Black Aesthetic through Power Sharing

The counter to “whitinizing” is the holistic insertion of Blackness as identity and process into digital humanities. A Black aesthetic conceptualizes peoplehood in technology, breathes consciousness into the inanimate, and creates a repository of a people and not just about a people. The spirit of Blackness or “soul” drives the instrument, whether it is Toni Morrison’s novels as referenced above or digital technology. But what is soul or a Black aesthetic?

Black scholars and literary artists from the 1960s and 1970s fixated on exactly this question. In 1971, Addison Gayle, Jr.’s edited anthology The Black Aesthetic reflected the political, social, and cultural thoughts of Black essayists struggling to define Blackness in the new era and embrace of Black power.3 In it, Julian Mayfield contended that “For those who must create, there is a Black Aesthetic which cannot be stolen from us, and it rests on something much more substantial than hip talk. . . . It is in our racial memory, and the unshakable knowledge of who we are, where we have been, and . . . where we are going” (Mayfield, 28). For Mayfield black aesthetic was feeling and consciousness, sensibility and worldview, improvisation plus call and response, symbology and vernacular, sonic rhythm and syncopation, collective experience and selfhood, racial memory and the imagined future of freedom.4 Writers Jimmy Stewart and Addison Gayle singled out the Black aesthetic as “unique experiences” that produced “unique cultural artifacts” and thus mandated “unique critical tools for evaluation.” For the purposes of Black digital humanities, we might understand the Black aesthetic as a reflection of both the transmission of culture and “the procedure of its becoming what it is” (Stewart, 80). Even more, it is, as Gayle notes, “a corrective—a means of helping black people out of the polluted mainstream of Americanism”—or rather, the digital whiteness (Gayle, xxiv).

A digital Black aesthetic is visual and stylistic, purposeful in its process and production. Like improvisation, it changes and evolves in coordination and conversation with the audience, keeping to the community’s beat (syncopation). Improvisation also means that Black digital humanities will over and over again reshape technology.5 This fluidity can upend the expectations of institutions and the assumptions of its producers but also liberate it from elite spaces for the Black community’s usage above all else. Regardless of producer comfort or intent, each endeavor must face the task and answer the final questions: Has my work co-opted Blackness or co-created the Black aesthetic? Have we offered Black audiences a reflection they recognize and a piece of themselves in the cyber world?

Black digital humanities is a mandate that dictates the digital be a servant to the Black public. It is both a depiction and a practice “enframing” subject and identity (Chun).6 The most effective Black digital projects embrace a praxis that bonds digital humanities with Black traditions of symbology, style, empowerment, and dissemination. They reverse the flow of institutional extraction from the community and instead reflect a spirit of Blackness through a power-sharing enterprise with the community. This call and response allows for the fluidity of improvisation and the constant flow of public exchange and power sharing. Digital practitioners transition from “civic engagement,” defined here as an interaction incorporating source extraction and end-of-project review, to long-term extensive accountability in all phases of the project, from idea to distribution.

This practice derives from centering the Black community as a living digital public and not an inanimate topic. The consistent obscuring of the Black public has freed the academy to produce creations that run counter to the community’s needs and character. The consequences of this thinking hindered the subject from defining and constructing the cybernetic self (Chun et al.).7 Widely accepted notions like “open access,” for example, overwrote and ignored the ambivalence held by peoples with a history of repression.8 Digital scholarship’s search for academic legitimacy is similarly in conflict with Black epistemology and Black scholars within the field. This narrow focus forces Black digitalists to walk a fine line between community and institution. Even further, it produces a single-minded mentality that pushes all digitalists to accept academic conventions over liberation models that help the Black public see themselves on the canvas of life versus through the peephole of the academy.9

A Black aesthetic philosophically undermines this tendency to focus on subject irrespective of praxis. It insists that the public is not an entity that you talk to, but rather a living body that talks back—marking the first step toward shared power. Shared power infuses a Black aesthetic into the digital humanities by first untying digital humanities from the institutional(ized) orbit and by second inducing a procedural technique to express Blackness. To be clear, such an infusion hardly prohibits outside communities—white or otherwise—from producing a Black digital project. After all, the Rascals had us groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon and Teena Marie gave us a Square Biz with shoutouts to Sarah Vaughn, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni, too—just to name a few.10 This shift to shared power simply means that Black people—from which the digital draws—have the power to frame and see themselves in cyberspace.

