening performance in which participants would practice the skill of dispersing and coming together when signaled by the electronic garments. At a busy outdoor art festival, with hundreds of audience members, loud music from other installations, roving police, and spontaneous performances, our performance group was made up of cis and trans people, white and people of color, straight and queer, and we all wore Autonets hoodies or bracelets. After blending into the crowd, one member of the group would turn on their garment and they would do a physical gesture, developed in the workshops, which expressed either “protection’ or “resistance.” Upon seeing the hoodies enabled, and the gestures beginning, other members of the group would join, mirror the gesture currently being performed, and then perform their own gesture for others to mirror. This technique, borrowed from dance, is called flocking. The performance had multiple levels of intention, including mine and those of the participants. One shared goal was to bring some of the affective violence felt by the participants into the space of an international art biennial, to exceed what was expected by a comfortable, affluent audience looking for entertainment. The participants were highly aware of the power differential between them and the art audience and curators, and of the multiple levels of mediation into which they were entering, as trans people, as people of color, and as gender-nonconforming people, who are already hyper-visible to the surveillance networks of the state. Another goal was to develop concrete skills for the participants, practicing ways of coming together at a moment’s notice to respond to violence. While the speculative design prototypes made visible possibilities for communication, participants had discussed the difficult realities of building responses to violence that, consistent with the aims of prison abolition, do not rely on police or prisons for safety. Ultimately, these performances were still performative, speculative gestures, as the strength of bonds needed to rely on others to protect them from violence cannot be built through a handful of workshops and performances. While I knew that stitching those affective bonds was of central importance to the project, I underestimated the multiyear commitment required to build fully functioning community-based responses to violence.

Autonets started with wearable electronics as speculative design prototypes, but continued as a research creation project over four years in which I discussed the prototypes with different groups experiencing violence in many different cities, and we collectively envisioned possible futures of building networks of communication. The project centered on the research question: can I, as an artist, build networks of communication that can reduce the violence that queer and trans people of color experience? Ultimately, the wearable electronics approach proved to have too many problems to be useful with the current state of the technology. The wearable transmitters were too expensive, and circuits sewn by hand were not reliable enough in the long term. Additionally, as with the Transborder Immigrant Tool, battery life was another limiting

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factor. These concerns, raised by participants in workshops, led me to shift the focus of the project to the possibilities of building communications networks that do not rely on digital technologies, such as embodied forms of communication and movement that can be used for safety, including signaling methods and practices of dispersing and converging. C Coonncclluussiioonn I propose here that in order to work to end violence against trans people of color, the strategies that trans people of color use to survive should be centered and valued as knowledge and artistic production. Trans of color poetics offers new operations of thought and action. Using the operator of the stitch, I have elaborated algorithmic methods made perceptible through art, design, and media by contemporary artists, as well as through my own practice-based research and art projects. Trans of color poetics learns from the movement of trans people of color in digital media, in order to build new models for thinking race, gender, and sexuality in digitally mediated, networked environments, with the goal of reducing violence. PAGES: 1 2 ALL PAGES NEXT PAGE

FFoooottnnootteess 1. Tanveer Mann, “Transgender Woman Becomes 21st Murdered in US This Year,” Metro, October 15, 2015. [Return to text] 2. Jorge Rivas, “20 Trans People Were Murdered This Year. This Is What Happened,” Fusion, August 20, 2015. [Return to text] 3. micha cárdenas, “Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media,

and Technology, January 4, 2015. [Return to text] 4. Sarah Hughes, “Laverne Cox: ‘We Live in a Binary World: It Can Change,’” Independent, May 31, 2014. [Return to text] 5. Achille Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, at 14. [Return to text] 6. Tanveer Mann, “Transgender Woman Becomes 21st Murdered in US This Year,” Metro, October 15, 2015. [Return to text] 7. Kara Keeling, “Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future,”

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 565–582. [Return to text] 8. Francisco J. Galarte, “On Trans* Chican@s,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 39, no. 1 (2014): 229–236, at 233. [Return to text] 9. Aren Aizura, “Death, Necropolitics and Ethnographic Method.” In Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco, and Jin Haritaworn (eds), Queer Necropolitics (London: Routledge), 129-48. [Return to text] 10. Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). [Return to text] 11. Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 1. [Return to text] 12. Ibid., 75. [Return to text] 13. Ibid., 89. [Return to text] 14. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 26. [Return to text] 15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5, 8. [Return to text] 16. Chela Sandoval and Angela Y. Davis, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); particle group, “Nano-Garages,” E-Misférica, August 29, 2012. [Return to text] 17. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 8. [Return to text] 18. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67. [Return to text] 19. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). [Return to text] 20. Brittany Cooper, “Intersectionality,” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, eds. Mary Hawkesworth and Lisa Ditsch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). And see also http://www.brittneycooper.com. [Return to text] 21. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, http://alexispauline.com; Jessica Marie Johnson, http://jmjohnso.com /selected-list-of-publications. [Return to text] 22. Kara Keeling, “1 = ANOTHER: DIGITAL IDENTITY POLITICS.” Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual

Politics of Comparative Racialization. Eds. Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). [Return to text] 23. Mattie Brice, Mainichi, November 6, 2012. [Return to text] 24. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays

and Speeches (1984; Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 112. [Return to text]

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25. Zach Blas, “Facial Weaponization Suite” (October 2013), Eyebeam website. [Return to text] 26. Kyle Chayka, “Biometric Surveillance Means Someone Is Always Watching,” Newsweek, April 17, 2014. [Return to text] 27. Tosten Burks, “An Artist’s Pioneering Masks Shield Us from Future Surveillance,” GOOD, January 26, 2015. [Return to text] 28. Blas, “Informatic Opacity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 9 (2014). [Return to text] 29. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliviera, “Questioning the ‘Critical’ in Speculative and Critical Design,” Medium, February 4, 2014. [Return to text] 30. Lawrence Bird, “Global Positioning: An Interview with Ricardo Dominguez,” Furtherfield, October 15, 2011. [Return to text] 31. Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / b.a.n.g. lab, Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [] Borders (New York: Printed Matter, 2010), 4. [Return to text] 32. David Schwartz, “Activists Say Transgender Woman Raped at Arizona Immigrant Center,” Reuters, July 31, 2014. [Return to text] 33. “The Global Poetic System: A System of Poetic Positioning,” in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of

Literary Structures, Interfaces, and Genres, edited by Jörgen Schäfer, Peter Gendolla. (pp. 345—364. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. (note transcript is not capped.) [Return to text] 34. Tara McPherson, “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,” Race

after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2012). [Return to text] 35. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth ed. Aunt Lute Books, 2012. [Return to text] 36. Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The

Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 12. [Return to text]

TAGS ACTIVISM

ART

GENDER

LGBT

PERFORMANCE

QUEER

RACE

SCIENCE

TECHNOLOGY

THEATER

TRANSGENDER

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EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN Simone Browne Version of record first published: 06 Jan 2012

To cite this article: Simone Browne (2012): EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN, Cultural Studies, 26:4, 542-564 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.644573

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Simone Browne EVERYBODY’S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN Black luminosity and the visual culture of

Downloaded by [University of Texas at Austin] at 18:12 22 July 2012

surveillance This article examines the production of The Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of New York in 1783 and situates it as the first government-issued document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly links corporeal identifiers to the right to travel. I do this to argue that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. I explore surveillance technologies of transatlantic slavery, namely lantern laws, and I examine arbitration that took place at Fraunces Tavern in New York City in 1783 between fugitive slaves exercising mobility rights claims by seeking to be included in The Book of Negroes and those who claimed them as property. Coupling the archive of The Book of Negroes with a discussion of rituals and practices engaged by free and enslaved blacks, I suggest that these interactions with surveillance served as both strategies of coping and critique, and in so being represent acts of freedom. This article begins with a story of black escape by taking up the surveillance-based reality television programme Mantracker to question how certain technologies instituted through slavery to track blackness as property anticipate the contemporary surveillance of the racial body. Keywords The Book of Negroes; surveillance; slavery; passports; American Revolution; Black Canada Thus despite the bland assertions of sociologists, ‘‘high visibility’’ actually rendered one un-visible whether at high noon in Macy’s window or illuminated by flaming torches and flashbulbs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the ideal of white supremacy. (Ellison 1989) Our history takes place in obscurity and the sun I carry with me must lighten every corner. (Fanon 2008)

Cultural Studies Vol. 26, No. 4 July 2012, pp. 542564 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.644573

B L AC K L U M I N O S I T Y AN D S U RV E I L L AN C E


Introduction Billed as ‘the ultimate cat and mouse chase through the Canadian wilderness’, the reality television series Mantracker made its debut on the Outdoor Life Network in 2006. With only a compass, a map and a 2 km head start, each episode of this reality game show sees the aptly named ‘prey’ given 36 hours to reach the finish line, by foot, some 40 km away. Riding on horseback with a lasso and spurs, Mantracker carries neither map, nor compass and supposedly has no idea where the finish line is located. He is equipped with binoculars and an assistant, however. Mantracker is Terry Grant, and as the show’s opening title sequence tells its viewers he is an ‘accomplished rider. No nonsense cowboy. He’s trained to track and capture whoever is on the run’. Mantracker began its third season with the episode ‘Al and Garfield’. With this episode, viewers are invited to ‘watch as these urban warriors draw on the history of the Underground Railroad for inspiration to escape the unflappable Mantracker’. Mantracker’s assistant in this episode is Barry Keown, a local horseman who cites John Wayne as one of his idols and who is familiar with the area of Deerhurst, Ontario where the episode was filmed. At one point in the programme, Keown jokes: ‘I guess I’m a little bit of a redneck at heart’ and ‘we’ll have those pilgrims rounded up so fast they wouldn’t believe it’. With its greenish, grainy night-vision footage mimicking on-screen GPS transmissions, high-resolution satellite aerial photograph mapping, and contestants offering staged ‘confessions’ into a hand-held video camera called a ‘preycam’, Mantracker has all the trappings of the surveillance-based reality television genre. Each one-hour episode also fulfils a certain pedagogical role as viewers are instructed on anti-tracking techniques, shown ambush plan schematics, and definitions for useful tracking terminology are flashed on the screen. That the human ‘prey’ has to be accompanied by at least one camera operator, a boom mike and proper lighting, does not seem to interfere with the appearance that the prey are evading their predators unabated or hindered by the necessary film crew and equipment needed to stage such a production. Described as ‘Toronto boys’ from the ‘hard knocks hood of Toronto’s Jane and Finch’, contestants Al St. Louis and Garfield Thompson repeatedly invoke the Underground Railroad throughout the episode. At one point, the show’s announcer even refers to the two as ‘fugitives’. In one scene, the two remark: Al: This definitely reminds me of, uh, the Underground Railroad and the slaves running away. You know, two black guys on the run, man. We’re keeping that in mind and that’s what fueling us forward. Garfield: It’s kind of like we’re doing it for our ancestors, man. You know what I mean?

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Al: That’s deep. That’s deep. That’s deep. That’s deep


Announcer: The prey draw on the past for inspiration. I begin this article with the reality television programme Mantracker to think about histories of black escape and the ways in which they inform contemporary surveillance of the racial body. More specifically, I am asking: what of the surveillance technologies instituted through slavery to track blackness as property? When ‘prey’ Garfield announces ‘it’s kind of like we’re doing it for our ancestors’, he gestures to the injury, the redress and the ‘negative inheritance’ that Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman envision as that of the slave’s progeny: ‘the ongoing, production of lives lived in intimate relation to premature death (whether civil, social or literal)’ (2005, p. 13). We might read Al and Garfield’s call on their self-emancipating ancestors for inspiration as they attempt to outrun Mantracker as offering a particular rendering of Canada and the tracking of black bodies within this nation that is often made absent from official narratives, that being the accounting for blackness as property. Rinaldo Walcott, in arguing for a refusal of the black invisibility that is produced through Canada’s official discourse of multiculturalism, suggests that ‘recent black migrants not imagine themselves situated in a discourse that denies a longer existence of blackness’ in Canada (2003, p. 14). Al and Garfield could be doing just this, naming a black Canadian presence prior to 1960s migrations that ‘troubles and worries the national myth of two founding peoples’ (p. 48). However, this rendering is mediated for a television audience in a rather synoptic fashion,1 interpellating the viewer in a slick production of black escape as entertainment. In one scene that has Garfield complaining that ‘this bush is killing me, guy’, Al responds with: Think of it like this, Garfield. This is what our ancestors had to go through and worse, you know, and they were literally on the run for their lives. So, a little bush, that ain’t gonna do nothing. Suck it up. Let’s go. In a voice-over of a campfire scene sometime later and shown for the audience in night-vision, Garfield retorts: There’s no comparison in, um, us reflecting back on probably what it was like for our ancestors running for their lives. So later on in the nighttime, you know, we really, ah, we really connected, Al and I, talking about that, you know, and, it was a pretty sentimental and very emotional moment for us. The screen then cuts to Al and Garfield singing the Negro spiritual ‘Go Down Moses’ which accompanies a black and white flashback montage highlighting scenes from the day’s chase. The segment closes with the ‘prey’ singing the



line ‘let my people go’ as Mantracker’s face flashes across the screen, eventually fading to the show’s title card and then cuts to a commercial break. The episode closes with Mantracker catching Al and Garfield. Upon their apprehension, images of their faces with a crosshair superimposed are put up on a ‘captured’ screen. Although this television programme’s website states that ‘the irony is not lost on these ‘‘two black guys running from a white guy on a horse’’’2 this particular episode of Mantracker speaks to the historical presence of the surveillance technologies of organized slave patrols and bounty hunters for runaways, notably those journeying at the height of the Underground Railroad from the United States to Canada. The remains of such technologies and the networked resistance to them namely Negro spirituals that were at once expressions of the desire for freedom as well as counter-surveillance strategies in this case, now rendered as cable television entertainment. Mantracker therefore serves as an entry into a deeper discussion of black mobilities, the visual culture of surveillance and The Book of Negroes. A key argument here is that The Book of Negroes, and its accompanying breeder documents,3 is the first government-issued document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly linked corporeal markers to the right to travel. The document also serves as an important record of preConfederation black arrivals in Canada, and in so being ‘ruptures the homogeneity of nation-space by asserting blackness in/and Canada’ (McKittrick 2002, p. 28) as it historicizes the links between visibility, invisibility, migration and surveillance in the nation. In the three sections below, I offer a discussion of the racial body in colonial New York City done by a tracing of the archive of the technologies of surveillance and slavery. The first section focuses on the technology of printed text, namely runaway notices and identity documents, in the production of The Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of the city. This section draws on archival documents to provide textual links that evidence the accounting of black bodies as intimately tied with the history of surveillance, in particular surveillance of black skin by way of identity documents. In so doing my analysis then raises the problem of my own surveillance practices in reading the archive: by accounting for violence do my reading practices act to re-inscribe violence and a remaking of blackness, and black skin, as objectified? Thus, I am mindful of both Katherine McKittrick’s cautioning that there is a danger of reproducing ‘racial hierarchies that are anchored by our ‘‘watching over’’ and corroborating practices of violent enumeration’ (2010) and Nicole Fleetwood’s urging for the ‘productive possibilities of black subjects to trouble the field of vision’ by virtue of ‘the discourses of captivity and capitalism that frame’ the black body as always already problematic (2011, p. 18). To question acts of watching over and looking back, in the second section I turn to lantern laws in colonial New York City that sought to keep the black body in a state of permanent illumination. I use the term ‘black luminosity’ to refer to a form of boundary

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maintenance occurring at the site of the racial body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob. Black luminosity, then, is an exercise of panoptic power that belongs to ‘the realm of the sun, of never ending light; it is the non-material illumination that falls equally on all those on whom it is exercised’ (Foucault 2003, p. 77). Here boundary maintenance is intricately tied to knowing the black body, subjecting some to a high visibility by way of technologies of seeing that sought to render the subject outside of the category of the human, unvisible. My focus in the second section is the candle lantern and laws regarding its usage that allowed for a scrutinizing surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to, and that produced them as black subject. Following David Marriott in his reading of the spectacle of death that is lynching and its photographic archive, such laws, I suggest, operated ‘through visual terror’ in the management of black mobilities, warning of the potential to reduce one to ‘something that don’t look human’ (2000, p. 9). Or perhaps too human. Rather than looking solely to those moments when blackness is violently illuminated, I highlight certain practices, rituals and acts of freedom and situate these moments as interactions with surveillance systems that are both strategies of coping and of critique. This is to say that ‘ritual heals’ and ‘constitutes the social form in which human beings seek to deal with denial as active agents, rather than as passive victims’ (Sennett 1994, p. 80). With the third section, I consider varied notions of repossession by examining the Board of Inquiry arbitration that began in May 1783 at Fraunces Tavern in New York City between fugitive slaves who sought to be included in The Book of Negroes by exercising mobility rights claims as autonomous subjects and those who sought to reclaim these fugitives as their property. In her discussion of ‘narrative acts’ and the moments of narration through which racialized subjects ‘are brought into being’, (2009, p. 625) Hazel Carby suggests that we must ‘be alert to the occasions when racialized subjects not only step into the recognitions given to them by others but provide intuitions of a future in which relations of subjugation will (could) be transformed’ (p. 627). I am suggesting that The Book of Negroes is one of those occasions that Carby alerts us to. At Fraunces Tavern, the pub turned courtroom, mobility rights were sought through de-commodificatory narrative acts, disputing the claims made on the self as goods to be returned. I conclude this article by turning to a different narrative act, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes: A Novel (2007), as it extends the racial surveillance practices discussed in this article through its creative remembering of the brutalities of slavery. I begin and end this article with representations of black escape to argue that, in different ways, they allow for a rethinking of the archive of the technologies of slavery and surveillance, in that they disclose how this archive continues to inform our historically present tenets of emancipation. The Book of Negroes lists passengers on board 219 ships that set sail from New York between 23 April 1783 and 30 November 1783. Ships, as Paul Gilroy tells us, ‘were the livings means by which the points within the Atlantic



world were joined’ (1993, p. 16). Following this, The Book of Negroes is not only a record of escape on board 219 ships, but it can also be thought of as a record of how the surveillance of black Atlantic mobilities was integral to the formation of the CanadaUS border. If we are to take transatlantic slavery as the antecedent of contemporary surveillance technologies and practices as they concern inventories of ships’ cargo and the making of ‘scaled inequalities’ in the Brookes slave ship schematic (Spillers 1987, p. 72), biometric identification by branding the body with hot irons (Browne 2010), slave markets and auction blocks as exercises of synoptic power where the many watched the few, slave passes and patrols, black codes and fugitive slave notices, it is to the archives, slave narratives and often to black expressive practices and creative texts that we can look to for moments of refusal and critique. What I am arguing here is that with certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives to ways of living under a routinized surveillance that was terrifying in its effects.

