Roopika Risam – New Digital Worlds
19 November, 2021 -
examPrep
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- 3 – The Puerto Rico Mapathon is an important example of how postcolonial digital humanities has come to the fore as an intervention in digital knowledge production through theory, praxis, and pedagogy at the nexus of the humanities and the sciences. Postcolonial digital humanities is an approach to uncovering and intervening in the disruptions within the digital cultural record produced by colonialism and neocolonialism.
- 5-6 – Rather, the hallmarks of colonialism in the cultural record—fissures and lacunas, politics of representation that render subjects of the Global South under the gaze of the Global North, and complicity in the act of world making—are being ported over into the digital cultural record, unthinkingly, without malice, in part because postcolonial critique has not made many inroads in the practices of digital humanities. These traces appear, as Amy Earhart suggests, in the ways that digital humanities scholarship has replicated literary, historical, and cultural canons.7 As a result, the digital cultural record is in danger of telling the story of humanity from the perspective of the Global North alone.
- 6 – While debates have raged over whether digital humanities is a discipline, a field, a methodological toolkit, or some combination of these, the term broadly articulates a connection between computation, digital tools and media, and humanities-based inquiry. 10 Digital humanities practitioners tend to resist committing to a definition, claiming that the term “digital humanities” is largely a construct and, as Matthew Kirschenbaum proposes, “a concession that exists to consolidate and propagate vectors of ambiguity, affirmation, and dissent.”11 But operating without a definition is a luxury for those whose work is already recognized and legitimated within university, library, and cultural heritage communities.
- 8 – Much like “theory” in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, digital humanities is charged with contributing to the decline of the humanities. Catherine Tumber claims this is because digital humanities is “tarted up with non-verbal tech effluvia—that led to the humanities’ deterioration and public disaffection in the first place.”17 In critiques advanced by Sanjena Sathian and Rebecca Schuman, digital humanities becomes nothing but a false promise for reenergizing the humanities at a time when they are under attack from budget cuts, skeptical administrators, and right-wing ideology. 18 Adam Kirsch goes one step further to claim that digital humanities is responsible for the death of the humanities because “the very idea of language as the basis of a humane education—even of human identity—seems to give way to a post- or pre-verbal discourse of pictures and objects. Digital humanities becomes another name for the obsequies of humanism.”19 Tumber echoes this sentiment by contending that “today’s doyens of so-called digital humanities are gutting what lies at the heart of the liberal arts: language and the narrative sensibilities that shape meaningful human endeavor.”20 Such critiques also hold digital humanities responsible for the sins of the neoliberal university, as critics like Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia link it to casualized academic labor, instrumental forms of learning through projects instead of reading and writing, and a reactionary politics of knowledge.21 These critics worry that the technologies used for digital humanities scholarship will supplant that which is “human” about the “humanities.”
- 9 – Though it emphasizes cultural criticism, postcolonial digital humanities is not, as James Smithies suggested when the term was first proposed, simply another term for “critical digital humanities.”29 Rather, it takes as its basis the belief that a postcolonial approach requires designing new tools, methods, and workflows that are based in local practices. These practices, which favor the particular over the universal, offer the promise of a more expansive humanities that takes advantage of the technological means of digital knowledge production to create space for underrepresented communities to populate the digital cultural record with their own stories.
- 11 – Engaging in these politics of knowledge, postcolonial digital humanities is also rooted in a broader history of exchange between postcolonial thought and science and technology studies. Sandra Harding has long made the case for putting postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and science and technology studies in conversation with each other. Such a combination, she proposes, allows scholars to rethink narratives of technological development centered on the Global North.41 Doing so confirms the importance of knowledge traditions from communities within the Global South and reveals how both imperialism and colonialism have shaped value within scientific discourse.
- 12 – Thus, postcolonial computing decenters knowledge from the Global North in favor of a localized approach that emphasizes crosscultural engagement and the effects of uneven development on design.44 This approach serves as an important model for digital humanities, which falls prey to the assumption that practices of the Global North are universal forms of knowledge, rather than what Donna Haraway terms “situated knowledges.”45 On the contrary, as Élika Ortega argues, “all DH is local DH.”46 Thus, for postcolonial digital humanities, “good” digital humanities practices are “local” practices that reject the universality of methods.
- 19 – Examining the contemporary landscape of digital humanities, this book explores the practices of postcolonial digital humanities that interrogate the ongoing influences of colonialism and neocolonialism within the digital cultural record and reimagine the practices necessary for remediating it. By invoking the term “postcolonial,” I draw on the intellectual tradition of postcolonial theory and its critiques of colonialism in the cultural record to make the case that digital humanities practitioners of the Global North must redress their practices and that postcolonial scholars have an important role to play in constructing the digital cultural record. For these practitioners, postcolonial digital humanities offers a productive way of looking at the relationship between technology and power in digital humanities scholarship through representation, methodology, labor, and language.
