Writing & Research
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Breaking, dancing, making in the machine: notes on .break .dance
This digital essay extends the work undertaken in the .break .dance digital project. Published in Small Axe Archipelagos & produced in response to the theme Slavery in the Machine, it extends its conceptualizations via notions of asymmetrical articulation as set forth by Zora Neale Hurston in "Characteristics of Negro Expression," Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s description of the modern Caribbean as being historically constituted as a series of vast interlocking machines, Édouard Glissant's conceptualizations of Relation and plantation worlds, and Leslie Marmo Silko portrayals of Black diasporic histories and Mardi Gras Black Indian Queens in Almanac of the Dead.
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.break .dance
.break .dance is an experimental digital project that uses Beyoncés visual album Lemonade as a keystone text to ground musings about time, code, and internet experience. Published in Small Axe Archipelagos & produced in response to the theme Slavery in the Machine, .break .dance includes discussions of Flying Lotus' "Never Catch Me" (ft. Kendrick Lamar), Toni Morrison's portrayal of Baby Suggs in Beloved, "Becky" from Jean Toomer's Cane. The critical work of .break .dance also emerges from engagements with Marlene Nourbese Philip's Zong, Kwame Dawes' "Stop Time," Fred Moten's In the Break, and Dalton Anthony Jones' "Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy."
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“Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality”
What kinds of critical structures might be distilled from thinking about technological adoption as itself a kind of Black cultural practice, a practice wherein “the past and future are not cut off from the present” (Ayewa and Phillips)? What might it mean to articulate techne as endemic to African American experience, even if so doing means resetting how we describe or imagine the technical emergence of digital technologies? Understanding the digital as both descriptive and generative of African American experiences of memory, space, and time resets the chronology for what we typically postulate as the technical device emergence of “the digital.”
Debates in Digital Humanities. eds. Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein (U. Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2019)
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“Hashtag”
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. eds. R. Davis, M. Gold, K. Harris, and J. Sayers (MLA: New York, 2019)
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“Rebooting Race: Virtuality and Embodiment in The House Behind the Cedars”
Charles Chesnutt: MLA Approaches to Teaching. eds. Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig (MLA: New York, 2017) Winner of the Sylvia Lyons Render Award by the Charles W. Chesnutt Society
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“17, or, Tough, Dark, Vulnerable, Moody— James Baldwin”
In its encounter with James Baldwin across form— "Letter to my nephew," "Sonny's Blues," and archival footage of Baldwin being interviewed by the psychologist Kenneth Clark— this explores how Baldwin's figuration of children and his own acts of care illuminate the political possibilities of both filiation and affiliation. Moving so effortlessly between caring for Black children and caring about Black communities exemplifies Baldwin's investment in articulating why the liberation of Black people is important to American liberation more generally. With that in mind, this essay's explorations are set against a backdrop of historical and contemporary state violence against children, from Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry's failed meeting with RFK, to Claudia Rankine's observations of Ferguson, MO in the aftermath of Michael Brown's murder. Printed in The New Centennial Review (Volume 16, Issue 2, 2016)
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“99 Problems: Assessment, inclusion, and other old-new paradigms”
Developing less burdensome and more equitable ways to support scholarly difference is a preeminent challenge when thinking about the future of assessment and promotion in higher education. At stake in this is the very capacity of institutions to do the work of scholarly inclusion, to recognize the range of approaches well captured in the digital humanities caucus of the American Studies Association’s succinct 2016 characterization of humanities work that is “innovative, critical, boundary-pushing, justice-based, and experimental work—scholarship that takes a diversity of forms, that reaches and is produced by thinkers, teachers, practitioners, and makers from a wide range of communities and contexts.” Assessment potentially shadows or highlights scholarly identity at every institutional juncture, and this is as true for undergraduate research work as it is for matters of promotion, tenure, or contract renewal for faculty and staff. With that in mind, this article surveys responses to the challenges of assessing DH work in institutional settings, and also reviews the work of Five College Digital Humanities 2016 draft report on digital assessment, "The New Rigor." Printed in American Quarterly (Volume 70, Number 3, September 2018)
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“Freedom, Equality, and Race”: Remembering Jeffrey B. Ferguson
This essay begins with my attempt to close-read a text by a recently departed colleague, Jeffrey B. Ferguson, but turns into an exploration of writing across registers, in this case the delivery of a very different version of the same paper by Ferguson, one that is far more intimate, insightful, and moving.