The making of The Book of Negroes With its crude inscriptions such as ‘scar in his forehead’ and ‘stout with 3 scars in each cheek’, The Book of Negroes is an early imprint of how the body, and skin in particular, comes to be understood as a means of identification and tracking by the state. In this section I outline how The Book of Negroes became the first large-scale public record of black presence in North America. This handwritten and leather bound British military ledger lists 3,000 black passengers who embarked on mainly British ships during the British evacuation of New York in 1783. Bound for Canada, England and Germany at the end of American Revolutionary War, passengers listed in The Book of Negroes travelled as indentured labourers to white United Empire Loyalists or as free people described in this ledger as ‘on her own bottom’. Around the same time others left New York enslaved to white Loyalists. While some travelled to Germany, most likely as the property of German Hessian soldiers, captured from rebel states as spoils of war. The travellers listed in The Book of Negroes would later be recognized by many as United Empire Loyalists, or more specifically Black Loyalists, for their efforts as soldiers, support staff and waged workers (cooks, blacksmiths, laundresses, nurses, spies and other labourers) with the British forces during the War of Independence. The naming of those listed as Loyalists, or specifically Black Loyalists, is not without controversy as many entered into the bargain with the British for freedom and not necessarily out of some loyalty to the Crown. What follows is a discussion of the proclamations and the provisional treaty that eventually led to The Book of Negroes. This is done through the stories of black escape in and around the time of the evacuation of New York that are found in the archive: runaway

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notices, official correspondence, a memoir, an early passport. With these texts we can understand how the tracking of blackness, rooted in the violence of slavery, was instituted through printed text. I argue that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. Linking identity to bodily markers and infirmities, such as scarring from small pox, ‘blind right eye’ or ‘lame of the left arm’, The Book of Negroes lists the names of each passenger falling under the Philipsburg Proclamation on board the 219 ships that left New York in 1783. Each entry details the passenger’s physical description, age, places of birth and enslavement and includes a section for comments or details of when and how each passenger came to fall under the Philipsburg Proclamation. Issued by British Commander-in-Chief Sir Henry Clinton on 30 June 1779 this proclamation promised ‘to every negroe Who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper’ (Royal Gazette 28 July, 1779).4 Whether those who had voluntarily left their Patriot masters and found themselves with the British felt assured that by ‘full security’ it was meant that they would be secure in the mutual recognition of their personhood or that they were fighting for what would ultimately lead to their emancipation is questionable, however numerous slaves owned by Patriots deserted these slave owners and fled to the British holdings. Those enslaved by white Loyalists, whether owned previously or confiscated during raids on Patriot estates, were not a part of this arrangement of service in exchange for freedom. Also detailed in The Book of Negroes were the names of the passengers’ claimants, if any, as a caveat set out by Article Seven of the Provisional Peace Treaty reached on 30 November 1782 between Britain and the Congress of Confederation stated that the British withdrawal be executed without ‘carrying away any Negroes, or other Property of the American Inhabitants’ (Provisional Articles to Treaty, 1782). A Board of Inquiry consisting of American and British delegates was established to adjudicate Patriot claims of loss of human property. When the Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September of the following year, this stipulation regarding ‘carrying away any Negroes’ was included (Treaty of Paris, 1783). If it was found that the British did indeed abscond with their property, Patriot owners could be duly compensated. At the time of the British evacuation the circulation of printed text allowed for a certain ‘simultaneous consumption’ (Anderson 1991, p. 35) of newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves by an assumed white public; consuming at once the black subject imagined unfree and producing the reader as part of the apparatus of surveillance, the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching, observing and regulating. Through their detailing of physical descriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement was put to use to make the already hypervisible black subject legible as, what Thelma Wills Foote terms, ‘objectified corporeality’ (2004, p. 190). Beyond



its primary function in the visual culture of surveillance, that being serving public notice of runaways by announcing ‘property as out of place’ (Hall 2006, p. 70), the subjective descriptions employed by subscribers in runaway notices often reveal the subversive potential of being ‘out of place’. ‘Out of place’ gestures to the Caribbean vernacular usage of the term, along with ‘facety’ and ‘boldface’, all of which were and continue to be used to name subversive acts of looking and talking back. The refusal to stay in spaces of dispossession, disposability and lived objecthood can be observed in a 14 June 1783 runaway notice in the Royal Gazette that offered ‘twenty dollars reward’ for 16-year-old Sam. Sam is described by the subscriber as ‘five feet high, slim made’ and ‘remarkable in turning up the white of his eyes when spoke to’. Sam’s refusals, or his ‘facetiness’, are agential acts, at first ocular, looking back to at once return and dismiss the gaze with the gesture of the eye roll and then to steal himself and make his own place. As slave owners could make claims to their human property, this made for many start-ups in slave-catching, the Mantrackers of the time. Some owners came to New York or sent representatives and slave catchers in their place to make claims seeking the return of the black women, men and children who they considered their property, making New York at once a space of terror and a site of freedom for those who came under one British proclamation or another. In his memoirs, Boston King recounts the terror that spread at this time: For a report prevailed at New York, that all slaves, in number 2,000, were to be delivered up to their masters, although some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumour filled us all with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds. (King 1798) It was not only Patriots who seized upon their slaves. British Loyalists also contributed to this atmosphere, however many black men, women and children outwitted this terror. Slaver Valentine Nutter placed a notice in the 12 May 1783 edition of the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury offering an award of five guineas for ‘a negro man named Jack’ described as around 23 years of age. Notably, this ad drew detailed attention to Jack’s skin as a means of identification, describing him as having ‘scars on his left arm and a small scar on his nose’. Perhaps Jack evaded capture as the following September Nutter left for Port Roseway, Nova Scotia aboard the ship L’Abondance with ‘Silvia’, a woman described in The Book of Negroes as a 30-year-old ‘stout wench’ and ‘Sam’, a ‘tall’ and ‘stout fellow’ recorded as 22 years old, as his property. Though the Treaty of Paris stipulated that the British were not to ‘carry away any Negroes’, for General Guy Carleton, Commander-in-Chief of all

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British Forces in North America, it did not require the British to readily facilitate the delivery of those deemed property. In a pre-emptive move the British began to issue Birch Certificates by order of Brigadier General Birch as defacto passports. These Birch Certificates served as status documents that identified the holder and confirmed the holder’s right to cross an international border. Birch Certificates would become breeder documents for The Book of Negroes. These early passports were a guarantee that the legitimate holder had resided voluntarily with the British before 30 November 1782, the date of the signing of the Provisional Peace Treaty, as only those who resided within British lines for 12 months or longer were deemed eligible for embarkation on British ships. Birch Certificates, such as the one issued to Cato Ramsey, read as follows: New York, 21st April 1783 This is to certify to whomever it may concern, that the bearer hereof Cato Ramsay a Negro, reported to the British Lines, in consequence of the Proclamations of Sir William Howe, and Sir Henry Clinton, late Commanders in Chief in America; and that the said Negro has hereby his Excellency Sir Guy Carleton’s Permission to go to Nova Scotia, or wherever else he may think proper. By the Order of Brigadier General Birch Those who made use of such certification to embark on the ships to Canada as well as England and Germany, had their names listed in the inventory that is The Book of Negroes. After General Birch departed New York in 1783, similar certification was issued by General Thomas Musgrave to close to 300 blacks who were eligible for evacuation. The ledger, in its accounting for humans as commodity in the enterprise of racial slavery, according to Saidiya Hartman, ‘introduces another death through its shorthand’ (2008, p. 5). The Book of Negroes is no exception. With each entry, quick assessments are made on the subject’s being and then jotted down in point form. Identifying each passenger by way of corporeal descriptors, race or national origins or sometimes referencing some specific labour that they performed: ‘worn out’, ‘stout healthy negro’, ‘young woman’, ‘blind of one eye’, ‘ordinary fellow with a wooden leg’, ‘healthy negress’, ‘better half Indian’, ‘stout labourer’, ‘nearly worn out’, ‘stout wench with a mulatto child 7 months old’, ‘M, between an Indian & Span.’, ‘thin wench, black’, ‘squat wench’, ‘he is Cook on board the ship’, ‘stout man marked with small pox’, ‘ordinary fellow’, ‘passable’, ‘thick set man’, ‘stout, flat, square wench’, ‘Mulatto from Madagascar’, ‘ditto’, ‘came from Jamaica, can’t understand him’.5 But in the 15 pages that precede the ledger we are afforded, by way of a crude transcript, a means to understand the Board of



Inquiry hearings as moments of contestation for mobility rights where black subjects were often repossessed by claimants, but importantly they used legal channels and testimony to repossess themselves through assertions of their right to freedom and autonomy. Often this was done with the aid of counterfeit identities, identity documents and the telling of necessary counternarratives that challenged a claimant’s stated timeline. I take up this transcript in the third section. Two interlocking questions emerge: first, how are we to read the historical record of these hearings given the context in which they were written, where one human owned another? Second, how do we grapple with the textual meaning itself, given that the archive is comprised not of verbatim transcripts but of records of proceedings and decisions rendered almost non-eventful in their brevity, and are only partial accounts meant to be put to later use in the service of Patriots for claims of injury, losses of property and compensation? By situating the Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern as moments of repossession what I am arguing for here is a mapping of Fraunces Tavern as a space where black women and black men challenged unvisibility through contestations for freedom and mobility that were simultaneously demands for recognition not as property, but as full subjects, as humans. In the section that follows, I take up eighteenth century lantern laws to question how black luminosity as a means of regulating mobility was legislated and also contested.

Torches, torture and Totau ‘Moment by moment’ is the experience of surveillance in urban life, as David Lyon observes, where the city dweller expects to be ‘constantly illuminated’ (2001, p. 5153). It is how the city dweller contends with this expectation that is instructive. To examine closely the performance of freedom, a performative practice that I suggest that those named fugitive in the Board of Inquiry arbitration hearings made use of, I borrow Richard Iton’s ‘visual surplus’ and its b-side ‘performative sensibility’ (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to internalize an expectation of the potential of being watched and with this emerges a certain ‘performative sensibility’. Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was ‘the conscious effort to always give one’s best performance and encourage others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of one’s audience (or whether there is in fact an audience)’ (p. 105). Iton employs the term visual surplus to think about the visual media of black popular culture (graffiti, music videos) made increasingly available to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five boroughs of New York City in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and distribute performances. Applied to a different temporal location,

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Iton’s analyses of visual surplus and performative sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive acts, black expressive practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial New York City 200 years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive in eighteenth century New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform in this case perform freedom even when one was not sure of one’s audience. Put differently, these performances of freedom were refusals of dispossession, constituting the black subject not as slave or fugitive, nor commodity but as human. For the black subject, the potentiality of being under watch was a cumulative effect of the large scale surveillance apparatus in colonial New York City and beyond stemming from transatlantic slavery, specifically fugitive slave posters and print news advertisements, blackbirders and other freelancers who kidnapped free blacks to transport them to other sites to be enslaved, slave catching and through the passing of repressive black codes, such as those in response to the slave insurrection of 1712. April 1712 saw an armed insurrection in New York City where over two dozen black slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and wounding others. In the end over 70 were arrested, with many coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a warning for the city’s slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a ‘Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the Nighttime’ that saw to it that ‘no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets’ of New York City ‘on the south side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle’ (New York Common Council, Volume III). ‘Fresh water’ here referring to the Fresh Water Pond found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law regulating mobility and autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where ‘no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years’ unless in the company of some white person ‘or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are’ was to be without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then ‘lawful for any of his Majesty’s Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves’ and ‘carry him, her or them before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the



Common Gaol’ (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was sentenced to a public whipping of no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have ‘absented himself’ from van Zandt’s dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that ‘the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God’ (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamilton’s narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things.

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Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this ‘a festival of misrule’ (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s eyewitness account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls ‘public



negro dances’ at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers ‘would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money’ (28 April 1889). Sylvia Wynter’s ‘provision ground ideology’ in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the ‘dehumanization of Man and Nature’ (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices, including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us, ‘the cultural guerilla resistance against the Market economy’ (1970, p. 36).7 The remains of the Catharine Market breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices offer moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance within a visual surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by ‘his Majesty’s subjects’ rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.

Of property and passports What began as a meeting between Generals Carleton and Washington on the point of Article Seven in the Provisional Peace Treaty ended with an exchange of letters between the two, with Washington reiterating his concern regarding the embarkation of escaped slaves. Carleton responded, in kind, with a letter dated 12 May 1783. On what he called Washington’s ‘surprise’ about the evacuation and Washington’s accusation that such action ‘was a measure totally different from the letter and spirit of the treaty’, Carleton reminded Washington that the British set up a register ‘to serve as a record of the name of the original proprietor of the negro, and as a rule by which to judge of his value. By this open method of conducting business, I hoped to prevent all fraud’ (Carleton 1783). Further, alluding to both self-repossession and tracking by way of identity document, Carleton suggested that ‘had these negroes been denied permission to embark they would, in spite of every means to prevent it, have found various methods of quitting this place, so that the former owner would no longer have been able to trace them, and of course would have lost,

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in every way, all chance of compensation’ (1783). On the notion of black subjects as property, Carleton put it this way, ‘every negroe’s name is registered and the master he formerly belonged to, with such other circumstances as served to denote his value, that it may be adjusted by compensation, if that was really the intention and meaning of the treaty’ (1783). Given this, American and British commissioners charged with receiving and settling claims were appointed to inspect all embarkations to prevent evasion of Article Seven. And with this came the setting up of the arbitration hearings that took place at Fraunces Tavern. At the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets in lower Manhattan, Fraunces Tavern served as the centre of arbitration, where almost every Wednesday at ten in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon from May 1783 through November of that same year the formerly enslaved came to argue for their inclusion in The Book of Negroes by asserting their right to leave New York as free people.8 On 2 August 1783, merchant Jonathan Eilbeck questioned the legitimacy of a woman named Jenny Jackson’s embarkation to Nova Scotia and he brought his claim before The Board of Inquiry. Jackson was brought to shore to be examined and she produced for The Board a Birch Certificate issued on 5 June 1783 which stated, ‘That a Negro named Jenny Jackson formerly the property of John Mclean of Norfolk in the Province of Virginia came within the British Lines under the Sanction and claims the Privilege of the Proclamation respecting Negroes theretofore issued for their Security and Protection’. Eilbeck, a Loyalist, produced a bill of sale for a Judith Jackson from John Maclean dated 16 July 1782. Jackson admitted to The Board that she was indeed Judith Jackson and formerly enslaved by Maclean and clarified that when Maclean departed for England and left her behind she went with the British army to Charlestown and then New York. More detail on Jenny ‘Judith’ Jackson’s narrative of falling within the Proclamation can be found in the 6 May 1773 edition of the Virginia Gazette. Between ads for the sale of slaves, tracts of land and a ‘fashionable’ chariot, and notices for a lost watch and for strayed and stolen livestock, a runaway announcement for a ‘Negro woman named Judith’ was placed by John Maclean of Norfolk. Offering a reward of up to six dollars, Maclean’s notice describes Judith as ‘tall and slender, not very black, appears to be between thirty and thirty-five years of age’. In the notice, Maclean made note that Jackson departed with her infant daughter and was perhaps pregnant. Although Jackson had laboured with the British for eight years in Charlestown, South Carolina and New York, and was issued a Birch Certificate attesting to her right to depart, the Board did not make a ruling in the dispute, perhaps because Eilbeck was a Loyalist and they were charged only with adjudicating Patriot claims of loss of property. The Board forwarded the case to General Carleton. Two women named Judith Jackson are recorded in The Book of Negroes. One woman departed from New York City before the aforementioned case was heard. The other Judith



Jackson left on the ship Ranger for Port Mattoon, Nova Scotia on 30 November 1783. This Judith Jackson remained in New York until the final day that ships departed as she petitioned Carleton for her passage to Canada and for the return of her two children who were given to Eilbeck. She left for Canada without her children. She is described in The Book of Negroes as an ‘ordinary wench’ of 53-years of age, and formerly the property of ‘John Clain’ of Norfolk, Virginia, from whom she is recorded as leaving ‘early 1779’. Eilbeck also makes an appearance in The Book of Negroes in the ledger entry for ‘Samuel Ives’. This unusually long entry states, ‘Sold to Captain Grayson by Jonathan Eilbeck of New York who it does not appear had any right to sell him as he was the property of Capt. Talbot of Virginia from whence he was brought by the troops 5 years ago and had a pass from Lt. Clinton which Mr. Eilbeck destroyed’. With this entry, Eilbeck’s questionable means of claiming possession of others is revealed. Not all who attempted to embark by altering their recollection of the time of their arrival within the British lines met the same fate. On 2 August 1783, Thomas Smith took issue with a woman named Betty’s pending embarkation to Nova Scotia. Betty produced a Birch Certificate issued to Elizabeth Truant detailing that she was formerly the property of Smith but ‘that she came within the British Lines under the Sanction and claims the Privilege of the Proclamation respecting Negroes therefore issued for their Security and Protection’. Smith insisted that ‘the Wench is his property’ and that she only arrived in New York City from his estate in Acquackanonk Township, New Jersey, on 20 April 1783. Perhaps out of terror and with the hope of reducing the punishment she might have imagined on the inevitability of her return, Betty relented and acknowledged that she escaped Smith the previous April, making her ineligible for the Proclamation. The Board ruled for the claimant and directed Betty to be ‘disposed of’ by Smith ‘at his pleasure.’ On 30 May the Board heard the case of Violet Taulbert. In an ad placed by David Campbell of Greenwich in the 24 May 1783 Royal Gazette, Taulbert is said to have escaped with her two boys. A reward of five guineas was posted for their return. No decision was made by The Board in this case as theirs was only to decide on cases regarding those ready to embark. In another case heard on 17 July 1783, Dinah Archer produced before The Board a Birch Certificate issued to her on 2 May 1783. Archer had been brought for examination before The Board through a claim by William Farrer. During the hearing Archer testified ‘that she was formerly the Property of John Baines of Crane Island Norfolk County Virginia’ and that she was sold by Baines to Farrer and lived and laboured in Farrer’s household for about three years until he left for England, leaving her behind. Archer told The Board that she was later informed by Baines that he never issued a bill of sale to Farrer, and Baines ‘compelled her to return to him’. Archer remained in Baines’ possession until she escaped to the

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British and arrived in New York City under Sir George Collier and General Matthews’ ‘Expedition up the Chesepeake’. The Board decided that they were ‘not authorized to determine the Question between the Claimant and the Negroe woman’ and referred the case to the Commandant of New York City. Recorded in the Book of Negroes as a 42-year-old ‘one eyed’ ‘stout wench’, Dinah Archer travelled on the ship Grand Duchess of Russia to Port Roseway on 22 September 1783. She travelled to Canada indentured to a Mrs. Savage. Although Archer had perjured herself to gain a passport, her narrative of coming behind the British lines before the signing of the Provisional Peace Treaty allowed the British to deny William Ferrer’s claim on her as his property. In total The Board of Inquiry heard 14 cases. Of those fourteen, five were children, two men and seven women. The five children were all returned to their claimants, the two men were allowed to embark and of the seven women, three were allowed to leave New York. In all 1,336 men, 914 women and 750 children are listed in The Book of Negroes. Once in Canada they would find there enslaved black people, other Black Loyalists who were evacuated from Boston in 1777, and largely untenable land. Many laboured on public works projects, feared slave catchers and faced possible re-enslavement. After some time, many left to establish what is now Sierra Leone (Pybus 2006; Schama 2007).