Shared power activates a fluid exchange where the act of creation is partially vested in the subject—living or not. Here, oral history theory provides procedures for collective creation and shared power.11 Oral history, as an act of creation between interviewer (the creator of the question) and narrator (the creator of the narrative), requires both participants to have a say in a co-conceived outcome.12 To that end, co-creation becomes an exchange of power. Most importantly, in the context of Black DH, it interrupts the white gaze as a replacement for Black voices (Morrison, “A Humanist View”). This means if the subject is Black or Black-related, the project must incorporate Black presence—in creation, grant development, material collection, project stages, technological formulation, finalized output, citation source, labor recognition (which can include equitable compensation), and finally dissemination through multiple venues in the Black community. Projects fail when they require communities to venture into institutions, utilize material collection but exclude Black voices throughout other phases, and center students as the audience while mining Black life. Though inclusivity is a badly needed enterprise, real “engagement” acknowledges that the Black public defines the cyber with equal standing, as co-principals and tech developers.

The Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr., Project from the North Carolina State University Hunt Library is one project that reflected a process of co-creation.13 Virtual MLK (vMLK) provides “audiences with sound-centered experiences of civic and political engagement and transformation,” based on Martin Luther King’s 1960 speech at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. Years in the making, project co-leaders Victoria Gallagher and Keon Pettiway impressively incorporated a strong partnership with members of White Rock Baptist Church. Additionally, the project’s outreach to public and neighborhood institutions decentered the university library location and facilitated exhibition in public spaces from local libraries to community museums.

However, the project fell short in its goal of “documenting and recovery of the history and everyday experience of African American/Black life” (vMLK Project Team). Church members expressed frustration that Virtual MLK failed to include oral history, which would have documented the memories of those present during King’s speech more than sixty years ago. The issue was particularly acute after the death of Douglas E. Moore, the minister who had invited King to speak at the church. During the project’s self-evaluation presentation in 2019, Keon Pettiway candidly discussed this tension between project design and the church’s need. Pettiway noted that sometimes a digital project must break from its original mooring “when the spirit calls.” A chorus of amens decidedly came from the church members. The conversation both expressed and highlighted the failure to adhere to a call and response approach and improvisation in the exchange between the church and Virtual MLK. The church’s call was unheard by the project team, so the experience was one of only partially shared power. More to the point, the church did not share in the project’s decision making and thus lacked the power to affect choices about its direction.

To be sure, external constraints such as grant structure or project timeline can determine any project direction. However, improvisation and shared power can and should redirect project activities as necessary, including reaching back to funders to address changes that emerge in the project. Stringent adherence to the project proposal meant the Virtual MLK project missed a major moment to interview Reverend Moore who invited King to White Rock Baptist Church. The project has only the disembodied virtual version of King’s voice and not the man who bore witness to the actual King, missing a crucial chance to present King’s words in the real-life context of his audience. Still, compared to other projects, Virtual MLK has strongly reflected a moral obligation and collective exchange. Its willingness to accept criticism from the community also reflected another kind of spirit: King’s beloved community.

Other digital projects infused with a Black aesthetic assert it through engagements with racial memory and in projects intended to function as liberatory tools. Julian Chambliss designed his Hannibal Square project as a conduit for Black voices to confront city officials. While Black community members sought to express—in the words of Langston Hughes—their “dark selves without shame,” the city used the rhetoric of blight to defame the community and justify gentrification. Similarly, the Texas Freedom Colonies Project secured funding for preservation to provide “cultural agency within vulnerable communities” (“Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Study”). Andrea Roberts, a Texas A&M professor of urban planning, led this charge to reassert the vitality embedded in the physical and conceptual memory of Black Texans, despite efforts on the part of city officials and developers to rewrite the space and obliterate its significance.

