A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Louis M. Maraj thinks/creates/converses with theoretical black studies, rhetoric, and digital media. He is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. An award-winning author, Maraj’s essays appear in a range of print and online journals. Learn more about his work at loumaraj.com.
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This short reflective essay meditates on how/why digital Blackness need not strive to recover or repair humanity for Black peoples. It questions the teleological drive for building Black digital archives and technologies motivated by representational politics. The foray performatively suggests otherwise by leaning into Sylvia Wynter’s (2007) notion that such folding into the figure of the human — overrepresented by Western Man — snuffs polyvalent and polysemic pluralities for Blackness.
I refuse the idea that the goal of Black digital technologies and their uses remains
building some Black canon of texts, some particular archive of artifacts, a catalogue
of ways of being in the world somehow authentically emerging from black
experience.
I don’t know where to pinpoint a start to my work in digital humanities. Maybe it began on instant messaging platforms like AIM or MSN Messenger, truncating, puttying, and shaping language for new platforms. Maybe it was in re-watching early viral videos —
inside chilegrowing up in Trinidad (face usually in a book or screen) never was assimilation into some larger arc of intellectual or technological
progressor change; one thing that drew me in to thinking about the ways digital technologies culture us or how we culture them was possibility. And I don’t mean possibility in the
discoveryor
recoverysense: I refuse the idea that the goal of Black digital technologies and their uses remains building some Black canon of texts, some particular archive of artifacts, a catalogue of ways of being in the world somehow authentically emerging from
Black experience.I also refuse the notion that
Black digital humanitiesmight help us find some place among the long arching shadow that is the figure of the “human,” even as snuff videos stay circulating of cops killing us with pleas for humanity on social media. I suppose possibility, to me, conjures constant shift(in’)-forms.
Following Black feminist scholars and activists who take up approaches to digital
humanities situated in a Wynterian theoretical genealogy, like Tara L. Conley and Ashley
Greene Wade for example, I understand digital technologies and media for their viral
potentials to undercut the overrepresentation of man as Western bourgeois male subject,
as human new genres of being human
human while
Black
might look like by digital means and watch them appropriated toward our
own demise. The plurality of Wynter’s call (in human
or humanistic
metric, discipline, or idea may measure or signify Blackness