This post is part of a week-long forum, organized by Mary Hicks, honoring Professor Jeffrey Brown Ferguson who passed away on March 11, 2018. Ferguson was the Karen and Brian Conway ’80 Presidential Teaching Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College.
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“Breadfruit, time and again: Reading Glissant in the World Relation”
According to Glissant,the temporal contradictions endemic to Faulkner's prose are not in themselves problematic because such narrative recursivity is endemic to life in the Americas, as ‘the various ways of telling one single fact’ constitute ‘the stream of consciousness that summarizes (or at least tries to) the circumstances of the country’.
In thinking about this, Glissant turns to the figure of the breadfruit, taking the complex and signifying fruit as the sign that might decode the whole of the rest of Faulkner's writing. In this essay, I take a digital writing-influenced perspective on Glissant's turn to the breadfruit as rhizomatic. I also look at Glissant's journey to Rowan Oak, Faulkner's estate, and the soft melancholy engendered in his racialized encounter with a concretely Faulknerian space.
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“The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Marisa Parham”
interview by Melissa Dinsman L.A. Review of Books, May 19, 2016
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“Deconstructing the Game”
by Katherine Duke Amherst Magazine, June 22, 2018 :: here.
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“Saying ‘Yes’: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred”
The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and through bodies. By articulating both "history" and Black women's bodies as sites of reading and writing, this article broadens conceptualizations of historical trauma. Printed in Callaloo, 32.4 (fall 2009) ⇢ Read
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“The New Wave in Digital Humanities”
Interviewed by Will Fenton Inside Higher Ed, August 2, 2017
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“Teaching Underrepresented Students How to Navigate Higher Ed Via Digital Humanities”
Interviewed by Liz Losh DML Central, February 05, 2018 here.
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“You Can’t Flow Over This: Ursula Rucker’s Acoustic Illusion”
Sonic Interventions. eds. Joy Smith, et al. (Rodopi Press: Amsterdam, 2007)
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“Octavia Butler Fans Psyched Over Two New Science Fiction Tales”
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Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture
What might it mean to “remember” something that is not of one’s own direct experience? To remember someone else’s memories? Looking at texts including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Bob Kaufman’s poetry, Haunting and Displacement describes phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as central to modern African American literature and culture. ⇢ Learn more
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Apocalypse, Afro- Futurism, and Post-Ecological Time
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Finding Estella: An Octavia E. Butler Research Pocket
Click here to visit Finding Estella: An Octavia E. Butler Research Pocket
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The Black Haunts in the Anthropocene Project
Please click here to visit the Black Haunts in the Anthropocene digital essay...
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Black Haunts in the Anthropocene
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“Without Innovation: African American Lifeworlds and the Internet of Things”
"Without Innovation." In this pocket I'm bringing a vareity of thinkers from the African American tradition— Fred Moten, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass— to bear on two interlocked matters, 1. the continually haunted origins of so much technological innovation, and by extension the digital humanities (think here of the important work typified in the recent issue of differences, on the "dark side" of digital humanities... ⇢ read more
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When nothing happens
I woke up this morning and looked through the window at the foot of my bed. The trees were swaying in the wind and the snow sugarspun along, left and right, down and around. It was beautiful and I was at home, that fact alone glamorous for a Tuesday morning. My first thought? This storm is boring. It was snowy, but not snowy enough. It was windy, but not windy enough. This was no snowmageddon, no “winter is coming”... continue reading at Medium.com ⇢"
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