Nishani Frazier’s Gentrification Project similarly emerged as digital protest and as a talk-back to policy and media sources that rewrote Black removal as “market forces” (“About Us”). This erasure also played out in the city itself—reworking the landscape as a process of economic “rescue” while ignoring the historical and cultural implications of gentrification on the community. Still under construction, this project is among multiple spatial justice sites that assert a Black aesthetic through spatiality, style, and intent. Liberation is a significant goal that asserts by design and desire freedom’s meaning in the Black imagination.

Frazier’s distillation of a Black aesthetic also appeared in the Harambee City project, which involved more complex processes of power sharing from text to website. Harambee City is the digital companion for the book Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism. Like the book, African American studies, public history, and oral history methodologies played central roles in the site’s construction and constant reconstruction. More specifically, the 1960s Black freedom movement and its activists drove the processes and theoretical underpinnings for the look and choice of digital tools on the Harambee City project site. Its landing page opens with images of movement people and those they had an impact on. The base background is Black—a visual homage to 1960s Black power. The site platform uses Omeka—a choice that was as much about function as symbolism. Its definition embodied multiple layers of historical meaning and digital theory.14 Omeka is a Swahili term meaning “to display or lay out wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack.” Swahili, a popular language during Black power, was also the basis for CORE’s economic project title: Harambee. Harambee is a Swahili word meaning to pull or work together and a Kenyan motto meant to encourage self-help and nation building.

The website acts to counterbalance the rigidity of the printed book, providing constant and long-term opportunity for telling and retelling CORE’s story. It is a conversation space for new memories, counter-arguments, or corrections that makes CORE’s history an ever-evolving narrative. To do this, Frazier considered adding Hypothes.is in order to allow annotated commentary from myself, civil rights activists, or other scholars who reviewed the site. Viewers could see all comments, which would facilitate a second level of learning or exchange and help them think about history as a fluid tension between document source, memory (public and individual), and historical analysis. However, this consideration was set aside given the number of documents, the archival structure (document focus versus historian synthesis assertion), and the potential unwieldy nature of multilayered conversations that could drown out the document/voice itself. Instead, Frazier simply included Omeka’s commenting plug-in. Any person may question an image, recall a memory, or share their thoughts for each document. 

The site also tries to invert the idea that scholar expertise ranks above grassroots knowledge. Black Studies seeks to recover, empower, transform, and disseminate. By its nature, Black Studies must consider how professionalization can operate to mute the voices of vulnerable communities and counter it. Oral history asserts a similar model that asks the interviewer to open historical production to broader participation. Consequently, Harambee’s copyright remains with the original owners, and the site travels with Frazier to ensure that proper protections remain in place and adhere to community needs, shared authority, and participatory democracy.15

Frazier also limited the full release of the oral history interviews (though she has consent) until she was granted additional permission to display them on the site or until the interviewee departed. Consequently, individual interviewees determined the time frame of “open access.” Even more, the site disrupts commercial paywalls by assuring the Black community’s usage and access to civil rights history without cost. Presented at public schools and libraries for wider dissemination, Harambee City both recovers Black history and unpacks the structural nuances designed to keep African Americans at the economic bottom. Thus, the website depicts Black economic protest and the steps that activists took to attain equity and freedom. The accessibility of this research consequently led College Board to include the site among its resources for the first African American Studies Advanced Placement course.

The power sharing envisioned by Frazier was not infallible. Professor Watson Jennison rightly critiques some of the failures of the website, including the tensions between the scholar and the participatory curation of the site itself. The site’s authoritative voice remained with Frazier, “leaving no opportunity for participants or visitors to post their own primary sources” (Jennison, 125). Despite these drawbacks, Harambee insisted on visibly displaying the power sharing and methodology at work. Thus, the manifestation of the Black aesthetic radiated from the struggle itself.