Conclusion: Aminata Diallo In discussing the archive of Atlantic slavery, Hartman asks, ‘how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been?’ (2008, p. 7). I close this article by considering The Book of Negroes: A Novel to ask if this creative text can offer an alternative imagining of the events surrounding the archive that could not be fully realized with the historical documents examined here. The novel traces protagonist Aminata Diallo’s life from her capture in West Africa, her enslavement in South Carolina, her journey to Manhattan and her eventual escape from her slave master to become bookkeeper at Fraunces Tavern, to her work with British under the proclamations, her emigration to Nova Scotia and on to London and her return to Africa. Through Diallo we are offered a remembering of Fraunces Tavern and those archived in The Book of Negroes as she is tasked by the British to interview, inspect and register the names in the ledger: ‘I wanted to write more about them, but the ledger was cramped’ (Hill 2007, p. 294). When a claim is made on Diallo’s person as property, she is taken in front of The Board at Fraunces Tavern, ‘wrists tied and legs



shackled’ (p. 306). In this claims court, promises of freedom were broken, despite the pleas and testimony. Diallo narrates: At the back of the room, I heard claims against two other Negroes who, like me, had been pulled off ships in the harbour. Both one man, and one woman were given over to men who said they owned them. I despised the Americans for taking these Negroes, but my greatest contempt was for the British. They had used us in every way in their war. Cooks. Whores. Midwives. Soldiers. We had given them our food, our beds, our blood and our lives. And when slave owners showed up with their stories and their paperwork, the British turned their backs and allowed us to be seized like chattel. Our humiliation meant nothing to them, nor did our lives. (p. 307) Diallo voices a story of life, surveillance and the making of The Book of Negroes other than one of acts of British compassion. By approaching surveillance technologies through stories of black escape Al and Garfield’s televisual escape, Sam’s facetiness in ‘turning up the white of his eyes’, Aminata Diallo’s narrative acts the brutalities of slavery are not subject to erasure, rather such a re-narration makes known the stakes of emancipation.

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Katherine McKittrick, and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am grateful for the generous support of the John L. Warfield Centre for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin that enabled me to visit the National Archives in London, the National Archives in Washington, DC, as well as Fraunces Tavern in New York City. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Ottawa in February 2010 and the University of California at Santa Barbara in October 2010. I would like to thank those audiences for their questions and comments. This paper was work-shopped at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University in October 2010. Thank you to all those in attendance for their fierce commentary and contributions: Cathy N. Davidson, Jennifer D. Brody, Sharon P. Holland, Mark Anthony Neal, Mark Olson, and Maurice O. Wallace. All shortcomings, however, are mine.

Notes 1

Coined by Thomas Mathiesen (1997), the synopticon, in counterpoint to the panopticon (where the few watch the many) allows for the many to watch the

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2

3

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5

few, often by way of mass media in a viewer society, for example, reality television watching. This quote is taken from the pair’s application video in which contestant Al St. Louis states incredulously: ‘two black men being chased by a white man on a horse?’ While it could be said that St. Louis and Thompson are framed in this episode through a narrative of upliftment and self-making as redeemed, it could also be argued that a certain element of minstrelsy or ‘hamming it up’ for the camera are engaged by the two: losing the defective compass leaving Mantracker to find it, paying homage to another reality television programme that also makes use of surveillance footage of evasion and capture, Cops, by singing the lyrics to its theme song ‘Bad Boys’, or beat-boxing Negro spirituals. A ‘breeder’ or foundation document is used to support one’s identity claims in the application process for a more secure status document, such as a passport. In our contemporary moment, breeder documents, such as birth certificates and in some cases baptismal certificates, are said to be more easily forged and weak in terms of security (Salter 2003). On 7 November 1775 John Murray, the fourth Lord of Dunmore and Governor of Virginia issued a proclamation that promised freedom for male slaves who voluntarily fought with British forces. After the defeat of his forces in Virginia, Murray arrived in New York City in the summer of 1776 to occupy the city, establishing its military headquarters there. With Dunmore’s Proclamation, and later Howe’s 1778 Proclamation and Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation in 1779, this guarantee was extended to women and children, bringing about the ‘largest black escape in the history of North American slavery’ with fugitives estimated at 25,000 55,000 in the ‘southern states alone’ (Hodges 1996, p. xiv). Sir Henry Clinton served as Commander-inChief of all British Forces of North America from May 1778 until February 1782 when Sir Guy Carleton took up the post. Now that The Book of Negroes is digitized and searchable on-line (http:// www.blackloyalist.info/), it could be argued that this inventory bears some of the hallmarks of contemporary centralized traveller databases, complete with a ‘no-sail’ list. ‘No-sail’ list here is a play on post-September 11th ‘nofly’ lists, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) maintained by the US Transportation Security Administration, and Secondary Security Screening Selection (SSSS) that subjects ‘selectees’ to additional scrutiny at US and Canadian airports. For a detailed accounting of the inventory that is the Book of Negroes see Hodges (1996). Hodges’ appendix includes tables, by colony and gender, of ‘All Negroes Who Claimed to Be Born Free’, ‘All Negroes Who Claimed to Have Escaped’, ‘All Negroes Who Were Free By Proclamation’, those who were indentured, enslaved and emancipated.



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Here ‘black city life’ was intricately tied with ‘Indian city life’, as laws regulated the mobility of both Negro and Indian slaves. The descriptions in The Book of Negroes of those who left New York also gesture to the intimate relations within the black and Indigenous populations: ‘born free, her mother an Indian’; ‘better half Indian’. Many thanks to Sharon Holland for pointing out this connection. For detailed discussions of the events of 1712 and 1741 in New York City and their effects on the regulation of the city life of black subjects see Doolen (2005), Lepore (2005), Harris (2003), Burrows and Wallace (1999), Davis (1985). For seventeenth and early eighteenth century laws regulating free and enslaved blacks see Hodges (1999). That fire (candle lantern) was employed to deter fire (burning the city down) is not without irony. Provision ground ideology names the slave’s relationship to the Earth as one concerning sustenance through the growing of produce for survival, rather than that harvested for the profit of the plantation. Where the ‘official ideology’, that of the plantation, as Wynter explains, ‘would develop as an ideology of property, and the rights of property, the provision ground ideology would remain based on a man’s relation to the Earth, which linked man to his community’ (Wynter 1970, p. 37). The idea of ‘Earth’ here is not one of property or of land, but of the formation of community through spatial practices ‘concerned with the common good’ (p. 37). For Wynter, dance is one form of ceremonial observance by which the black subject ‘rehumanized Nature, and helped to save his own humanity against the constant onslaught of the plantation system by the creation of a folklore and a folk-culture’ (p. 36). Here we see the centrality of folk practices, including dance, to the emancipatory breaching necessary for a liberatory remaking of humanness (Wynter 2009). What was to become Fraunces Tavern was built by a member of the Delancey family in and around 1706. In 1762, Samuel Fraunces or ‘Black Sam’ took ownership of the building, opening a social club, tavern and inn and named it The Queen’s Head. There is some disagreement surrounding Jamaican-born Fraunces’ racial identity, which reveals the then and continued anxieties around race, and blackness in particular, in America.

Notes on contributor Simone Browne is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Sociology and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and researches surveillance studies, biometrics, airport protocol, popular culture, new media and black diaspora studies.

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References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso. Best, S. & Hartman, S. (2005) ‘Fugitive justice: the appeal of the slave’, Representations, vol. 92, pp. 1 15. Book of Negroes or Headquarters Papers of the British Army in America 1783, PRO 30/55/100. Browne, S. (2010) ‘Digital epidermalization: race, identity and biometrics’, Critical Sociology, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 131 150. Burrows, E. G. & Wallace, M. (1999) A History of New York City to 1898, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press. Carby, H. V. (2009) ‘Becoming modern racialized subjects: detours through our past to produce ourselves anew’, Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 624 657. Carleton, G. (1783) 1st Baron Dorchester: Papers. The National Archives PRO 30/55. Davis, T. J. (1985) A Rumor of Revolt: The ‘‘Great Negro Plot’’ in Colonial New York, New York, The Free Press. De Voe, T. F. (1862) The Market Book, New York, Burt Franklin. Doolen, A. (2005) Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Ellison, R. (1989) Invisible Man, New York, Vintage Books. Fanon, F. (2008) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, New York, Grove Press. Fleetwood, N. R. (2011) Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Foote, T. W. (2004) Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City, New York, Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (2003) Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1973 1974, New York, Picador. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Hall, R. (2006) ‘Missing dolly, mourning slavery: the slave notice as keepsake’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies 61, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 70 103. Hamilton, A. (1948) Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton 1744, Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, University of North Carolina Press. Harris, L. M. (2003) In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626 1863, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press. Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, vol. 26, pp. 1 14. Hill, L. (2007) The Book of Negroes: A Novel, Toronto, HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd.



Hodges, G. R. (1996) The Black Loyalist Directory, New York and London, Garland Publishing, Inc. Hodges, G. R. (1999) Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey 1613 1863, Chapel Hill and London, The University of North Carolina Press. Iton, R. (2009) In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the PostCivil Rights Era, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press. King, B. (1798) Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher, The Methodist Magazine, March June 1798. Lepore, J. (2005) New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in EighteenthCentury Manhattan, New York, Vintage Books. Lott, E. (1993) Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York and Oxford, University of Oxford Press. Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, Buckingham, Open University Press. Marriott, D. (2000) On Black Men, New York, Columbia University Press. Mathiesen, T. (1997) ‘The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s panopticon revisited’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 215234. McAllister, M. (2003) White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theatre, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. McKittrick, K. (2002) ‘‘‘Their blood is there, and they can’t throw it out’’: honoring Black Canadian geographies’, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7, Spring, pp. 27 37. McKittrick, K. (2010) ‘Math whips’, paper delivered at The Archive and Everyday Life Conference, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 8. New York (NY) Common Council. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York 1675 1776 Volume III 1905, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company. New York (NY) Common Council. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York 1675 1776 Volume IV 1905, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company. New York Times (1889) ‘Where slaves danced: Catherine Market’s rise and decline’, April 28. Provisional Articles to Treaty, 1782; George Washington Papers, 1741 1799 Series 4, General Correspondence, 1697 1799, United States and Great Britain, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Pybus, C. (2006) Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty, Boston, Beacon Press. Salter, M. B. (2003) Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations, Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Schama, S. (2007) Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Sennett, R. (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York, W.W. Norton & Company.

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Spillers, H. (1987) ‘Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an American grammar book’, Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 64 81. Treaty of Paris, 1783; International Treatise and Related Records, 1778 1974; General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11, National Archives, Washington, DC. Walcott, R. (2003) Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, Toronto, Insomniac Press. White, S. (1989) ‘Pinkster: Afro-Dutch syncretization in New York city and the Hudson Valley’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 102, no. 403, pp. 68 75. Wynter, S. (1970) ‘Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the interpretation of folk dance as a cultural process’, Jamaica Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 34 48. Wynter, S. (2009) ‘The ceremony found: Black knowledges/struggles, the color line, and the third emancipatory breaching of the Law of Cognitive Closure’, keynote lecture delivered at the 8th International Conference of the Collegium for African-American Research, Bremen, Germany, March 28.

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SURVEILLANCE (HTTPS://MODELVIEWCULTURE.COM/ISSUES/SURVEILLANCE)

Everyone Watches, Nobody Sees: How Black Women Disrupt Surveillance Theory Our picture of surveillance needs to factor in not just tech developments, but the cultural standards that have bred surveillance, especially towards black culture, as part and parcel in our world. —by Sydette Harry (https://modelviewculture.com/authors/sydette-harry) on October 6th, 2014

What the hell is you looking for? Can’t a young man get money anymore?

It kind of pains me to call Mason Betha prophetic, but 17 years ago when “Looking at Me” hit the Billboard charts, the Harlem native pretty much described the current state of surveillance and tech in America. Especially for black people and doubly so for black women. Surveillance is based on a presumption of entitlement to access, by right or by force. More importantly, it hinges on the belief that those surveilled will not be able to reject surveillance — either due to the consequences of resisting, or the stealth of the observance. They either won’t say no, or they can’t. Discussions of stolen celebrity sel es o en miss the “by force” aspect of the breeches, instead focusing on salacious details. Surveillance is part of the information age, but it has always been part of abusive dynamics. As opting into surveillance becomes increasingly mandatory to participate in societies and platforms, surveillance has been woven into the fabric of our lives in ways we can not readily reject. Being watched is not just an activity of Big Brother-style surveillance, but also fannish adulation and social enmeshment. As Black women have been historically denied the ability to consent to surveillance, modern discussion of watching and observing black women needs better historical context. When I’nasah Crockett points out how black women online (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/raving-amazons-antiblackness-and-misogynoir-insocial-media) have constantly been portrayed as “raving amazons,” one of the unspoken through lines is how easily media, even on the le , believes dissecting black women, tracking their online habits, consuming illegally obtained images of them, and demanding education is a “right”. Black women cannot say no, and do not need to be in any way respected or fully informed about how they will be studied or used. Media collects the data of black activity and media production as a weapon, without black participation. The lack of black participation can be unintentional or intentional, but usually ends in gross appropriation, clumsy

“admiration”, willful erasure or a troublesome combo of all three. Combined with historical blindness, racist condescension and content desperation, the modern surveillance of black women too o en results in the same historical abuse and erasure of black women. When Patricia Garcia (http://www.vogue.com/1342927/booty-in-pop-culture-jennifer-lopeziggy-azalea/) says the that the big booty era has nally arrived as a “high fashion” moment, but credits Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azaelea, it erases the very real abuse that black bodies have su ered for those exact body types, that were surveilled to produce the standard that Garcia hands over to Lopez et. al. She writes:

“Rihanna shows up to the CFDA Awards practically naked with her crack fully on display and walks o

with a Fashion Icon Award. Perhaps we have Jennifer Lopez to

thank (or blame?) for sparking the booty movement.”

Suggesting the way to Rihanna’s 2014 moment was paved by Lopez shows a dangerous laziness towards the stated goal of body positivity. Rihanna’s moment was a direct tribute to Josephine Baker, another black woman o en sexualized and placed under surveillance, not just for celebration of her uniquely black body but for her participation in World War II and the civil rights movement. Garcia’s “cultural surveillance” ends up being a contextless mess that insults both Rihanna and Baker.

(https://twitter.com/rihanna/status/473952039169310721)

Writing for Salon (http://www.salon.com/2013/12/05/the_american_media_has_no_idea_how_to_talk_about_race_on_screen/), I pointed out that Media has no idea how to talk about race, and more recently I am convinced they do not actually care to learn. Unfortunately when covering Black women, this inability or unwillingness to learn defaults to common stereotypes at best and complete cultural propaganda at worst. That unwillingness create a vacuum of knowledge, as history repeats itself over and over. Take Alessandra Stanley’s pro le of Shonda Rhimes in the New York Times: a cringe-worthy attempt at “complimenting” Rhimes’ stereotype-breaking television output that instead relies on empty surveillance of black characters while Stanley o ers no evidence of having actually watched the shows she cites. Stanley’s descriptions of Rhimes and her work are lled with words like “angry, terrorizing and sassy,” recalling Crockett’s angry amazons perfectly while perpetuating and prolonging logic that for decades kept Viola Davis from being the leading lady (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/viola-davis.html?src=me&_r=0) Stanley describes. Her piece ignores multi-year plot developments as well as a wonderful opportunity to discuss Rhimes’ accomplishments as possibly the only non-white-male with multiple, simultaneous network TV hits. Her surveillance provides little in the way of edi cation and a lot in codifying uncomfortable catch 22’s for black women and privacy: visibility is part of achievement in media, but is it worth it when even at the pinnacle of your success the only thing made visible is the racism of those observing you? Even more di cult, how do you ght back?

Photo CC-BY Disney/ABC Television Group, ltered. (https://www. ickr.com/photos/disneyabc/14180784084/)

Under Surveillance, Over Exposed Steven Mann’s concept of sousveillance centers on wearing portable cameras and technology to record activity, but I would like to expand it to include all forms of using tech to jam surveillance. Mann, a pioneer in the eld of wearable computing and computation photography, framed the concept of wearable cameras functioning as recording data for the user, not an outside network. Hashtags, street recordings, phone taps can all be looked at as

ways of using tech to push back against surveillance. #Yourslipisshowing in particular was used to ght #4chan surveillance of black women. Crockett, user @sassycrass, and a community of black women (myself included) used the hashtag to expose 4chan board members who declared “war” on black feminists by tracking and attempting to in ltrate their “ranks.” The attempt was foiled mostly by how their racist caricatures of black women (much like Stanley’s) were so jarringly incongruent with reality. However, sousveillance o en requires large amounts of disclosure to be e ective and ultimately negates privacy even more. Hasan M. Elahi responded to being incorrectly (http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-06/ps_transparency)surveilled by making a project of displaying his personal information (http://elahi.umd.edu/track/). Similarly, Black women’s responses to abusive surveillance has o en been heart-rending accounts of personal trauma and exposure of personal networks. What goes unmentioned is that social capital and safety are o en key to being able to go public with sousveillance as a strategy. Mann and Elahi – credentialed, well-known professors – have a much easier time of saying they agree to be watched than those on the margins. Stacia L. Brown (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/09/11/how-thefashion-media-erase-black-women/) o ers a beautiful examination of the rami cations of ahistorical surveillance, discussing representation as well as more diverse media sources as counter-tactics. As Brown points out in response to Garcia’s ippant mess: “It isn’t about who gets credit for popularizing the ‘big booty.’ It’s about who is erased and minimized in the process.” Her recommendations are solid but also bring up a very real question: for populations whose fundamental problem under surveillance is the inability to declare privacy and boundaries, what kind of solution is being made to expose one’s self “voluntarily,” to invite more observation into one’s life? The response to these articles and continued moments of ahistorical abuse and sometimes outright violence are a version of cultural sousveillance. Black women must lay themselves bare, exposing trauma and constantly excavating painful historical memory to gain sympathy and respect. Surveillance must be used as sousveillance, with the records generated by the intrusive observation of blackness, used to bolster black testimony. Buzzfeed has an article that is a triggering reminder (http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/danielholtzclaw-alleged-sexual-assault-oklahoma-city#3ztyni1) of the murkiness of this dilemma. While being one of the few places to acknowledge how Daniel Holtzclaw, a predatory policemen targeted black women, it also notes how he used surveillance, and even the more stringent sousveillance to track black women to abuse. To emphasize the gravity of his o ense, once again black women’s trauma is made public with overly speci c details on the abuse of his victims. More disturbingly have been the deaths of three black men: Eric Garner, Michael Brown and John Crawford III, all murdered by police. In all three cases there was video /photo evidence of the deaths that circulated the internet, and in Brown’s case, even AFTER the mother requested it stop. Crawford’s death is a disturbing illustration of the interplay of surveillance and sousveillance with historical discrimination. The police who ultimately ended his life were responding to a report, via citizen surveillance, that he had been observed with a gun. The surveillance video which showed him being shot? Still not enough for indictment. Why must black death be broadcast and consumed to be believe, and what is it beyond spectacle if it cannot be used to obtain justice (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwoway/2014/09/25/351422552/grand-jury-wont-indict-o cers-in-ohio-wal-mart-shooting)?

