Thread by @amplify285

Recently I was asked to write a thing for @PublicBooks, on teaching, learning, and ‘doing’ #digitalhumanities in the pandemic.

I ended up with a #BlackDH essay about ontologies of digital mediation in the anthropocene—which is a fancy way of saying that +
publicbooks.org/like-sands-thr…

For @PublicBooks I wrote about new and old forms of loss, of how remembering and forgetting are so tightly tied to experiences of space, to our experiences of natural and built environments. Black Americans have always had a fundamentally multidimensional relationship to space +

In "Black Haunts in the Anthropocene" I contemplate Black multidimensionality as an experience of hybrid temporality, so deep historical embeddness that requires us to constantly remix the present. Everything has a groove, but nothing quite fits together. blackhaunts.mp285.com

I came to this by thinking about Black American relationships to built and natural environments. How racism— forced migration, spatial displacement (segregation), psychic displacement (gaslighting)— has structurally virtualized Black experiences of even the most material worlds +

In other words, I theorize Black life as an experience of digitized layers. From double consciousness to code switching to the ubiquity of sample & remix, we learn to see simultaneously thru multiple lenses—sudden shifts in register, shades & haunts that enable futures. Breaks. +

That said, I wasn't thinking in this register when I began writing this @PublicBooks piece. In my work life I produce digital scholarship, run digital humanities centers, teach digital interactive methods, help scholars integrate & broaden DH and institutions support them... +

All just to say that I know that I am one of few humanities scholars who can say that they are actually all digital all the time.

So let's just say I was stunned when I looked at the prompt and had nothing to say. I was asked to talk about 'doing digital,' and I only had tears.

I tried to focus on some recent work I've been doing to think about mapping, Black ecology, and digitality. What can #digitalhumanities learn fr Black experiences of being digitized, often our bane, but also of being digital, what often emerges as a superpower, albeit hard won +

I also realized that I had to understand that this situation— covid, pandemic, this strange sheltering that I'm writing about in @PublicBooks— might be more new than not. On first thought I might have said that for me this newness didn't resonate with other experiences, +

but then I realized that I didn't know if that was true. Actually, I wouldn't let myself think much at all. It's like my mind had become a version of the kind of shortstep walk my family unconsciously adopted in quarantine winter, bc we were always indoors, and our gait adapted.+

In quarantine we were becoming versions of ourselves. This was especially true for my children, who changed schools during the pandemic. It's like they were there at school, but not. Like ghosts on the edges of their new social worlds. +

Thinking the digital, being digitized, the little black zoomboxes as signifiers for trying to connect as a subset of (barely) manageable heartbreak. The power it takes to launch from a shortstep. This is not new; the pandemic story is less new than it is reasonable to admit. +

Pause for tears. Thank you @schuyleresprit for reminding me of this. I am taken with the real problem of us all being here together but not. We are not ghosts, but yet what were we. We deserve elegies but should not — we are here we are here we are here +

https://twitter.com/schuyleresprit/status/1397537609434505217?s=20

So in thinking about what #BlackDH brings to this moment. My hot take on DH is that it's about having the freedom and skills to find or make the tools we need, in order to find or say what we might not otherwise be able to find or say. +

In seeking my own degree zero for this edgelessness, for feeling ghosted in my own damn life, for this sense of suspension without rest, for my small fears for how the uncanniness of this experience will shape and inhabit my family... while in this mode I chanced upon a tweet +

As I mention in the @PublicBooks essay, it arrived seemingly out of nowhere, and it helped me with my heartbreak. Or at least it helped me see it as heartbreak, and also as survivable. It's quote shared by @Edge_metron, and it wants to save our lives:

https://twitter.com/Edge_metron/status/1356391540625534976

That bit of serendipity helped me write a narrative digital-mapping essay about my own degree zero: grandparents, Chicago, and yet another Black house that is, for all intents and purposes, gone, faded in sync with the eroding Michiana coastline, subject to the same forces. +

So this thread might be longer than the actual essay (!), but it's all just to say thank you, esp to @saframpton & @CarolynDever for an opp to do a hard thing + @bravohotelpapa for a thoughtful editorial eye.

Also gratitude to my cohort in this series ⇣

https://twitter.com/saframpton/status/1397022230580695040?s=20

Finally, thanks to @PublicBooks for this image. It holds all the joy and fraught— the charge, the freight— of Black childhood on the Chicago coast. Ephemera and pleasure in segregated waters. I can't stop looking at it.

Saudade is not the new ashé, yet... publicbooks.org/like-sands-thr…