Toward a Shared Practice of the Black Aesthetic: Digital Humanities 2017

Christy Hyman’s foray into recovering African Americans’ tarnished lineages to the Great Dismal Swamp landscape necessitated that she immerse herself in the contested interpretations of African-descended ties to the land and how those ties mattered in marking sites of memory in the swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, located along the North Carolina/Virginia border, was a haven for enslaved fugitives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet there are no physical sites that mark this revolutionary action of self-liberation. To begin to recover that erasure using digital media, Hyman created a short video that sought to capture the moments of fear, dread, and hope in the process of enslaved flight. Hyman screened the first iteration of the video at Digital Humanities 2017, and it inspired us (the authors of this chapter) to continue probing the connections among the Black aesthetic, shared power and authority, and the many publics that Black digital humanities work engages.

The video, an artifact grounded in the Black digital humanities recovery oeuvre, is a multi-dominant audiovisual meditation on enslaved flight and the pursuit of freedom.16 Multi-dominance is a term that originated with artist and critic Robert L. Douglas, and it seeks to formalize a Black aesthetic, synthesizing visual and musical elements invoking a “Trans-African” culture. Composer George E. Lewis informs us that Douglas’s aesthetic of multi-dominance involves “multiple use of colors in intense degrees, of textures, design patterns, and/or shapes” (33). Hyman’s video, for instance, evokes a tableau of still images, motion video, and text, representing a range of sites within the Great Dismal Swamp that coalesce into a whole—comprising trauma, struggle, creative expression, and the pursuit of freedom.

When we think back to the plantation landscape, a site of domination and trauma, the ways that enslaved people made music for themselves were quite different from the minstrelsy spectacle forced on enslaved people for their enslavers’ enjoyment. Enslaved people’s musical performances while under the coercion of enslavers constitute what historian Katrina D. Thompson has called “contradictory pieces of stagecraft”: done for the colonial gaze, yet still a “signification of resistance, power and cultural autonomy” when enslaved people’s creative expression pleased themselves (Thompson, 34). As historian Jon Cruz points out, “Slaveowners may have heard only noise from enslaved cabins,” yet such a dismissive notion of the music enslaved people made among themselves was “tantamount to being oblivious to the structures of meaning that anchored sounding to the hermeneutic world of the slaves” (Lewis, 34). To hear only noise is to “remain removed from how slave soundings probed their circumstances and cultivated histories and memories,” Cruz explains (Lewis, 34). Hyman’s goal in making the video was rooted in getting closer to visualizing those soundings and memories formed from enslaved people’s committed yearning for freedom. The process of curating the images and texts for the video also built Hyman’s understanding of the importance of engaging recovery work with descendant communities living near the Great Dismal Swamp today. It was a “technology of recovery,” as Kim Gallon uses the term, in that it aimed at creating a usable past that would empower living descendants with pride in their shared freedom legacies.

For Eric Sheppard, a direct descendant of formerly enslaved abolitionist Moses Grandy, the denial of enslaved people’s connection to landscape has contributed to a complete erasure of the legacy of slavery and freedom for enslaved people’s descendants in the area.17 The hidden legacy of African Americans’ lineage to the Great Dismal Swamp influenced Sheppard’s efforts to recover his family history and educate the public about the history of enslaved flight and the Underground Railroad presence near the swamp. Historian Kathryn Benjamin Golden has written about public historical representation in areas near the swamp, finding that state institutions set the terms and controlled the narratives that have effectively marginalized the history of slavery and resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp. With such an ecosystem of erasure at work, Sheppard’s efforts are all the more significant. Sheppard educates the public about enslaved resistance in the swamp with no institutional resources, and his efforts demonstrate the importance of heritage curators in constructing community narratives of landscape.