History Repeating

Photo CC-BY ibkod, ltered. (https://www. ickr.com/photos/ibkod/4186747311/) When Janay Rice was assaulted by her husband, it became a rallying cry for domestic violence and resulted in job creation for white feminists. What stuck out immediately was the ease at which the surveillance aspects were skipped over. Echoing a similar leak of a private moment that targeted the Knowles-Carter family, little discussion was made of how a culture of intrusion seemed to focus on the abuse of black women as breaking news without asking about breaches of boundaries. That the same online communities that continually prodded and mocked black women are incubators for sex criminals who expose private pictures of celebrities isn’t shocking, it’s inevitable. They watched the world not care, why should they anticipate consequences now? Predators are o en wrongly pictured as targeting the defenseless, when they also target the undefended. Black people, women particularly have historically been able to defend themselves, but have also been shown to be undefended. The problem is not that they can’t ght back, but that their ght and the record of what they were ghting is erased and sanitized for easier consumption. When Laurie Penny and Lola Okolosie (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/18/sexist-racist-online-sabotagewont-win-posing-online-feminists-le ists) claim a victory over racist and sexists online, they willfully erase the original problem of targeted women not wanting to be surveilled, and shut down conversations about how that issue can be addressed. If they have won already, what does the trauma of the women used in that success matter? Just recently, threats to “expose” Emma Watson’s nudes turned out to be a prank to “draw attention (http://mashable.com/2014/09/24/emma-watson-nude-leak-viral-marketing/)” to attacks on feminists. The very real trauma of women — who even a er they were transgressed were asked to answer for it like they had committed the crime — becomes a “gotcha” moment. A time to ask what factors lead to the abuse of women and where it starts — usually with black women expressing feminist or anti-racist ideals — becomes covered in really uncomfortable racist/classist overtones, namely: “What happens if this happens to a white woman we actually care about?!” Even as women of all colors have been ghting for years to make legislation against revenge porn.

When Janay Rice was assaulted by her husband, it became a rallying cry for domestic violence and resulted in job creation for white feminists (http://espn.go.com/n /story/_/id/11531293/roger-goodell-n -create-social-responsibilityrole-help-domestic-violence-social-issues). It’s a cry that does not truly encompass the necessary complexity (https://sports.vice.com/article/the-n s-domestic-violence-problemand-our-race-problem) of the problem in the NFL, or give anything at all to the attacked woman. This major step to “address issues” still hinges on making a black woman’s personal a airs heartbreakingly public and assuring that no one who represents her voice — which has asked for very di erent things than advocacy — will be heard.

What We Call Surveillance

Photo CC-BY Andy Roberts, ltered. (https://www. ickr.com/photos/aroberts/3035796/) What we have decided to call surveillance is actually a constant interplay of various forms of monitoring that have existed and focused on black people, and speci cally black women, long before cameras were around, let alone ubiquitous. Surveillance technology is a dissemination of cultural standards of monitoring. Our picture of surveillance needs to factor in not just tech developments, but the cultural standards that have bred surveillance, especially towards black culture, as part and parcel in our world. Elahi can use the intrusion into his privacy to further his work. But if all you want to do is have space to mind your own business, handle your family issues in private, or exist without interference, sousveillance isn’t an answer… it’s a reminder of defeat. If what you want is representation as you are, what do you do when the reality is ignored for the easy win, even when it leaves you worse than before? What is the solution for being constantly watched, if no one sees you at all?

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Vol. 16 No. 1 (http://common-place.org/book/issue/vol-16-no-1/) Fall 2015 / Colored Conventions Project (http://common-place.org/column/roundtable/colored-conventions-project/) Roundtable (http://commonplace.org/column/roundtable/)

Toward Meaningmaking in the Digital Age: Black Women, Black Data and Colored Conventions Sarah Patterson

Tracing the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era. On May 9, 1843, a Black delegation gathered for a two-day series of meetings in New York City and resolved to collaboratively write and publish a public call for a national convention of colored citizens. A committee of three writers drafted the call and approximately fifty signers from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania pledged support. The delegation identified the dearth of annual national conventions as a key issue preventing Black-led political organizing from having a stronger impact on the condition of Black people in the U.S. In the reprinted call appearing in minutes of the 1843 National Colored Convention, the signers argued: Since we have ceased to meet together in National Convention, we have become ignorant of the moral and intellectual strength of our people. We have also been deprived of the councils of our fathers, who have borne the burden and heat of the day—the spirit of virtuous ambition and emulation has died in the bosoms of the young men, and in a great degree we have become divided, and the bright rising stars that once shone in our skies, have become partially obscured. The call represents Black men’s increasing anxieties about the growing intellectual and organizational distance between senior figureheads and emerging leaders. The signers cite the eight years since the last national colored citizens convention was held in Philadelphia in 1835 as irrefutable evidence of this distance. And yet this call inadvertently creates another form of distance: by focusing on the politics of male leadership, the call truncates Black women’s ideological and economic contributions that also helped to sustain colored conventions’ interests, political viability and cultural influence. I describe two instances where historical records either ignore (Black women) or misrepresent (Black communities, in general) lived reality. In 2015 the Colored Conventions Project launched online exhibitions to encourage our learning and meaningful exchange about the significance of the colored conventions movement to American political history. Using digital media as a critical lens, I sketch a portrait of Black intellectual cultures by clarifying links between the socio-economic character of Black women, communities and political organizing. I also illuminate the ways in which rich social histories can be charted through open-source digital media by taking as an example the online exhibit “Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention (http://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/show/exhibit-1843).” The exhibit highlights the economic and cultural assets of Black people as well as the narratives and initiatives connected to the convention. It especially highlights Black women’s often-underrepresented contributions to convention cultures. The exhibit brings attention to diverse forms of political expression captured in convention proceedings and newspapers while also placing important antebellum Black political conventions in a broader context of regional Black political activity. More than a century before the digital age emerged, Black activists sought to translate a multitude of Black experiences into records about Black life that could answer the question: what is the condition of free Black Americans? For these Black thinkers, data describing individual and collective achievements forced readers to acknowledge Black Americans’ contributions to contemporaneous nation-building efforts. Departing from styles of biographical writing that cage Black women’s economic and political roles within patrilineal narratives about their husbands, fathers and brothers, the exhibit “Black Wealth (http://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/show/exhibit-1843)” situates Black women as the leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs that their life stories prove them to be. Scholars have traditionally studied and characterized colored conventions with men as central points of entry into convention cultures and ideological debates. By moving Black women from the margins to the center of the exhibit, the Colored Conventions Project makes a crucial intervention in the historiography of the colored conventions movement. The exhibit’s tabulations depict a collective image of Black antebellum life taken from data reports presented by the convention’s Committee on the Condition of Colored People. By extrapolating and visualizing these reports, the project inserts Black-led, census-style reports into politics surrounding Black Americans’ struggles for power over self-determination. Working toward meaning-making in the digital age, this essay interrogates the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

Colored Convention Cultures: Black Women’s Economic Prosperity and CensusStyle Reports Delegates of the 1843 national convention emphasized Black communities’ diverse labor and entrepreneurial pursuits, characteristics they thought would best communicate a diverse number of Black communities’ economic achievements and potential. Fifty-eight credentialed delegates met to debate various subjects before a lively audience. The men discussed delegates’ voting rights, regional favoritism, the role of Christianity in Black political organizing and the effectiveness of collective insurrection to securing civil liberties for oppressed Black people in the U.S. Many of the convention’s most celebrated Black leaders, including William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Henry

Highland Garnet, James N. Gloucester, and Charles B. Ray, represented Massachusetts and New York. Indeed, this convention is best known for the heated debate that ensued when delegates voted on whether or not to endorse Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (http://www.blackpast.org/1843-henry-highland-garnet-address-slaves-united-states)”—with Douglass leading the charge against endorsing Garnet’s radical call to arms and defeating its adoption by the slimmest of margins.

Delegate Attendance Trends at National Colored Conventions, 18… 160

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1. Delegate Attendance Trends at National Colored Conventions, 18301864. The minutes of the colored conventions movement offer many insights into Black mobility and geographically concentrated activities during the ante and postbellum eras. This graph charts rates of delegate attendance at national conventions in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1864.

The convention’s publication committee captured and printed many of these leading Black men’s interventions, as did activist-themed newspapers such as The Cleveland Daily Herald, The Emancipator and Free American, and The Liberator. But what of Black women intellectuals and community leaders? Although women are seemingly invisible within the printed proceedings, the Colored Conventions Project’s larger mission is dedicated to highlighting women’s political and economic contributions. Thus, “Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention” focuses on the socio-economic histories of connected women such as Julia Williams Garnet, Elizabeth Gloucester and Dr. Sarah Marinda Loguen-Fraser. Their prosperity and activism furthered the convention’s principles and missions beyond delegate appointment. In one compelling example, an important member of Brooklyn’s Black bourgeoisie, Elizabeth Gloucester, amassed business holdings and a personal fortune (http://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/show/exhibit-1843/news-coverage) that matches, and in many cases surpasses, that of the convention’s male celebrities. Elizabeth Gloucester’s economic history—one glimmer in the archives of the Colored Conventions Project—prompts us to explore her activism and professional ties. Gloucester’s husband, James, hailed from a family known to many as a Black ministerial dynasty in Philadelphia’s free Black elite communities. An orphan upon her mother’s death, Elizabeth joined the Gloucester family while just a girl. She grew up in a thicket of activity among Philadelphia’s Black intelligentsia wherein Black religious and political cultures were tightly bound. During her climb to economic eminence in Brooklyn, Gloucester acquired several properties and businesses including second-hand clothing stores, a furniture store, and a boarding house known as Remsen House (http://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/show/exhibit1843/biographies/elizabeth-gloucester), which was nestled between Myrtle and DeKalb Avenues, a popular merchant district. As directress of and a fundraiser for the New York Colored Orphans Asylum, Gloucester donated significant sums to the home to further its educational goals and to improve the lives of impoverished children. Indeed, the businesswoman’s properties and organizational affiliates were deeply intertwined with a host of political activities and institutions: Underground Railroad sites, Black churches, literary societies, freedom parades, a women’s commerce and trade group. Gloucester’s economic history is an invaluable conduit by which we understand Black women’s integral roles in promoting the principles and missions of the 1843 national convention. Undoubtedly, Gloucester’s estate and occupations (http://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/show/exhibit-1843/biographies/elizabeth-gloucester) would have been prime evidence to support the 1843 delegation’s interest in validating Black communities’ social value and community development by publishing data reports in the pages of the proceedings. Because we know that colored conventions were not historically discrete meetings, but were rather embedded in broader historical contexts involving many actors and events, the exhibit likewise highlights Black-led data reports. Convention organizers could only “hope that…every city, town, hamlet, and village [would] be represented as well as Literary and Benevolent Societies” at the five-day series of meetings. But delegates knew that enumeration could defy space, time, and racial bias; they also knew that the federal decennial census apportioned taxes and congressional representation. Even today as we struggle with the dilemma of racial bias in the “historical record” over 170 years later, we should increasingly seek out historical Black data repositories that challenge and complicate our understanding of American (political) history. Such repositories present a compelling opportunity for new investigations into Black data curation. This is especially significant in light of federal reports such as a 1918 Department of Commerce publication that confirms the bureau’s frequent misrepresentations of Black population trends prior to the thirteenth decennial census. The 1843 delegation seized an opportunity to dispel myths about Black people’s economic stagnancy by including statistical and qualitative reports that could reframe readers’ understanding of Black communities’ progress in America. As James McCune Smith discovered after deftly sifting through the 1840 federal census, the U.S. government had published erroneous and blatantly fabricated calculations on the condition of Black people while simultaneously presenting the still-young federal census as a legitimate means by which Americans and global readers could construe an intelligent understanding of the nascent New World. Labor, educational attainment, family units, service, physical ability—each of these categories, among others, were thought to reflect the general ambition and progress of a young and vibrant nation. McCune Smith exposed incorrect calculations in the census’s population category for

Deaf and Dumb, Blind and Insane Colored People, and exposed misleading interpretations of vital statistics on Black people. As the 1843 convention’s statistical reports suggest, some Black leaders viewed faulty calculations and resulting interpretations of the general condition of Black people as threats to free Blacks’ prosperity and uplift initiatives. Erroneous census records dangerously impaired Black mobility, undermined community building and seemed to render moot the advances Black leaders had made within their communities. Further, such records offered legislators and communities a rationale for discriminatory practices, promoting the idea that free Black populations were disproportionately insane, impoverished, rapidly decreasing, and thus degenerate. For these reasons and others, a number of northern states and western territories in antebellum America passed a series of laws that limited Black travel in and out of the state, that disallowed or restricted Black people’s ownership of land and chattel, that disallowed or restricted Black voting and court testimony rights, and that generally required free Blacks to meet onerous measures in order to live and work. For example, Ohio’s application of Black exclusion laws in 1829 proved an impetus for the colored conventions movement. Falsified federal census records also threatened Black economic freedom during a time when many Black leaders believed that economic progress among the Black masses would be a ticket to gaining civil rights. How would ambitious Black entrepreneurs know where to settle to start a new business venture? How likely was it that talented Black teachers would travel to and seek out employment in a seemingly economically stagnant school district?

Reported Societies in New York, 1843 Albany, NY Bath, NY Buffalo, NY Geneva, NY Lockport, NY New York City,… Newtown, NY Niagara, NY Penn Yan, NY Rochester, NY Schenectady,… 0

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2. Reported Societies in New York, 1843. Black communities often organized and raised funds to support a host of societies that enriched Black communities’ educational, moral, political, and economic wellbeing. This graph enumerates the number and variety of New York societies that appear in the 1843 report of the Committee Upon the Condition of the Colored People, presented at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, N.Y. Cities without values reflect absent statistics in the report.

Thus, we should critically interrogate the 1843 convention delegation’s self-reporting efforts as responses to at least two conversations. They should be viewed in relation to racially discriminatory data collection practices apparent in federal censuses and the power they subsequently apportioned. They should also be viewed as responses to intra-communal concerns about Black people’s general elevation. The 1843 convention strategically appointed data collection leaders with access to pecuniary support and to socio-economically diverse Black populations. And, because political philosophy played an important role in data collection processes, these leaders undoubtedly needed to have the intellectual acumen to move reports from aggregation to publication. Elizabeth Gloucester’s husband, James, chaired the reporting Committee on the Condition of Colored People, which included Abner Francis, William Munro, Sampson Talbot, Theodore Wright, and W. H. Yancy. Organizers directed delegates to submit statistical and qualitative information about their constituents and later compiled and printed reports in the minutes. Black elected representatives might have asked simple, survey-style questions: What sort of work do you do? How much money do you earn per year? What types of societies host meetings? How many drunkards and morally degenerate people are among you? They also consulted local, state and private organizations’ statistical data. Black data collectors often lacked sophisticated skills in statistical analysis and contended with limited funding for data collection. Still, their reports accumulated and organized information about Black communities that the U.S. State Department would not gather until 1850. Their reports portrayed a more diverse image of Black free communities while also providing evidence of the sorts of intellectual inquiries that represented their view of free Blacks’ economic vitality. Delegates initiated the 1843 statistical report with the lofty goal of a large-scale portrait of Black American life. They intended to collect information about Black communities’ character, divisions of labor, and state of well-being or disunion as they existed in the east, west, north and, perhaps most quixotic in ambition, the south. However, the 1843 statistical report ultimately provides occupational, population, organizational, and economic data only for three states: New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio. In relation to cities in the triumvirate states, the stats depict New York City as an organizational hub of numerous societies including men’s and women’s benevolent and literary societies, an educational society, and a public library. Mechanics, merchants, and agriculturalists are among occupations most represented in Albany, Buffalo, and Rochester, N.Y., and in New Bedford, Mass., and Columbus, Ohio. A related report on agriculture was also featured in the minutes of the 1843 national convention. It argues that numerous Black men and their families had excelled at community-building in Ohio, where they collectively owned thousands of acres of land, built schools and homes, and manufactured their own goods. These reports challenged contemporaneous political theories such as the notion that Black people lived longer (and thus better) within the institution of slavery than they had as free people, and that free Black men and women had not contributed to the nation’s economic and social well-being. The 1843 data reports enumerate the labor and social conditions representing what free Black northeastern and midwestern communities had achieved through entrepreneurial diversity and organizational achievement. This brief overview of a colored

convention’s ties to Elizabeth Gloucester, a Black woman of incredible success, and its numerical and sociological reports, seeks to broaden what we know (http://coloredconventions.org/teaching) about Black informational enterprises and the broader debates to which they are connected. We continue to confront a striking absence of Black voices and lived experience in historical records, so the onus is upon scholarly and public communities to critically examine and explore a more substantial history of America’s development. The Colored Conventions Project is leading the charge to bring buried histories of Black men’s and women’s political organizing to public audiences. We champion online exhibits as an important form of digital pedagogy. We collaborate with national and local teaching partners, student content contributors and the scholars featured in our forthcoming collected volume to promote innovative undergraduate and graduate research and exhibits. We have also benefited from a historic agreement with Gale, part of Cengage Learning Inc., to feature newspaper articles hosted in its databases. In many ways, the project’s collaborative nature is a reflection of the collaborative spirit so strongly embedded in cultures of the colored conventions themselves.

Sarah Patterson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation examines Black intellectual cultures and ideals, particularly through the ways in which Black women’s political writing addresses social reform movements between 1856 and 1910. She is a co-coordinator for the Colored Conventions Project and will co-edit the collection Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age.