In 2016, when Hyman began her investigation into enslaved flight in the Great Dismal Swamp, she set out to determine whether there had been any historical markers dedicated to Moses Grandy. She found that there were none, either in North Carolina or Virginia.18 Googling historic places near the Great Dismal Swamp, Hyman came across an article that referenced a local Suffolk, Virginia, heritage curator who gave tours of the Underground Railroad presence near the Great Dismal Swamp (Feber). It was in this moment that Hyman became aware of Eric Sheppard’s work, and the seeds of collaboration between them were planted.19

The Great Dismal Swamp’s lack of commemoration with regard to its ties to slavery also compel us to consider how Black digital humanities projects as a whole may suffer from a similar lack of support due to historical silences. For instance, heritage curators in the Great Dismal Swamp have pointed out that the state school curriculum focuses on a national narrative of history that privileges an understanding of the past that is simplistic, linear, and devoid of disturbing elements. The nationalist interpretation of history serves to bolster patriotism and order the social behavior of students. James W. Loewen has written about these issues, pointing out that textbook adoption committees “function as censors that avoid offending parents.” “Offended parents” are the parents who occupy the dominant social group. Controversies surrounding “critical race theory” and it supposedly being taught to students shows how politicized educational curricula can be. The de-emphasis of important events related to Black history in K–12 textbooks lays a foundation for Black history to be seen as marginal when compared to more nationally centered events that receive greater coverage. When school curricula minimize the role of Black people in the shaping of history, it perpetuates marginalization and destroys the potential for public memory. As Henry Giroux explains, these historical silences “actively function to suppress the development of a critical historical consciousness among the public,” putting Black digital recovery projects at a disadvantage when they seek funding opportunities, especially those on the federal level (Loewen, 305). This asymmetric coverage of history as it relates to the Black past means that when scholars apply for funding from granting institutions, the statement of significance section will likely be one of the most challenging areas to write: Project directors know there will need to be extensive work required in order to convince funding agencies of the universal relevance of their recovery projects. Black recovery projects are undoubtedly significant, but because it is highly probable that reviewers may not be aware of the historical actors involved, the propensity for the proposal to be dismissed as insignificant puts added pressure on grant writers.

It is for this reason that a number of Black DH projects have been implemented without external federal grant funding, including the projects created by the authors of this chapter.20 Even success in being awarded grant funding does not guarantee that digital recovery project implementation will simply fall in place. On the contrary, if digital humanists are working from liberation frameworks not in line with the traditional business logic and currencies of the university, grant-funded recovery projects may find themselves battling every step of the way to mitigate the power structures of the university (Cole et al.). One could argue that these issues concerning historical silences and erasures put Black DH projects in a precarious position with criteria required for funding opportunities if the content of the project is not seen as relevant to the “national story.” Given that a large number of funded projects involve digitization and preservation of archival collections, the stories from Black communities that could be expanded with a digital project have no archive where these memories live—the memories are in the community itself. The creative approaches that many Black digitalists use are in the spirit of recovery, and this does not always cohere to the requirements of major funding agencies.

The issues of historical silences, popular memory, and the determined cultural heritage resilience in relation to building a recovery project from a liberatory framework require confronting how access to funding and other forms of resources are uneven. To construct a fair and equitable system of allocation for Black recovery projects, practitioners must imagine a new form of consciousness that applies not only to access to grants and related resources at institutions of higher education but also to how Black life lives and endures in an unfair, unjust world.

Black on Campus, at the Conference, in the World

These issues are not just a function of community access to institutional resources. They also require that we examine how academic spaces can reflect sites of oppression and extractive practices that not only affect Black communities but also Black scholars. For example, a number of news reports have caused alarm for Black people in university spaces. At Yale, a white student called the police on a fellow student, a Black woman, for sleeping in the common dormitory space (Griggs). In 2018, at the International Communications Association conference in Prague, Czech Republic, Black scholars were chased by neo-Nazis as they attempted to walk down the street (Schradie). At the annual meeting for classical studies, Dan-el Padilla Peralta was told in a question-and-answer session that he only got his position in academia because he is Black (Flaherty). And just five days after the University of Nebraska-Lincoln held a symposium on the importance of civil discourse, one of the coauthors of this chapter, Christy Hyman, learned that her thirteen-year-old son was verbally abused with racially abusive epithets and curses by a person in a passing car as he walked home from school (Schlage). These are the very real interactions that Black scholars have to contend with as they strive to attain their academic and professional credentials.