About Sarah Patterson Chicago Citation Patterson, Sarah. "Toward Meaning-making in the Digital Age: Black Women, Black Data and Colored Conventions." Common-place.org. 16, no. 1 (http://common-place.org/issue/vol-16-no-1/) (Fall 2015). http://common-place.org/book/toward-meaning-making-in-the-digitalage-black-women-black-data-and-colored-conventions/ Topic Tags: Politics (http://common-place.org/book/topic/politics) Race (http://common-place.org/book/topic/race) Religion (http://common-place.org/book/topic/religion) Slavery and Abolition (http://common-place.org/book/topic/slavery-and-abolition) Theory and Practice in Early American Scholarship (http://common-place.org/book/topic/theory-and-practice-in-early-american-scholarship) Women (http://common-place.org/book/topic/women)

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Content A out New CFP

Making a Ca e for the lack Digital Humanitie KIM GALLON The du t ha et to ettle around the de ate over what the digital humanitie i or i not. oundarie and demarcation continue to hift within a complex and ongoing conver ation a out the inter ection of technolog with humani tic eld . Thi context, I would argue, ha generated the ideal condition in which to engage the que tion of how humanit i framed in the digital humanitie . To thi end, I eek to articulate a relation hip etween the digital humanitie and Africana/African American/ lack tudie (from here on I will call the eld lack tudie ) o a to highlight how technolog , emplo ed in thi underexamined context, can further expo e humanit a a racialized ocial con truction. Que tion ma ari e around the u e of the term “ lack.” Would not “Africana” or “African American” e more appropriate, ome ma a k. In other context , I am quite ure that m addition of a racial igni er to “digital humanitie ” would appear at the mo t raci t and at a minimum divi ive, leading to que tion a out who could or could not engage in lack digital humanitie . Que tion of thi magnitude are to e expected and are in fact nece ar when new area of inquirie are propo ed. At the ame time, the e ort of que tion o fu cate crucial complexit , making it di cult to chart the path needed to addre much deeper and temic i ue . To get caught up in exact de nition or que tion of “who i in or who i out” in lack digital humanitie i to ignore how the ver nomenclature of lackne ha a complex and rich hi tor that move in the ame conceptual or it a the term “digital humanitie ” (Parham, “Without Innovation”). Although work on racial, ethnic, and national di erence i emerging in the digital humanitie , di cu ion a out the lineage of lack tudie within the digital humanitie are almo t nonexi tent.1 While a comprehen ive hi tor of the inter ection etween lack tudie and the digital i orel needed, it i out ide of the cope of thi chapter. Here, I eek to et in motion a di cu ion of the lack digital humanitie drawing attention to the “technolog of recover ” that undergird lack digital cholar hip, howing how it ll the aperture etween lack tudie and digital humanitie . Indeed, the lack digital humanitie help to unma k the racialized tem of power at work in how we under tand the digital humanitie a a eld and utilize it a ociated technique . In their work with the #tran formDH collective, Alexi Lothian and Amanda Phillip have ugge ted that putting a name to the unnamed help to ring a concept

into exi tence (Lothian and Phillip , “Can Digital Humanitie Content A out New Thu CFP Mean Tran formative Critique?”). , thi piece name the “ lack digital humanitie ” a the inter ection etween lack tudie and digital humanitie , tran forming the concept into corporeal realit while lending language to the work of the lack digerati in and out ide of the academ . Like Matthew Kir chen aum’ under tanding of the term digital humanitie it elf, preci e de nition of what con titute the lack digital humanitie are elu ive. The lack digital humanitie re ect le an actual “thing” and more of a con tructed pace to con ider the inter ection etween the digital and lackne (Kir chen aum, 51). Like race, gender, cla , and exualit —all ocial con truct , if ou will—the digital humanitie increa ingl hold real meaning and igni cance in the academic univer e. A Kir chen aum ha o erved, there are high take for who i and who i not a digital humani t, and for what i or i not digital humanitie , when federal grant are hard to come and academic jo ma hinge on the term (Kir chenaum, 54–55). ome digital humanitie cholar have egun to call attention to the role that race ma pla in the development of digital humanitie program and center and in the funding and recognition that particular digital humanitie project might garner ( aile , “All the Digital Humani t Are White”). A vi rant and critical di cour e from #dhpoco, #tran formDH, and HA TAC (Humanitie , Art , cience , and Technolog Advanced Colla orator ), among other , now erve to re i t the academic hegemonie that ma limit our under tanding of what the digital humanitie i and will e in the future. M hope i that a critical con ideration of the connection etween lack tudie and the digital humanitie will help to advance thi work. The eld of lack tudie i nearing it ftieth irthda , having developed out of the civil right and lack Nationali t movement in the late 1960 . lack tudie ha long een under tood a the comparative tud of the lack cultural and ocial experience under white urocentric tem of power in the United tate , the larger African dia pora, and the African continent, after all, and the e tem of power endure. Contemporar cholar uch a Alexander Weheli e therefore de cri e “ lack tudie a a mode of knowledge production” that “inve tigate proce e of racialization with a particular empha i on the hifting con guration of lack life” (Weheli e, 3). He continue : If racialization i under tood not a a iological or cultural de criptor ut a a conglomerate of ociopolitical relation that di cipline humanit into full human , not-quite-human , and non-human , then lackne de ignate a changing tem of unequal power tructure that apportion and delimit which human can la claim to full human tatu and which human cannot. (Weheli e, 3)

Weheli e a k u to con ider how lack tudie might illumi Content proce A oute New CFP nate the variou which nonwhite u ject are tematicall hut out from “the categor of human a it i performed in the modern we t” (Weheli e, 3). Hi conception of lack tudie i powerful in it a ertion that modern humanit cannot e di located from a racialized hegemon . What doe thi mean for digital humanitie ? Following Weheli e, I would argue that an connection etween humanit and the digital therefore require an inve tigation into how computational proce e might reinforce the notion of a humanit developed out of racializing tem , even a the fo ter e ort to a em le or otherwi e uild alternative human modalitie . Thi ten ion i enacted through what I call a “technolog of recover ,” characterized e ort to ring forth the full humanit of marginalized people through the u e of digital platform and tool . Recover re t at the heart of lack tudie , a a cholarl tradition that eek to re tore the humanit of lack people lo t and tolen through temic glo al racialization. It follow , then, that the project of recovering lo t hi torical and literar text hould e foundational to the lack digital humanitie . It i a deepl political enterpri e that eek not impl to tran form literar canon and hi toriograph incorporating lack voice and centering an African American and African dia poric experience, though it certainl doe that; lack digital humanitie trou le the ver core of what we have come to know a the humanitie recovering alternate con truction of humanit that have een hi toricall excluded from that concept. A di cour e on the “politic of recover ” in the digital humanitie i eginning to take hape through Am arhart’ work. he document a hi tor of what he call “DIY recover project ” in the 1990 that ought to di rupt a canon of urocentric and male-authored literature. Through the len of lack digital humanitie , the e e ort at recover can e under tood not onl a the recover of “lo t or non-canonical and di cult to locate text ,” ut al o a the recover of lack author ’ humanit ( arhart, “Can Information e Unfettered?”). Applied a a technolog in lack tudie and in the live of lack people living in the digital era more generall , recover re tore lack people’ humanit . Thi technolog of recover operate a the hared a i for lack academic and nonacademic digital work, one that dominate the wa which oth lack tudie cholar and a lack pu lic approach technolog . ver da di cur ive interaction on ocial media network are a ca e in point. lack people’ u i tence in and re i tance to the complex oppre ive tem of laver , coloniali m, Jim Crow, ma incarceration, and police rutalit , acro time and pace, make lack live ground zero for a technolog of recover u ing ocial media. Movement that prote t the ongoing police rutalit of lack women and men, which egan on “ lack Twitter”

and Face ook with ha htag uch a # a HerName, # lack Content A out reathe, Newcontinue CFP lack people’ cenLive Matter, and #ICant turie -old endeavor to make their collective humanit apparent to the world. The e ha htag reveal that lack people’ humanit i tethered to a racial tem that deem lack people’ live a in igni cant relative to their white counterpart . Tweet that highlight di paritie in ocial indicator uch a emplo ment, education, hou ing, and healthcare etween white and lack people how how lack people’ humanit ha material con equence . In addition to Twitter, cholar and in titution (along with nonacademic u er ) have developed literar and hi torical digital recover project that imilarl repre ent a earch and mi ion for the collective recuperation of a lo t peoplehood. The Digital chom urg, one of the earlie t lack digitization project , demon trate the power of reclaiming lack humanit recovering nineteenth-centur lack female writing2 and late nineteenth and earl twentieth centur image of people of African de cent.3,4 It ma then e of little urpri e that cholar of the lack literar tradition, a a whole, have et to em race text mining and other quantitative digital approache in the ame num er a other group of literar cholar . cholar of African American literature ma view text mining a counterpo ed to recover (Ram , “African American Literature and Digital Humanitie ”). The relativel mall num er of text mining project among cholar of lack literature i concerning, however, at a time when digital humanitie work ha hifted it focu to quantitative and computational approache . ut the lack digital humanitie can highlight the value of peci c computational method . Kenton Ram , A i tant Profe or of African American Literature at the Univer it of Texa at Arlington and the Project Digital Initiative Coordinator for the Project on the Hi tor of lack Writing, model thi approach. Noting that moilit and place are predominant theme in African American literar expre ion, he u e text mining oftware to geo-tag the occurrence of cit and other geographical landmark name in lack literar expre ion (Ram , “African American Literature and Digital Humanitie ”). For example, text mining allow Ram to recover dward P. Jone ’ u e of citie , treet , neigh orhood , and cit landmark to reenvi ion form of lack humanit that are not completel circum cri ed raci m (“ dward P. Jone and Literar Geo-Tagging”). Ram ’ work tre e another ke point: digital recover project that are either led or heavil involve lack cholar are particularl impactful in how the expand what we undertand the digital humanitie to e and it potential for criticall thinking a out power. A a cholar of African de cent leading the digital program of the thirt -two- ear-old Project on the Hi tor of lack Writing (H W)—which wa founded another lack literar cholar, Mar emma Graham, with a group of

African American literar cholar at an organizing meeting en Content A i out New CFP titled Computer A ted Anal i of lack Literature (CAA L)— Ram produce work that di rupt the normative and racialized framework of the digital humanitie a led white cholar .5 Digital humanitie project exclu ivel developed white cholar and information technolog ta often re ect the racial hierarchie pre ent in higher education. Mark Anthon Neal view the mall num er of lack cholar in the digital humanitie a an admini trative i ue. He o erve , “When all the e dean and provo t are looking around for the folk who are going to do cutting edge work, the la t folk the think a out are lack folk ” (Left of lack). Neal’ comment touch on the unpoken a umption that African American are technopho e , even in the mid t of the information age. The uppo ition that lack people are aver e to technological innovation i tied to the di cour e of “ lack technopho ia” that till circulate toda , reproducing and reinforcing long- tanding “ cienti c” evidence of lack intellectual inferiorit ( verett, 19). From the vantage of lack digital humanitie , foundational a umption a out humanit , a well a a out how we derive meaning a out human culture in the academ , remain deepl entrenched in racialization, and the digital humanitie are not exempt from thi charge. Like man di cipline that tud humanit , di cu ion a out digital tool and proce e are mo t often con ideration a out how majorit group u e or might e tudied with computational approache . Thu , the large hare of digital humanitie project and related cholar hip that pa no attention to race hould e de ned a the “white digital humanitie ,” for the are, in practice, exploration a out human culture a ed on whitene a an unmarked categor and “ tandard of the real” (Gordon, 79).6 The racialization of lack people’ humanit therefore po e a fundamental pro lem to the digital humanitie a it i generall de ned. Under tood a the union of digital technolog and the academic di cipline that tud human culture, what do we do with form of humanit excluded from or marginalized in how we tud the humanitie and practice the digital humanitie ? What are the implication of u ing computational approache to theorize and draw deeper in ight into a modern humanit that i prima facie arranged and con tructed along racial line ? One of the e ential feature of the lack digital humanitie , then, i that it conceptualize a relation hip etween lackne and the digital where lack people’ humanit i not a given. The lack digital humanitie pro e and di rupt the ontological notion that would have u accept humanit a a xed categor , an a umption that unpro lematicall emanate in the digital realm. The lack digital humanitie , then, might e dened a a digital epi teme of humanit that i le tool-oriented and more inve ted in anatomizing the digital a oth progenitor of and ho t to new—al eit related—form of racialization. The e

form at once attempt to a oli h and to fortif a taxonom of Content A out New CFP humanit predicated on racial hierarchie . What, then, do the lack digital humanitie mean for the humanitie and it relation hip to digital tool ? Rather than moving forward with digitizing, text mining, topic modeling, and the like, the lack digital humanitie would have u eriou l conider the political relation and “a em lage ” that have racialized the literar , philo oph , and hi torical text that we tud (Weheli e, 3). Digital tool and platform hould e mo ilized to interrogate and di clo e how the humanitie are developed out of tem of power. The lack digital humanitie reveal how methodological approache for tud ing and thinking a out the categor of lackne ma come to ear on and tran form the digital proce e and tool u ed to tud humanit . Que tion pertaining to digital tool development have much roader application , of cour e. Johanna Drucker, for in tance, remind u that we mu t u e and uild digital infra tructure and tool teeped in humani tic theor o that the function in wa that re ect the core value of the humanitie (Drucker, 87). However the lack digital humanitie force u to move ackward efore moving forward in thinking a out tool , to r t con ider how the ver foundation of the humanitie are racialized through the privileging of We tern cultural tradition . It then a k u to a e whether tho e tool would till e u ed in the ame manner had the een developed to explore the text that were and are marginalized through the racialization of the humanitie . It further prompt u to a k how tool uilding might mirror the material realitie of lackne . The lack digital humanitie therefore foreground the digital a a mutual ho t for raci m and rei tance and ring to light the “role of race a a metalanguage” that hape the digital terrain, fo tering hegemonic tructure that are oth new and old and replicate and tran cend analog one .7 Ultimatel , the ta k of lack digital humanitie i to a k, “What a pect of the digital humanitie might e made more “humani tic” if we were to look at them from the per pective of lackne ?” The lack digital humanitie rai e the que tion, “How can digital tool and proce e uch a text mining and di tant reading e ju ti ed when there i o much to do in recon tructing what it mean to e human?”8 lack digital humanit , with it empha i on humanit a an evolving categor , al o change how we hould view the ongoing concern a out u taina ilit and the future of digital project . Recognizing that humanit i a con truct, a contingent idea, force digital humani t to come to term with the contingenc of digital project . How might the u taina ilit of a digital project e conceptualized from a tandpoint that con ider humanit a a ocial con truction and u ject to change over time and place? Accordingl , the lack digital humanitie promote a tem of change; it i a mechani m for deregulating the tendenc of technological tool , when

emplo ed in the digital humanitie , to deempha ize que tion Content itAelf.out New CFP a out humanit Thu , I make the ca e for the lack digital humanitie in order to, a Alan Liu ugge t , enlarge the eld with “ ociocultural meaning” (Liu, 501). lack digital humanitie provide a forum for thinking through the wa that lack humanit emerge , u merge , and re urface in the digital realm through the “racializing a em lage of u jection” (Weheli e, 2). M articulation of thi union doe not di mi or marginalize other e ort working at thi nexu , uch a e lack tudie , lack code tudie , and digital lackne .9 The all provide compelling method for de cri ing how the digital come to ear on lackne and vice ver a. ut there i a need for the e and more theorization on the topic o that the might contri ute to a larger lack technocultural di cour e and Internet activi m. lack tudie ha a unique role to pla in di mem ering how we think a out humanit and the digital humanitie exten ion. A lack epi temolog will generate que tion a out the relationhip etween the racialization of humanit and the digital a power, ultimatel fo tering new inquirie and deeper undertanding a out the human condition.

Note 1. For ome of the cholar hip on di erence in the digital humanitie , ee http://tran formdh.org/a out-tran formdh/ and http ://www.ha tac.org/explore/ ocial-political-i ue /race-ethnicit . 2. http://digital.n pl.org/ chom urg/writer _aa19/toc.html. 3. http://digital.n pl.org/ chom urg/image _aa19. 4. http://www.n pl.org/a out/location / chom urg/digital- chom urg. 5. http ://h w.ku.edu. 6. oth Mo a aile and Tara McPher on implicitl make thi argument with their article title : “All the Digital Humani t Are White, All the Nerd Are Men, ut ome of U Are rave” and “Wh Are the Digital Humanitie o White?” 7. On the “metalanguage of race,” ee Higgin otham. 8. M que tion i heavil modeled o the que tion that Africana philo opher Lewi Gordon po e a out the role of philo oph in relation hip to Africana philo oph . ee Introduction to Africana Philo oph . 9. http://e lack tudie .org; http://dia porah pertext.com/2015/02/13/cfp- lack-code- tudie /; http://www.rutger digital lackne .com.

i liograph

aile , Mo a Z. “All the Digital Humani t Are White, All the Nerd Are Men, ut ome of U rave.” Journal of Digital Humanitie 1, no. 1 Content A Are out New CFP (2011). http://journalofdigitalhumanitie .org/1% 2%80%931/all-thedigital-humani t -are-white-all-the-nerd -are-men- ut- ome-of-u are- rave- -mo a-z- aile /.

Digital chom urg: African American Women Writer of the 19th Centur . New York Cit Pu lic Li rar , 1998. http://digital.n pl.org/ chom urg/writer _aa19/. Drucker, Johanna. “Humani tic Theor and Digital cholar hip.” In De ate in the Digital Humanitie , ed. Matthew K. Gold, 85–95. Minneapoli : Univer it of Minne ota Pre , 2012. arhart, Am . “Can Information e Unfettered?: Race and the New Digital Humanitie Canon.” In De ate in the Digital Humanitie , ed. Matthew K. Gold, 309–18. Minneapoli : Univer it of Minne ota Pre , 2012. verett, Anna. Digital Dia pora: A Race for C Pre , 2009.

er pace. Al an : UNY

Gordon, Lewi R. An Introduction to Africana Philo oph . Cam ridge: Cam ridge Univer it Pre , 2008. Higgin otham, vel n rook . “African American Women’ Hi tor and the Metalanguage of Race.” ign 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–74.

Image of African American from the 19th Centur . New York Cit Pu lic Li rar , 1999. http://digital.n pl.org/ chom urg/image _aa19/. Kir chen aum, Matthew, G. “What I ‘Digital Humanitie ’ and Wh Are The a ing uch Terri le Thing A out It?” Di erence : A Journal of Femini t Cultural tudie 25, no. 1 (2014): 46–53. Liu, Alan. “Where I Cultural Critici m in the Digital Humanitie ?” In De ate in the Digital Humanitie , ed. Matthew K. Gold, 490–509. Minneapoli : Univer it of Minne ota Pre , 2012. Lothian, Alexi , and Amanda Phillip . “Can Digital Humanitie Mean Tran formative Critique?” Journal of e-Media tudie 3, no. 1 (2013). http ://journal .dartmouth.edu/cgiin/We O ject /Journal .woa/xmlpage/4/article/425. McPher on, Tara. “Wh Are the Digital Humanitie o White? or Thinking the Hi torie of Race and Computation.” In De ate in the Digital Humanitie , ed. Matthew K. Gold, 139–60. Minneapoli : Univer it of Minne ota Pre , 2012. Neal, Mark Anthon . “Race and the Digital Humanitie .” Left of lack (we ca t), ea on 3, epi ode 1, John Hope Franklin Center, eptem er 17, 2012. http ://www. outu e.com/watch?v=AQth5_-QNj0. Nel on, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Text .” ocial Text 20, no. 2 ( ummer 2002): 1–15.

Project on the Hi tor of lack Writing. “H W Hi tor : The Hi tor of the Project on the Hi tor of lack Writing.” http://www2.ku.edu/~ph w/a out_u _hi tor .html. Parham, Mari a. “Without Innovation: African American Lifeworld and the Internet of Thing ,” Octo er 14, 2014. http://mith.umd.edu/podca t /dd_fall-2014-mari a-parham.

Ram , Kenton. “African American Literature and Digital Humanitie ,” Januar 17, 2014. http://www.culturalfront.org/2014/01/african Content A out New CFP american-literature-and-digital.html. —. “ dward P. Jone and Literar Geo-Tagging,” Januar 17, 2014. http://www.culturalfront.org/2014/01/edward-p-jone -and-literar geo-tagging.html. —. “Text-Mining, Geograph , and Canonical African American hort torie ,” Januar 17, 2014. http://www.culturalfront.org/2014/01/textmining-geograph -and-canonical.html. Weheli e, Alexander G. Ha ea Vi cu : Racializing A em lage , iopolitic , and lack Femini m Theorie of the Human. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer it Pre , 2014.

API and Atom Feed Data a out thi text i availa le via read-onl J ON API endpoint : entence , annotation , comment , and index ke word . Comment po ted on thi text can e followed text' Atom Feed.

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Mapping Caribbean Cyberfeminisms Tonya Haynes Caribbean cyberfeminisms are diverse, heterogeneous, and polyvocal. Networks may be simultaneously national, regional, global, transnational, and diasporic. Through practices of media creation, curating, (re)blogging, (re)tweeting, sharing, and commenting across multiple social media platforms, Caribbean feminist knit together an online community that is often linked to on-the-ground organizing and action. Online feminist practices are therefore rich archives for the study of Caribbean feminisms. To date, scholarly work on women’s and feminist movements in the region has failed to document and analyze these practices and sites of activism. Similarly, Caribbean feminist critiques of technology and new media are not well developed. The essay attends to this gap by offering a partial and preliminary mapping Caribbean cyberfeminisms primarily through documentation and analysis of Caribbean feminist blogs.

The murder of Japanese pannist Asami Nagakiya at Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival generated international headlines. The mayor of Port of Spain, Raymond Tim Kee, seemed to blame Nagakiya for her own death, couching the violence against her as a result of “vulgarity and lewdness in conduct,” underscoring that “women have a responsibility to ensure they are not abused.”1 Trinidadian women (and men) assembled outside City Hall to demand the mayor’s resignation. They also shifted the public conversation on gender-based violence away from what they deemed “victim-blaming” and “slut-shaming” toward one of state accountability and respect for women’s autonomy and bodily integrity. The leaders of the feminist organization womantra were among those identified as coordinating the protest action and media engagement. Womantra is one of the most vibrant, feminist Pan-Caribbean online spaces linked to on-the-ground action in Trinidad and Tobago. Such spaces serve as a key ground for mobilizing Caribbean feminist constituencies, as evidenced by their street protest and online petition with more than 10,500 signatures. 1

Sean Douglas, “Mayor: Beware Dangerous Sub-cultures,” Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, 11 February 2016, http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/0,223841.html.

sx archipelagos • May 2016 • DOI 10.7916/D8HM58J8 • CC-BY 4.0 International Small Axe Project • ISSN: 2473-2206

[ Haynes ] Mapping Caribbean Cyberfeminisms

sx archipelagos Issue (1) [ May 2016 ]

A Jamaican government minister dismissed his country’s Twitter users as an “articulate minority” that does not express the views of “ordinary Jamaicans,”2 and the noted Caribbean feminist activist Hazel Brown, in response to her perception of a lack of civic activism, is quoted as lamenting, “People are writing blogs, but what are we doing?”3 While the perception that Caribbean people are not using online technologies for significant civic participation is one shared by scholars, I seek to challenge such assessments.4 Studies of Caribbean culture and literature are finally acknowledging the significance of our online-media-saturated worlds, as evidenced by recent research on Afro-Dominican lesbian feminist organizing, Caribbean rhetoric, online cultures, and literatures.5 Building on this move in Caribbean cultural studies, I center Caribbean cyberfeminisms as knowledge-producing spaces of political thought and action that may at times either bridge or reinforce a digital divide but that nonetheless deserve documentation.6 Such documentation, of feminist blogging in particular, is the focus of my attempt to offer a necessarily preliminary and partial mapping of Caribbean cyberfeminisms. Through an analysis of feminist blogs, I make a claim for the existence of Caribbean cyberfeminism as, in Susanna Paasonen’s words, “a critical feminist position for interrogating and intervening in specific technological forms and practices,” visible in the ways bloggers challenge normative and hegemonic configurations of both feminism and digital technologies.7

Introducing Caribbean Feminist Cyberspace Nicholas Laughlin (and the bloggers who left comments on his article) traces key moments in Caribbean blogging, going back to at least 2000 with Taran Rampersad blogging from Trinidad and Tobago and the first blog post from Mad Bull (a Jamaican living the Cayman Islands) in 2001. Guyana Gyal (Neena Maiya), described by Laughlin as “the first Caribbean blogger to 2

“Ordinary Jamaicans Know Nothing about Twitter, Says Pickersgill,” Jamaica Observer, 26 November 2014, http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Ordinary-Jamaicans-know-nothing-about-Twitter–says-Pickersgill.

3 4

“Hazel Brown: Making a Difference,” Newsday, 21 April 2013, http://www.newsday.co.tt/features/0,176606.html. Pearson Broome and Emmanuel Adugu, “Whither Social Media for Digital Activism: The Case of the Caribbean,” British Journal of Education, Society, and Behavioural Science 10, no. 3 (2015): 1–21; Kristina Hinds Harrison, “Virtual Shop Fronts: The Internet, Social Media, and Caribbean Civil Society Organisations,” Globalizations 11, no. 6 (2014): 751–66.

5

Marcia A. Forbes, Streaming, vol. 1, #Social Media, Mobile Lifestyles (Kingston: Phase Three, 2012); Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Daniel Miller, Tales from Facebook (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Kevin Adonis Browne, Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Bernard Jankee, “The Word in Cyberspace: Constructing Jamaican Identity on the Internet,” in Annie Paul, ed., Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2007); Annie Paul, “Log On: Towards Social and Digital Islands,” in Michael Bucknor and Alison Donnell, eds., The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011); Rachel Afi Quinn, “This Bridge Called the Internet: Black Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Santo Domingo,” in Cheryl R. Rodriguez, Dzodzi Tsikata, and Akosua Adomako Ampofo, eds., Transatlantic Feminisms Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015).

6

For a discussion on the digital divide in Trinidad and Tobago, see Bheshem Ramlal and Patrick Watson, “The Digital Divide in Trinidad and Tobago,” Social and Economic Studies 63, no. 1 (2014): 1–23.

7

Susanna Paasonen, “Rethinking Cyberfeminisn,” Communications 36, no. 3 (2011): 340.

2



make a point of writing consistently in a ‘non-standard local dialect,’” began blogging in 2005.8 As one of the strongest female Caribbean voices who has been blogging consistently, Guyana Gyal is clearly a pioneer of Caribbean feminist blogging. Another pioneer, the Barbadian woman behind Titilayo, a blog no longer active or available online, also espoused feminist perspectives beginning in 2001. Thus Caribbean women as bloggers and Caribbean feminist blogs specifically are integral to a history of Caribbean blogging. Online Caribbean feminisms are extremely diverse, heterogeneous, and polyvocal. Networks may be simultaneously regional, national, and global, or transnational and diasporic. Through practices of media creation, curating, reblogging, retweeting, sharing, and commenting across multiple social media platforms, Caribbean feminists knit together online communities that are often linked to on-the-ground organizing and action. The online feminist activism of Caribbean people has caused major manufacturers to pull advertisements deemed offensive by the community, forced dialogue about and ultimately police investigations into the practices of journalists, and shut down websites with sexist content. Below are key signposts of the significance, emergence, and diversity of Caribbean cyberfeminisms:

8

•

Queen Macoomeh initiated an online petition against an Angostura advertisement with the tag line “Avoid the friendzone, offer her a real drink.” Angostura subsequently removed the advertisement.9 The public protest against the advertisement, especially via the online petition, was reported by international media outlets such as Buzzfeed.10

•

Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe of Groundation Grenada and colleagues at the Goat Dairy Project have used crowdfunding to raise US$63,160 to support a community agriculture project.11

•

WOMANTRA won a 2013 grant from the FRIDA Young Feminist Fund to organize a summer camp for girls transitioning to secondary school in Trinidad and Tobago. This demonstrates that communities that have their genesis online may incubate others forms of political organizing and intervention.12

•

Patrice Daniel, a twenty-nine-year-old feminist from Barbados and frequent contributor to International Planned Parenthood Federation’s blog, generated what I consider to be a key moment in Caribbean feminist blogging history. Her “An Open Letter to Caribbean Men, from Caribbean Women” went viral, with over 10,000 shares on Facebook, demonstrating the extent to which her words resonated not only with Caribbean women but with women across the globe.13

Nicholas Laughlin, “Eleven Key Moments in [Anglo-]Caribbean Blog History,” Global Voices, 13 January 2006, http://globalvoicesonline.org/2006/01/13/11-key-moments-in-anglo-caribbean-blog-history.

9

See http://www.change.org/p/we-did-it-angostura-has-said-they-will-pull-the-ad-thank-you-all.

10

See http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/another-liquor-company-creates-a-rapey-ad

11

Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe, “Kickstarting the Goat Dairy in Grenada,” Guardian, 30 August 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2013/aug/30/kickstarter-goat-dairy-grenada.

12

See http://womantratt.wix.com/home.

13

Patrice Daniel, “An Open Letter to Caribbean Men, from Caribbean Women,” RH Reality Check, 12 March 2013, http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/03/12/an-open-letter-to-caribbean-men-from-caribbean-women.

3



•

Caribbean women, many of whom identify as feminists and are active in feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizing have created online networks for “women who love women.” LGBT organizations such as Guyana’s Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination, Trinidad and Tobago’s Coalition Advocating for Inclusion of Sexual Orientation, and St. Lucia’s United and Strong maintain a significant online presence.14

•

Air Me Now is a YouTube show hosted by women from Belize, the Bahamas, and Jamaica that highlights “Caribbean women’s voices, Caribbean women’s issues, Caribbean oomanism.”15

•

Gender consciousness has also meant broader public engagement with questions of gender and sexuality, like that offered by the YouTube video created by a group of young Jamaican men in response to the rape of five women and girls. The video, titled Jamaican Anti-Rape Campaign (Please Share), has received almost 40,000 views.16

•

The social media efforts of Ashlee Hinds, a twenty-three-year-old Barbadian student, to create positive images of fat black women resulted in a transnational fashion blog and Facebook page titled Big Beautiful Black Girls, with 217,434 followers.17

These are but a few examples of the significance of Caribbean cyberfeminist practices.

Methods In 2014 I hosted a Caribbean blog carnival titled e-Mas: To the Caribbean, with Love. Using the hashtag #dearCaribbean, contributors from Venezuela, Curacao, and St. Kitts and Nevis, as well as from the wider Caribbean and its diaspora, submitted entries that were hosted on their own blogs as well as on Feminist Conversations on Caribbean Life.18 Global Voices reviewed the series, as did Trinidadian writer Shivanee Ramlochan, whose review was published in the Trinidad Guardian newspaper. US-based feminist media site Feministing.com also featured the series.19 E-Mas highlighted Amina Doherty’s photography; Jermaine Ostiana’s 14

See http://www.sasod.org.gy; http://www.facebook.com/caiso; and http://unitedandstrongstlucia.wordpress.com.

15

See http://www.facebook.com/AirMeNow and http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLNiArTOn_azPDdIR4FvkyepgRQrb9K8Y.

16

Danar Royal, dir., Jamaica Anti-Rape Campaign (Please Share), 2:15, posted 8 October 2012, https://youtu.be/IS8uJ9dol5s. For a broader discussion on gender consiousness, see Patricia Mohammed, “Like Sugar in Coffee: Third Wave Feminism and the Caribbean,” Social and Economic Studies 52, no. 3 (2003): 5–30.

17

See http://www.bigbeautifulblackgirls.com, http://bigbeautifulblackgirls.tumblr.com, and http://www.facebook.com/BigBeautifulBlackGirls.

18

See http://redforgender.wordpress.com/e-mas-caribbean-blog-carnival.

19

Matthew Hunte, “Blog Carnival Shows the Caribbean Some Love,” Global Voices, 4 February 2014, http://globalvoices.org/2014/02/04/blog-carnival-shows-the-caribbean-some-love; Shivanee Ramlochen, “Bloggers’ Paradise,” Trinidad Guardian, 16 February 2014, B29, http://digital.guardian.co.tt/default.aspx?iid=87563&startpage=page0000101#folio=100; Juliana Britto Schwartz, “This Week in Feminism South of the Border,” Feministing.com, 31 January 2014, http://feministing.com/2014/01/31/this-week-in-feminism-south-of-the-border-2.

4



poem “Trujillonomics”; Carla Moore’s video On Loving Yaad, Leaving Yaad, and Why Some ah We Waan Run Come Back; Stephanie Leitch’s reflections on her queer Baby-Doll mas’; and Gabrielle Hosein’s essay “A Risky Location: What It Means to Be an Indian Feminist in Our Region.” Ramlochan, herself a prolific digital griot, said of the collection: “These are some of the best and brightest in Caribbean letters, writing letters back home. They may often put forth theories that blast old, time honoured paradigms to shred, indeed, this is one of their most vital advantages. Digital space makes such collaborations not just possible but easily navigable. This blog carnival is proof that room can be constructed, in safe space, for every voice to interrogate its way toward truth.”20 Ramlochan’s analysis suggests that these “digital griots” must be taken on their own terms.21 The experience of hosting the “blog carnival” underscored for me the importance of documenting and analyzing online Caribbean feminisms. This partial and tentative attempt to map the diverse networks, spaces, and actors that constitute Caribbean online feminisms draws on my own experiences of maintaining a personal blog since 2006 and managing Feminist Conversations on Caribbean Life since 2010. It is therefore limited by my own networks. It is also linguistically limited, since it draws largely on media and actors published in English and English-based Creoles and dialects, though that does not preclude the multilingual abilities of some of the bloggers nor suggest that English is the official language of the countries from which these bloggers hail. There is reference to Cuban bloggers, but a more robust discussion on Cuban cyberfeminisms is outside of the scope of this essay and can be found elsewhere.22 Despite these obvious limitations, this mapping is still useful for understanding Caribbean feminisms in the twenty-first century and for understanding cyberfeminisms as a global and globalized phenomenon. I selected thirty-six key Caribbean feminist blogs for inclusion in the analysis. The majority of these blogs either expressly identify as feminist or reveal a feminist, gender-conscious politics in the nature of their content. The list is also cross-referenced with the twenty-eight bloggers who chose to register their blogs with the CatchAFyah Caribbean Feminist Network, though not all of those blogs were included in the analysis. The ones included represent almost exclusively blogs that belong to Caribbean women and men. Caribbean bloggers, however, also publish on blogs belonging to regional or international organizations. The blogs highlighted in the analysis are largely owned and maintained by the bloggers themselves. As part of this documentation of Caribbean bloggers, I sought to establish the national identities of these bloggers. Despite the claim that representing the nation is a key part of Caribbean people’s online activities and identities, determining the nationality of a specific blog or blogger is not always straightforward.23 While “representing the nation” is important to the online personality and content of some bloggers (e.g., Jamaica’s Carla Moore) and for others their nationality is signaled in their blog title (e.g., Negra Cubana tenia que ser), some blogs are best understood as Pan-Caribbean in scope (e.g., Roots and Rights or Antillean 20

Ramlochen, “Bloggers’ Paradise.”

21

Tzarina T. Prater, “‘Look Pon Likkle Chiney Gal’: Tessanne Chin, the Voice, and Digital Caribbean Subjects,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 12, no. 1 (2015): article 11.

22

See Sandra Abd’Allah-Alvarez Ramírez, “¿Ciberfeminismo en Cuba?,” paper presented at “Towards a New Social Contract?,” 31st International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 30 May–1 June 2013, Washington, DC.

23

See Miller and Slater, The Internet.

5



Media Group), as diasporic (e.g., BattyMamzelle), or as multicountry projects (e.g., Add Fyah and Stir). In seeking to discover the issues most important to Caribbean cyberfeminists, I undertook a content analysis of the blogs. I decided to focus exclusively on the text-based blogs that were still active and had updated at least in July 2015, excluding the blog to which I regularly contribute and those not written in English. This gave a total of nineteen blogs, of which fifteen are owned by women and three by men, and one has multiple contributors. For convenience, I selected the five most recent posts on each blog published in 2015 and included them in the thematic analysis. This yielded some ninety-five blog posts that were read closely for recurring topics. Taking seriously Ramlochan’s assertion that the Caribbean’s digital subjects must be understood on their own terms, I sought to categorize the thirty-six blogs in the sample. The categories I propose as useful for analyzing Caribbean feminist bloggers are, as much as possible, drawn from the bloggers’ own descriptions of their online practices.

Categorizing Caribbean Cyberfeminisms Personal-is-political is used to refer to personal blogs that draw on personal experience to illustrate or analyze relations of power in wider society. For example, in outlining the reason she decided to start blogging, Gabrielle Hosein argues that the “‘small p’ politics that reflects just living a woman’s life” while rendered trivial in sexist imagination is, in fact, a source of women’s theorizing: i’m writing to live. to stand still instead of running from one end of the seesaw to the other, constantly trying to keep the whole in balance. the words do not express the ‘big P’ politics of public revolutions and realisations, but a consciousness of ‘small p’ politics that reflects just living a woman’s life. . . . so much of women’s lives, time, work, concerns are considered trivial, yet they are momentous . . . if only to our own self. in this spirit, i start this diary, charting the daily negotiation of managing work and family, for as long as i can and perhaps as long as i need.24 Personal-is-political blogs therefore represent a continuation of women’s and feminist uses of diarying and journaling as a way of making sense of the world and of insisting that women’s experiences are significant sources of knowledge. I use the term culture critic to categorize blogs focused on cultural and sociological analyses of relations of power such as gender, race, class, and heterosexism and inequalities broadly. These blogs provide social, political, and economic analyses of everyday life and (popular) culture. Soyini Ayanna’s description of her blog Creative Commess makes explicit her role as culture critic: “I frequently think about and critique popular West Indian & Trinbagonian cultural trends, soca trends and what I see taking place.”25 Likewise, the tag line to Annie 24

Gabrielle Hosein, “Momentous Trivialities,” Diary of a Mothering Worker, http://grrlscene.wordpress.com/momentous-trivialitiesdiary-of-a-mothering-worker.

25

Soyini Ayanna, “About Me,” Creative Commess, http://soyluv.wordpress.com/about.

6



Paul’s Active Voice—“sharp, pointed, often witty commentary on current events in Jamaica, the Caribbean, India and the world”—also suggests her role as culture critic.26 Personal-is-political and culture critic emerged as the most popular classifications and are used to categorize half the blogs. This reflects the extent to which Caribbean feminists are using blogging as a means of analyzing and creating knowledge and dialogue around topical issues in their countries and region. Most personal-is-political blogs are also culture critic blogs; the distinction is that the personal-is-political blogs use personal experience to illustrate, analyze, and comment on broader sociocultural relations of gender, race, class, and sexuality. +Feminism is perhaps the most difficult category to conceptualize, though it is the secondmost popular. It refers to blogs that do not have an exclusive or primary focus on feminism, feminist perspectives, gender, or sexuality but that do include either writing from a feminist perspective or posts about women’s, feminist, and LGBT issues. For example, the Antillean Media Group is “a caucus of journalists, researchers and policy analysts dedicated to the stories that impact the Caribbean.”27 Their coverage of Caribbean stories includes issues of gender relations, covered from a profeminist perspective. However, they also address a broad range of issues from multiple perspectives. Media crossover is used to refer to blogs that contain content published both in mainstream and online media and private blogs. It includes blogs by journalists and columnists as well as bloggers whose online content is republished in national newspapers or bloggers who have attracted significant mainstream media attention. This categorization is important because it demonstrates new media’s imbrications with older forms of media. For example, the blogger Gabrielle Hosein saw her personal-is-political blog attract mainstream attention and subsequently be reprinted as a weekly column. Meanwhile, in the face of uncertainty over whether his weekly column would be renewed by the Trinidad Guardian, Colin Robinson continued to make articles available online via his blog. Thus the crossing implied by the category of media crossover suggests multidirectional flows. It also suggests the increasing salience of gender consciousness and feminist thought in Caribbean public space. When the media crossover blogs are added to this list of +feminism blogs, it reflects an important and growing infiltration of feminist ideas into the mainstream, demonstrating the extent to which feminist values, viewpoints, perspectives, and issues form part of a gender-conscious public conversation. Likewise, while the feminist academics who blog do not necessarily self-identify primarily as academics, I feel that the category of feminist-academic is important, since it reveals the overlap between digital and academic spaces. Seven of the blogs are categorized as feministacademic blogs. This demonstrates the extent to which feminists in the academy have been using online media to produce and share knowledge on a variety of issues. This number doubles when I include the blogs of those of current or former students for whom courses in women’s/gender/feminist studies at universities in the Caribbean and overseas have been crucial to their own identities and consciousness as feminists. This demonstrates the importance of feminist academia to Caribbean cyberfeminisms. It also suggests that understanding privilege, class, and elitism is critical to unlocking Caribbean cyberfeminisms. To the extent that 26

Annie Paul, Active Voice, http://anniepaul.net.

27

“Building the New Caribbean Media,” Antillean Media Group, http://www.antillean.org/about.

7



8

Caribbean cyberfeminisms serve to reinforce rather than challenge asymmetries of knowledge and power, their subversive potential is undermined. Curator describes blogs that gather and reproduce content published elsewhere or curate original content from a variety of contributors (e.g., WomenSpeak Project’s Women Speak, which solicits submissions).28 The blog Repeating Islands describes itself as “a project intended to bring the broader Caribbean community closer through the sharing of news and information that transcends the linguistic divide in the region.”29 This information sharing is done through aggregating and curating news published on multiple Caribbean news sites and serves the political mission of working across the divides of imperial languages. Included in this work of curating are also practices of reblogging, sharing, and citing the work of other Caribbean cyberfeminists. For example, included among the links, images, stories, and responses to reader questions that Bad Dominicana shares on her blog is a quote from a blog post by BattyMamzelle titled, “This Is What I Mean When I Say ‘White Feminism.’”30 Here, Caribbean feminists build consciousness-raising communities online, share knowledge, and think collectively through these practices of curating, linking, and reblogging each other’s work. Witty refers to blogs from writers for whom wit, wordplay, humor, and sarcasm function as key rhetorical devices and serve to make their media both more accessible and appealing to a wide readership/viewership. Annie Paul’s tagline promises “witty commentary,” and Mar the Mongoose’s “tales of a fierce, agile West Indian mongoose who moves quickly and sees much” also suggests a quick wit.31 While only five of the thirty-six blogs examined have been characterized as witty, it remains an important category for understanding feminist rhetorical strategies. Table 1a

ecord of What Happened ce and Stir

Caribbean Feminist Blogs and Bloggers

Blogger

Country

Categorization

Some of It/DJ Afifa Aza Annie Paul

Jamaica Jamaica Antigua & Barbuda/St. Kitts– Nevis/T&T Trinidad & Tobago Caribbean

Personal-is-political, culture critic +Feminism, culture critic, witty Personal-is-political

natan Media Group

+Feminism +Feminism

28

WomenSpeak Project, Women Speak, http://womenspeak.tumblr.com.

29

Ivette Romero-Cesareo and Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Repeating Islands, http://repeatingislands.com/our-blog.

30

Zahira Kelly (Bad Dominicana) quotes Cate Young (BattyMamzelle), “This Is What I Mean When I Say ’White Feminism,” imploring, “Please everybody: read this article!” http://bad-dominicana.tumblr.com/post/138419448358/white-feminism-doesnot-mean-every-white-woman; BattyMamzelle, 10 January 2014, http://battymamzelle.blogspot.com/2014/01/This-Is-What-IMean-When-I-Say-White-Feminism.html#.VwxPjXqYuCf.

31

Annie Paul, Active Voice, http://anniepaul.net; Mar the Mongoose, The Mongoose Chronicles, http://mongoosechronicles.blogspot.com.



9

Table 1b Caribbean Feminist Blogs and Bloggers

ominicana

Dominican Republic

curator

Trinidad & Tobago/US

Culture critic, personal-is-political

Trinidad & Tobago Trinidad & Tobago/US Trinidad & Tobago

Personal-is-political Culture critic, personal-is-political Feminist-academic, media crossover is-political, lture critic

liens

Barbados/South Africa/US

Culture critic, feminist-academic, cu personal-is-political

onversations on Caribbean

Barbados/Caribbean

Feminist-academic, culture critic

Sherlina Nageer

Guyana

Media crossover, culture critic, pers political

Yoani Sánchez

Cuba

+Feminism, personal-is-political, cu critic, media crossover

n Grenada al ese Experience

Neena Maiya Sara Bharrat

Grenada Guyana Guyana

+Feminism, culture critic Personal-is-political Culture critic, personal is political, nism

oman Tongue

Carolyn Cooper

Jamaica

Feminist-academic, media crossover critic, witty

oose Chronicles Ja

Mar/Mar the Mongoose Carla Moore

Barbados Jamaica

Culture critic, witty Media crossover, personal-is-politica culture critic, feminist-academic

ana tenia que ser

Sandra Abd’Allah-Alvarez Ramírez/Negra Cubana

Cuba

Feminist-academic, culture critic

n…Many Bodies…Bound-

Colin Robinson

Trinidad & Tobago

Media crossover, LGBT , +Feminis

Trinidad & Tobago Jamaica Trinidad & Tobago Pan-Caribbean

Personal-is-political +Feminism Curator +Feminism, feminist-academic, cur

US/Guyana Caribbean

+Feminism Personal-is-political, culture critic

zelle

ssa Wears No Shoes ommess Mothering Worker

y Any Means Y

Zahira Kelly/Bad Dominicana Cate Young/BattyMamzelle Soyini Ayanna Gabrielle Hosein

o

Islands

d Come Again Rights

Emma Lewis Ivette Romero-Cesareo and Lisa ParavisiniGebert Roberta Clarke


Table 1c

Amina Doherty

of a Minibus Traveller h Satire Flag Words eak ”

Vidyaratha Kissoon Atillah Springer Kei Miller WomenSpeak Project Debra Providence


10

Caribbean Feminist Blogs and Bloggers

Antigua & Barbuda/Nigeria St. Vincent & the Grenadines Guyana Trinidad & Tobago Jamaica The Bahamas Trinidad & Tobago St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Personal-is-political, curator Personal-is-political, +Feminism Personal-is-political +Feminism, culture critic, media cr Culture critic, +feminism, witty Poetry blog, personal-is-political Curator +Feminism, poetry blog

Feminist Positionality The ways Caribbean digital griots identify online reveal a cyberfeminist practice that intervenes in dominant configurations of both feminism and digital space as Northern/Western, white, and bourgeois and that render Caribbean, feminist, and female voices as marginal. In their “about me” pages, many of the bloggers expressly define themselves as feminist: This is me. Caribbean. Feminist, activist, poet, academic, educator, T-shirt graffiti artist.32 I am a black feminist* and womanist and I prioritize black women & girls always. I often find myself revisiting areas pertaining to race, blackness, anti-blackness, culture and identity to name just a few.33 Three fabulous Caribbean feminist cousin-sisters.34 A feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music and critical commentary on media representation.35 These feminist bloggers also articulate the critical and political importance of women’s voices and spaces, and by affirming “me nun tak back nuh chat,” they defiantly lay claim to their opinions, analyses, and theorizing without apology:36 Lover and defender of my womanness, Africanness, my Caribbean heritage, my Barbados, my right to take up my space and protect our space.37 “Woman tongue, ‘was-was’ and tamarind tree, the three worse things.” —Jamaican proverb Translation: The woman’s tongue, the wasp and the tamarind tree sting the most. This proverb suggests the potency of the female voice as an expression of incisive social critique.38 32

Gabrielle Hosein, Diary of a Mothering Worker, http://grrlscene.wordpress.com/souldeya.

33

Soyini Ayanna, Creative Commess, http://soyluv.wordpress.com/about.

34

derevolushunwidin, trendsettah, and pieces2peace, Add Fyah and Stir, http://addfyahandstir.wordpress.com/about.

35

Cate Young (BattyMamzelle), Battymamzelle, http://battymamzelle.blogspot.com/

36

Carla Moore, MooreTalkJa, http://mooretalkja.wordpress.com.

37

Mar the Mongoose, “About Me,” The Mongoose Chronicles, http://www.blogger.com/profile/06241127953404268513.



Men also claim and participate in these cyberfeminist spaces, asserting, “Yes, I am a Rasta, Socialist, Feminist Caribbean Man. Above all, I am an Artist.”39 The explicit use of the term feminist signals its acceptance and assumption of shared meaning. Feminism is a key part of the identity of some of the bloggers whose work is examined here, such as Bad Dominicana, who describes herself as a “raging mujercista,” with cyberfeminism also a key part of how some bloggers self-identify.40 For example, Negra Cubana describes herself as “ciberfeminista negra.”41 These bloggers tend to qualify the term feminist with Caribbean or black, suggesting an awareness of the racially and geopolitically exclusionary way normative feminism is often framed and of the antagonism between feminisms and nationalism in postcolonial settings, or as a means of articulating the specificity of their feminist thought and practice. I argue that the insistence of geographical, national, racial/ethnic, and political qualifiers is a key Caribbean practice of cyberfeminists that reveals an understanding of themselves as speaking across a divide that contains differently identified feminists and a sensitivity to communication as key to emancipatory practices. Early 1990s representations of the technological future visualized racialized embodiment as oppositional to its liberatory promise, thus folding excitement about the promise of new technologies into old racialized, gendered, and geopolitical exclusions.42 The Net is therefore not a virtual place; it is very much real for identities and economies. These bloggers treat Internet media as extensions of the social spaces in which their bodies are already engaged. Commercial, consumptive, militaristic, and entertainment usages of the Internet predominate, reinforcing the notion of an individual, apolitical, consuming self as the modal way of being online.43 As Marcia Forbes has noted, Jamaican youth view a lack of access to the Internet and social media as a stigmatizing disadvantage.44 Furthermore, even when Internet users are engaged in expressly “political” projects, as are Caribbean feminists online, their dependence on commercially driven platforms implicates them in these hegemonic, militaristic, and commercial orientations of the Internet, as well as in asymmetrical flows of information, media reach, and capital. On the other hand, the Internet provides a space for a plurality of voices, including the counterhegemonic. Via their explicit articulations of their positionality, Caribbean feminists intervene in these domination configurations of digital space. The format of the online forum or the blog post with a comments section allows for a multiplicity of voices. It therefore opens up spaces for dialogue and negotiation. However, some Caribbean cyberfeminists warn that you enter the media spaces they have created “at your own motherfuckin risk,” insisting, “i want you to feel alienated by me. i want you to have to tiptoe around me like im a delicate creature who will snap your head off if you so even think of messing w my humanity.”45 38

Carolyn Joy Cooper, “About,” Jamaica Woman Tongue, http://carolynjoycooper.wordpress.com/about.

39

Amílcar Sanatan, “About I,” http://www.amilcarsanatan.com/about-us.

40

Zahira Kelly (Bad Dominicana), “About Me,” The Bad Dominicana, http://bad-dominicana.tumblr.com/about.

41

Sandra Abd’Allah-Alvarez Ramírez (Negra Cubana), “¿Quién es Negracubana?,” Negra Cubana tenia que ser, http://negracubanateniaqueser.com/quien-es-negracubana.

42

See Alondra Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 1–15.

43

Paul C. Adams, “Cyberspace and Virtual Places,” Geographical Review 87, no. 2 (1997): 260.

44

Forbes, #Social Media, Mobile Lifestyles.

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By this they reveal heightened awareness to the ways being online folds into hegemonic notions of what it means to be human and into the gendered and racialized hierarchies of cyber/space. Their discursive, rhetorical, and media-making practices reveal their “critical feminist position for interrogating and intervening in specific technological forms and practices.”46 In this sense, it is important to view national or ethnic markers not merely as a part of “representing the nation online” but as a cyberfeminist practice that directly addresses geopolitical and racial hierarchies inside and outside feminisms.47

Caribbean Feminist Concerns Cyberfeminists bloggers cover a range of concerns in dialogue with local, regional, national, and international current affairs. They examine diverse issues, including drought, climate change, and environmental degradation, as well as the manifestation of unequal relations of gender in a range of areas. They explore embodiment, transgender identities, skin color, and racisms and offer up sophisticated analyses of heterosexuality and sexual politics that are often muted in academic scholarship. Caribbean cyberfeminists train their critical lenses to Caribbean and US popular culture, using these as modes of engaging with feminisms. Caribbean cyberfeminists challenge heteronormativity through their documenting of local, national, and regional LGBT organizing and articulating a vision of citizenship and nationhood that is inclusive. “I’ve always understood the project and vision of nation to include me—that it was meant to include everyone,” writes Colin Robinson. “I firmly believed there was progress in wrapping ourselves in its symbols, which would make a difference where threatened boycotts, shaming human rights reviews and bans of our culture didn’t quite appear to be working.”48 Across multiple blogs, Caribbean cyberfeminists express concern about governance, the masculinism of state power, corruption, and holding state managers accountable. Yaoni Sanchez’s words are illustrative of the views expressed by many: “With so many problems facing the country, which affect millions of people, how could a day of ‘the official organ of State power’ be squandered to sing the praises of a single man? Situations like yesterday are proof that the pernicious cult of personality remains intact among us, fostered by those who idolize a few and those who swell with vanity at the flattery.”49 Bloggers also use social and electronic media to speak out against sexual harassment and assault at the hands of men whose official power would otherwise render these women silent. The excerpt below is illustrative of the ways some Caribbean women have used personal blogs to break the silence on sexual violence: “I went to him expecting some professionalism, you know, and all I get was him trying to bus’ a hustle in me. Telling me about how he could do things to my body 45

Kelly (Bad Dominicana), “About Me.”

46

Paasonen, “Rethinking Cyberfeminisn,” 340.

47

See Miller and Slater, The Internet.

48

Colin Robinson, “Mrs. Joyce Pierre’s Daughter,” One Nation . . . Many Bodies . . . Boundless Faith, 28 June 2015, http://onenationmanybodies.wordpress.com/2015/06/28/mrs-joyce-pierres-daugther.

49

Yaoni Sánchez, “Cult of Personality in Cuban Parliament,” Generación Y, 15 July 2015, http://generacionyen.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/cult-of-personality-in-cuban-parliament.

12



and how he want fuck me. I mean what shit is that? Can you imagine how I felt? How was I suppose to receive a service from a man like duh eh? And imagine this nonsense now, he get big government wuk.” I related my own encounter with the same gentleman to her. It had happened more than 7 years ago at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court. Since then, I’ve heard many similar stories from women about him. The standard response to this particular official is “O, he? Everybody know how he stay.”50 Here, Guyanese blogger Sara Bharrat relates a conversation she had with a woman taxi driver about a state manager infamous for his sexual exploitation of women. Their narrative exchange, which took place in the taxi, is an act of feminist solidarity that is then extended to digital space. Bloggers also analyze and expose racial/ethnic tensions in their communities and countries, exposing antiblack and anti-Indian racism and meditating on racialized identities in the region: When some Trinidadians make fun of the blackness of Tobagonians, it’s not unlike the maligning of Haitians, overtly or subconsciously, as “that kind of Black”—too black.51 “I do not know if I am East Indian, Trinidadian or West Indian.” Sam Selvon, Opening Address to East Indians in the Caribbean Conference, University of the West Indies, Trinidad, 1979 While in the beginning I have not been overly concerned with being West Indian, there have been many days when I was not sure whether I was an East Indian or a Guyanese. In fact, I was afraid to be either of these things because I did not know how to make them live in harmony inside of me. There was a time when I could not fully nor comfortably embrace my East Indian heritage because I felt guilty; I felt as if I were somehow betraying my Guyaneseness. But then, how could I be Guyanese without my Indianness? It took me a while to realize why it was so hard to be Guyanese; I simply did not understand what it meant to be one of us.52 Taken together, these diverse areas of concern reveal Caribbean cyberfeminist participation in local, regional, national, and global communities and demonstrate the subversive possibilities of digital public spheres.

Strategic Space, Strategic Action While I have focused largely on individual bloggers, it is important to recognize that blog posts are often cocreated, open-ended, community projects. They may be reblogged on multiple 50

Sara Bharrat, “The Senior Government Official Guyanese Women Dislike,” Guyanese Experience, July 2015, http://sarabharrat.wordpress.com/2015/07.

51

Soyini Ayanna, “The Language of Blackness,” Creative Commess, 11 July 2015, http://soyluv.wordpress.com/2015/07/11/thelanguage-of-blackness.

52

Sara Bharatt, “Three into One Definitely Can’t Go, or Can It?,” Guyanese Experience, 15 May 2015, http://sarabharrat.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/three-into-one-definitely-cant-go-or-can-it.

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blogs and shared via Facebook, e-mail, and other media. Comments on the blog post itself, on Facebook, and in lunch rooms co-construct knowledge, open up dialogue, act as a form of consciousness raising, and may also challenge received knowledge on inequalities, gender, and sexuality and serve to build community. The process of commenting can shift the dialogue, help flesh out the analysis initiated by the author, or make space for multiple and dissenting voices. Caribbean feminists have also published their work on the blogs of others and on more outernational platforms. Jamaican-born, New York-based lesbian poet, author, and performer Staceyann Chin is published regularly in multiple US-based online media platforms and is a very successful producer and user of social media, with 17,000 follows on Twitter and 27,000+ on Facebook. Guyanese activist Sherlina Nageer of Red Thread, Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination, and Occupy Guyana writes frequently on her own Facebook page and has shared those writings with a wider audience by publishing on the Huffington Post, on Black Looks (a website owned by Nigerian journalist Sokari Ekine, who is currently living in Haiti), and on CODE RED’s blog Feminist Conversations on Caribbean Life. Nageer used these multiple platforms to denounce police killings in Linden, to share with a wider audience her submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women on the rights of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women in Guyana, and to report on the efforts of Guyanese activists from women’s, LGBT, and disability rights organizations to mobilize against transphobic, homophobic, sexist, and ableist violence in Guyana. Sherlina later started her own blog, Freedom by Any Means, on which she republishes articles from her Stabroek News column.53 BattyMamzelle, a US-educated twenty-something from Trinidad and Tobago, was a regular contributor to US-based commercial pop feminism site, Jezebel, with some of her most popular pieces gaining more than one million unique views. In 2013, she wrote a post outlining her decision to no longer contribute to the site: I’m 23. I’m black. I’m West Indian. I didn’t have a lot of exposure to feminism growing up. I cringe when I recall the things that I said about other women when I was a freshman in college, and the attitudes that I had towards sexuality and womanhood. I went to a Catholic school in a country that is still largely misogynistic. It was pretty much a given that I’d grown up to be an anti-woman little shit. But then I found Jezebel. I found Jezebel and I started reading. I’m the kind of person who just likes to know things, so perusing the site pre-Kinja was like a revelation to me. All of a sudden I had this entire vocabulary to explain the little microagressions that I’d faced all my life, and a community of women who were engaged in parsing those issues. I could finally vocalize why I felt an inconsolable rage when I was tone policed. I knew how to defend myself against slut shaming. I could explain in detail

53

Sherlina Nageer, “No Women Died, This Is Not a Women’s Issue,” Black Looks, 15 August 2012, http://www.blacklooks.org/2012/08/no-women-died-this-is-not-a-womens-issue; “End Sexual-Orientation and Gender-Identity Discrimination in Guyana,” Huffpost Gay Voices, 10 July 2012 (updated 2 February 2016), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sherlinanageer/; “In Praise of Bad-john Lil Girls,” Feminist Conversations on Caribbean Life, 21 August 2013, http://redforgender.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/in-praise-of-bad-john-lil-girls. See http://freedombyanymeans.wordpress.com.

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why rape culture was so insidious and why restrictions on reproductive freedom were a devastating step backwards for women. Jezebel taught me how to be a woman. And then it taught me that it didn’t care about the kind of woman that I am.54 BattyMamzelle’s experience of the racism of online feminist communities highlights the continuities and articulations with historically sedimented relations of power that remerge in the very spaces that claim to be feminist, polyvocal, rhizomatic, and queer. Her experiences validate my earlier analyses about the strategic use of ethnic, racial, national, and regional markers in bloggers’ “about me” pages as both recognition of and counter to prevailing exclusions in cyberspace. Cyberfeminist spaces are becoming increasingly important to the consciousness raising of a new generation of women and men, even when these spaces themselves may be exclusionary. Aside from blogging, Caribbean cyberfeminist communities are created through the use of groups, pages, and campaigns, many of which are hosted on Facebook. As Facebook moves to monetize every aspect of the Facebook experience, Caribbean feminists who made strategic use of the site for consciousness raising and community building are faced with challenges resulting from the predominance of the commercial nature of cyberspace. Prior to Facebook’s changes to its policy for pages, once someone “liked” your page, any content you posted there showed up in their personal feed. One of the earliest attempts at building online Caribbean feminist community, CODE RED for Gender Justice’s Facebook page, which was inaugurated in 2010, capitalized on this capacity to build readers, contributors, and commenters. Now Facebook requires that you pay to promote each individual post to your page, or else it only reaches a tiny percentage of your network. This no doubt severely reduces the reach of Facebook-based campaigns, such as Walking into Walls, whose page aggregates daily news stories of violence against women, intimate partner violence, rape and sexual violence, and child abuse from a wide range of Caribbean countries: “Walking into Walls is a social media campaign that found its roots in a 2012 regional meeting organized by the Caribbean Institute for Women in Leadership (CIWiL). This campaign was developed by four passionate, committed Caribbean women who are tired of the walls that are routinely hit in the struggle to end violence against women.”55 Its Facebook page is a digital media resource of tremendous potential and importance that is intended to contribute to awareness raising and to keep reports of violence against women in the forefront of Caribbean people’s minds. Such Caribbean feminist media campaigns are important as independent media sites that seek to compensate for the elisions in mainstream media, though, of course, without the benefit of the same kind of reach. CODE RED for Gender Justice on Facebook similarly covers a wide range of topics related to gender inequality, violence, sexuality, disability, and the environment.56 The dependence of Caribbean feminists on privately owned corporate platforms that claim ownership of their content while modifying their media delivery online with revenue generation strategies undermines the subversive potential of Web 2.0. In “Rethinking Cyberfeminism,” Susanna Paasonen notes, 54

Cate Young (BattyMamzelle), “The Hardest Word to Say Is Goodbye: Why I’m Quitting Jezebel,” BattyMamzelle, 8 October 2013, http://battymamzelle.blogspot.com/2013/10/Why-Im-Quitting-Jezebel.html#.UlqP_FCsim4.

55

http://www.facebook.com/WalkingIntoWalls/info/?tab=page_info.

56

See http://www.facebook.com/redforgender/timeline?ref=page_internal.

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Possibilities of lay users to interact with and shape the medium are more limited than they were fifteen or even ten years ago. While it was entirely possible to set up a catchy web site in the late 1990s with a basic mastery of HTML—and, perhaps, a few touches of the cutting-edge such as JavaScript—this is no longer the case. Code has grown increasingly complex and necessitates rather specialized skills. Rather than building their sites (such as personal home pages and online journals) from a scratch, users make use of customizable templates and social media applications (from Blogger to YouTube, Facebook, PhotoBucket and Flickr) when publishing their images, videos, texts and music. Riot Grrrl ’zines, with their DIY feel, have largely disappeared.57 Feminist and gender-conscious journalists located within mainstream media are nonetheless part of Caribbean cyberfeminism. Caribbean feminist scholar Alissa Trotz’s In the Diaspora column in Stabroek News brings a mainstream reach to feminist and social justice advocates and writers. Online magazine Outlish, though not a feminist magazine per se, has created a space for discussion of issues of gender, feminism, and masculinity, with articles such as “Why Is There So Much Pressure on Indian Men to Get Married?,” “This Is Why I’m Feminist,” and “Don’t Laugh but T&T Needs a Men’s Movement.” Feminists from the Caribbean have also created their own online lifestyle magazines: for example, Black Girl in the Ring, from Antigua and Barbuda/Guyana, and CompleXD Woman, from Grenada/UK.58 Online activist practices include petitions, mobilizing to shut down offensive websites, and promotion of offline events such as popular actions, protests, and stands. Many longstanding women’s and feminist organizations in the region also maintain an online presence. Scholars, however, have drawn attention to the strategic space that global South peoples make of the Net, arguing that rather than see marginalized peoples as on the losing end of the digital divide, focus should be on the creative and strategic uses they make of these technologies.59 Stephanie Leitch of WOMANTRA shares that she regularly uses the WOMANTRA community to mobilize women and men in order to shutdown offensive websites and Facebook pages. She recalls a popular online magazine that published an article titled “No Matter How Hot She Is” that warned single men not to have sex with women more than twice lest they become “disillusioned and depressed.” Leitch left a comment below the article, “basically telling the guy he was a sexist pig” and encouraged others to do the same. The sheer volume of complaints the magazine received caused the editorial staff to pull the article and shutdown the website for a day. One of the managers then contacted Leitch and ironically told her that she should be writing something rather than “just talking.” Leitch later wrote an article about sexism and media responsibility that was published on the site. However, she recalls of the blogger who wrote the original post: “[He was] was very abusive, said i must be ugly or a lesbian and called another guy [who also complained about the article] a faggit.”60 The examples cited here reflect diverse cyberfeminist strategies aimed at subverting asymmetrical relations of gender. They intervene into the normalizing of misogynist discourses and images 57

Paasonen, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism,” 347.

58

See http://www.stabroeknews.com/category/features/in-the-diaspora;; http://www.outlish.com; http://blackgirlinthering.com; and http://www.complexdwoman.co.uk.

59

See Curwen Best, The Politics of Caribbean Cyber Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

60

Stephanie Leitch, personal communication with the author.

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by challenging mainstream media normalization of unequal relations of gender and sexualized images of women and girls.

Future Directions Online feminist spaces are important consciousness-raising and pedagogical sites for Caribbean feminists. These sites, however, are ones of unequal access and privilege. The necessity and challenges of working across and through difference, race/ethnicity, color, class, and privilege that were identified two decades ago by Caribbean feminists organized in Sistren (Jamaica), Red Thread (Guyana), and the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action persist as key issues for Caribbean feminist organizing.61 Caribbean historians have also called attention to the ways Indo- and Afro-creole nationalisms have marginalized indigenous people in the region.62 Investigations into the extent to which online feminisms reproduce and reframe these long-standing inequities and oppressions remain a key Caribbean cyberfeminist project. Online Caribbean feminisms are multigenerational, multiethnic, transnational, and PanCaribbean. Caribbean feminists have engaged in cyberactivist practices and used the Internet to build community, organize, and mobilize. Nonetheless, issues of media reach as well as dependence on commercial platforms whose very structures may be inimical to feminist principles limit the subversive potential of these strategies. Strategies such as the use of video, humor, personal stories, and writing in nation languages serve to make online feminism more accessible. However, as participation in digital cultures brings with it notions of progress, modernity, and a supposedly apolitical globalization, it is important for Caribbean cyberfeminism as a critical approach to attend to the ways digital cultures may be complicit in reinscribing inequalities.

Appendix Blog Category: Description (number of times used) Culture critic: Blogs focused on cultural and sociological analyses of relations of power such as gender, race, class, and heterosexism and inequalities broadly (18) Personal-is-political: Blogs that draw on personal experience to illustrate or analyze relations of power in wider society (18)

61

See Honor Ford-Smith, “Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: Sistren, Collective Democracy, and the Organization of Cultural Production,” in M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997); Andaiye, The Angle You Look from Determines What You See: Towards A Critique of Feminist Politics in the Caribbean, Lucille Mathurin Mair Lecture series (Mona: Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, 2002); Rawwida Baksh-Soodeen, “Issues of Difference in Contemporary Caribbean Feminism,” Feminist Review 59 (June 1998): 74–85.

62

See Shona N. Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Melanie J. Newton, “Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean,” Small Axe, no. 41 (July 2013): 108–22.

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+Feminism: Blogs that do not have an exclusive focus on feminism or gender and sexuality but that do include either writing from a feminist perspective or posts about women’s, feminist, gender, and LGBT issues (14) Feminist-academic: Blogs by feminist academics (7) Media crossover: Refers to blogs that contain content published both in mainstream and online media; includes both blogs by journalists and columnists and those by bloggers whose online content is republished in national newspapers or who have attracted significant mainstream media attention (7) Curator: Blogs that curate and reproduce content published elsewhere (6) Witty: Blogs by writers for whom wit, humor, and wordplay are key rhetorical devices (5)

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Tonya Haynes Tonya Haynes lectures at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, blogs on redforgender.wordpress.com, and is a founding member of CODE RED for gender justice! and CatchAFyah Caribbean Feminist Network. She holds a PhD from the University of the West Indies and researches in the area of Caribbean feminisms and Caribbean Feminist Thought. Her work has been published in Global Public Health and Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism.

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Home / Uncategorized / A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza

A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza By Guest Contributor on October 7, 2014

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By Alicia Garza

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I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to

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action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed. It was a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also, unfortunately, our movements. Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag. Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastructure for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets. Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore, organized to support the movement that is growing in St. Louis, MO, after 18year old Mike Brown was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. We’ve hosted national conference calls focused on issues of critical importance to Black people working hard for the liberation of our people. We’ve connected people across the country working to end the various forms of injustice impacting our people. We’ve created space for the celebration and humanization of Black lives. The Theft of Black Queer Women’s Work As people took the #BlackLivesMatter demand into the streets, mainstream media and corporations also took up the call, #BlackLivesMatter appeared in an episode of Law & Order: SVU in a mash up containing the Paula Deen racism scandal and the tragedy of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

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Suddenly, we began to come across varied adaptations of our work–all lives matter, brown lives

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matter, migrant lives matter, women’s lives matter, and on and on. While imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery, I was surprised when an organization called to ask if they could use “Black Lives Matter” in one of their campaigns. We agreed to it, with the caveat that a) as a team, we preferred that we not use the meme to celebrate the imprisonment of any individual and b) that it was important to us they acknowledged the genesis of #BlackLivesMatter. I was surprised when they did exactly the opposite and then justified their actions by saying they hadn’t used the “exact” slogan and, therefore, they deemed it okay to take our work, use it as their own, fail to credit where it came from, and then use it to applaud incarceration. I was surprised when a community institution wrote asking us to provide materials and action steps for an art show they were curating, entitled “Our Lives Matter.” When questioned about who was involved and why they felt the need to change the very specific call and demand around Black lives to “our lives,” I was told the artists decided it needed to be more inclusive of all people of color. I was even more surprised when, in the promotion of their event, one of the artists conducted an interview that completely erased the origins of their work–rooted in the labor and love of queer Black women. Pause. When you design an event / campaign / et cetera based on the work of queer Black women, don’t invite them to participate in shaping it, but ask them to provide materials and ideas for next steps for said event, that is racism in practice. It’s also hetero-patriarchal. Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy. We completely expect those who benefit directly and improperly from White supremacy to try and erase our existence. We fight that every day. But when it happens amongst our allies, we are baffled, we are saddened, and we are enraged. And it’s time to have the political conversation about why that’s not okay. We are grateful to our allies who have stepped up to the call that Black lives matter, and taken it as an opportunity to not just stand in solidarity with us, but to investigate the ways in which anti-Black racism is perpetuated in their own communities. We are also grateful to those allies who were willing to engage in critical dialogue with us about this unfortunate and problematic dynamic .And for those who we have not yet had the opportunity to engage with around the adaptations of the Black Lives Matter call, please consider the following points. Broadening the Conversation to Include Black Life Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement. When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgement Black poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country– one half of all people in prisons or jails–is an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of state violence. Black queer and trans folks bearing a unique burden in a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us is state violence; the fact that 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented

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immigrants and relegated to the shadows is state violence;.the fact that Black girls are used as

HOME CATEGORIES SUBMISSIONS COMMENT POLICY CONTACT US BOOKING ADVERTISING negotiating chips during times of conflict and war is state violence; Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state-sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by White supremacy is state violence. And the fact is that the lives of Black people—not ALL people—exist within these conditions is consequence of state violence. When Black people get free, everybody gets free #BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important–it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide reaching and transformative for society as a whole. When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free. This is why we call on Black people and our allies to take up the call that Black lives matter. We’re not saying Black lives are more important than other lives, or that other lives are not criminalized and oppressed in various ways. We remain in active solidarity with all oppressed people who are fighting for their liberation and we know that our destinies are intertwined. And, to keep it real–it is appropriate and necessary to have strategy and action centered around Blackness without other non-Black communities of color, or White folks for that matter, needing to find a place and a way to center themselves within it. It is appropriate and necessary for us to acknowledge the critical role that Black lives and struggles for Black liberation have played in inspiring and anchoring, through practice and theory, social movements for the liberation of all people. The women’s movement, the Chicano liberation movement, queer movements, and many more have adopted the strategies, tactics and theory of the Black liberation movement. And if we are committed to a world where all lives matter, we are called to support the very movement that inspired and activated so many more. That means supporting and acknowledging Black lives. Progressive movements in the United States have made some unfortunate errors when they push for unity at the expense of really understanding the concrete differences in context, experience and oppression. In other words, some want unity without struggle. As people who have our minds stayed on freedom, we can learn to fight anti-Black racism by examining the ways in which we participate in it, even unintentionally, instead of the worn out and sloppy practice of drawing lazy parallels of unity between peoples with vastly different experiences and histories. When we deploy “All Lives Matter” as to correct an intervention specifically created to address antiblackness,, we lose the ways in which the state apparatus has built a program of genocide and repression mostly on the backs of Black people—beginning with the theft of millions of people for free labor—and then adapted it to control, murder, and profit off of other communities of color and immigrant communities. We perpetuate a level of White supremacist domination by reproducing a tired trope that we are all the same, rather than acknowledging that non-Black oppressed people in this country are both impacted by racism and domination, and simultaneously, BENEFIT from antiblack racism. When you drop “Black” from the equation of whose lives matter, and then fail to acknowledge it came from somewhere, you further a legacy of erasing Black lives and Black contributions from our movement legacy. And consider whether or not when dropping the Black you are, intentionally or unintentionally, erasing Black folks from the conversation or homogenizing very different experiences. The legacy and prevalence of anti-Black racism and hetero-patriarchy is a lynch pin holding together this unsustainable economy. And that’s not an accidental analogy. In 2014, hetero-patriarchy and anti-Black racism within our movement is real and felt. It’s killing us and it’s killing our potential to build power for transformative social change. When you adopt the work of queer women of color, don’t name or recognize it, and promote it as if it has no history of its own such actions are problematic. When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I

always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black

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Liberation Movement, what it’s political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.

When you adopt Black Lives Matter and transform it into something else (if you feel you really need to do that–see above for the arguments not to), it’s appropriate politically to credit the lineage from which your adapted work derived. It’s important that we work together to build and acknowledge the legacy of Black contributions to the struggle for human rights. If you adapt Black Lives Matter, use the opportunity to talk about its inception and political framing. Lift up Black lives as an opportunity to connect struggles across race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality and disability. And, perhaps more importantly, when Black people cry out in defense of our lives, which are uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state, we are asking you, our family, to stand with us in affirming Black lives. Not just all lives. Black lives. Please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too. It does, but we need less watered down unity and a more active solidarities with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it. _______________________________________ Alicia Garza is the Special Projects Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She has been the recipient of multiple awards for her organizing work in Black and Latino communities, receiving the Local Hero award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Jeanne Gauna Communicate Justice award from the Center for Media Justice in 2008. She has twice been honored by the Harvey Milk Democratic Club with the Bayard Rustin Community Activist award for her work fighting gentrification and environmental racism in San Francisco’s largest remaining Black community. Alicia comes to NDWA after serving as Executive Director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) in San Francisco since 2009. Under her leadership, POWER won free local public transportation for youth; fought for a seat at the table in some of the most important land use decisions affecting working-class families; beat back regressive local policies targeting undocumented people; organized against the chronic police violence in Black neighborhoods; and shed light on the ongoing wave of profit-driven development that contribute to a changing San Francisco. In 2013, Alicia co-founded #BlackLivesMatter, an online platform developed after the murder of Trayvon Martin, designed to connect people interested in learning more about and fighting back against anti-Black racism. Alicia currently serves on the Board of Directors for the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL) in Oakland, California, and is a contributing writer for WarTimes magazine. She serves as trusted counsel for organizations across the country looking to build their capacity to lead and win organizing campaigns. When she’s not scheming on freedom, Alicia enjoys dancing, reading and writing—and scheming some more.

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Yoshi-chan October 8, 2014 at 1:08 pm

A well-written piece.

Julie October 8, 2014 at 1:36 pm

Thank you for this powerfully important piece — and for the opening for growth and reflection that it offers all of us.

Becca Tumposky October 8, 2014 at 8:07 pm

Thank you, as always, for your political clarity Alicia. Really important piece that has pushed me a lot. Pingback: As Ferguson ‘Weekend of Resistance’ Begins, Organizers Weigh How to Turn a Moment into a Movement | Chicago Activism Pingback: 5th Annual Commemorative Gathering & Vigil (October 22, 2014) | Justice Pour les Victimes de Bavures Policières / Justice for the Victims of Police Killings Pingback: 5e Rassemblement et vigile commémorative annuelle (22 octobre 2014) | Justice Pour les Victimes de Bavures Policières / Justice for the Victims of Police Killings

sharon martinas October 14, 2014 at 8:39 am

Thank you, Alicia, for these powerful words and for your powerful organizing work. Pingback: Racial Justice Movement

Shirley October 15, 2014 at 1:03 pm

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Excellent piece, Alicia. Thank you for your words andCOMMENT your work! POLICY HOME CATEGORIES SUBMISSIONS

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