These events are important because they underscore the range of antagonisms and aggressions that Black scholars confront as they engage in the life of the mind while pursuing their research programs and avoiding replication of academic practices that abuse community trust. The life of the mind requires the space to think clearly, but when one is burdened by the weight of racial trauma, that thinking is severely affected. This means that Black scholars already dealing with the emotional trauma from the painful histories on which their recovery projects are drawn are also grappling with the daily reality of an ongoing afterlife of unresolved societal oppression rooted in colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and racism broadly. Black scholars are often the first called on to organize diversity initiatives on campus while also managing their research agenda for promotion and tenure. These bureaucratic diversity exercises require significant emotional labor and reinforce trauma.

Thinking critically about the digital humanities spaces in which Black scholars find themselves, whether through collaborations or through work and research spaces, involves acknowledging and accounting for the dynamics of power in relation to people represented in those spaces, but also the position of power each scholar holds within their university and within the discipline. Digital humanities spaces must confront the fact that, as Tamura Lomax puts it powerfully, “academia and the growing academic-corporate trend is a microcosm of the world house in its disappearing and disenfranchising of Black people, especially Black women.”

The Black Subject Creating Digital Work in the University

It is a well-documented fact that digital projects require a great deal of labor. For Black scholars, adding the work involved in building a digital recovery project to the work required for degree completion or tenure requirements can seem a daunting task. The dedication to historical and cultural recovery requires that Black scholars work carefully and diligently to satisfy the requirements of the university but also the communities to which their research is accountable. Hyman found that in working with Great Dismal Swamp cultural narrators, it took time to earn their trust. Trips to the Great Dismal Swamp area several times a year to support and amplify the heritage efforts of cultural narrators helped to cultivate meaningful relationships with them. Their testimonies pointed out the historical and cultural meanings that were important to them, and it in turn remapped the region in a way that shifted power from colonizing logics of the landscape that erased them. This level of engagement with accountable communities is essential, and at every turn community voices are centered and respected. Black scholars engage in these practices on top of the responsibilities required by their role in the university.

Doing this work takes an array of skills and competencies. Depending on how resourced a scholar’s institution is, there may be training opportunities on campus to cultivate DH skills; there may be digital humanists at the university participating in projects who offer opportunities for training through work experience; or one may elect to participate in an array of DH training institutes. For many scholars, “hacking” their way through digital humanities training, online tutorials provide a great deal of skill building. No matter which avenue is taken, Black scholars endeavoring to build recovery projects alongside a research agenda in departments that may or may not value digital recovery work are embarking on an unpredictable journey that may or may not provide immediate or long-term guarantees.

How do assemblages of Blackness—that is to say, the racialized sets of “relations structured in political, economic, social, and heteropatriarchal dominance” at the university—unmask systems of power at work in collaborative spaces (Weheliye, 49)? For example, how does a Black contingent worker who is the only racial minority on a project team make their voice heard in spaces where their race and position at the university marginalize their voice? Or how does the Black diversity officer handle being spoken over by senior university officials when their findings indicate a need for material investment in transformative efforts for meaningful change? How does the Black scholar remain empowered in a world where the acceptance of any racialized category is viewed through the prism of white supremacy and colonialism (Miller and Driscoll)? And how can the digital humanities as a field ensure that it is critically reflective of the racist societal processes that often are so naturalized that only racialized others notice when they occur?

These questions are essential for building a greater understanding of the array of social identities making up the community of digital humanists. It is essential that those in the digital humanities recognize who is most vulnerable and who has the potential to do the most harm in digital projects on a number of scales (Kim). In this we must attend to the relations among members of the DH spaces and within digital project teams, and the relations of the digital practitioners to the many publics who stand to receive the work. We must fully value and validate the accountability to which Black scholars hold themselves in their relationships with the descendant communities for whom their research is relevant.

The digital humanities is strengthened when it collectively makes efforts to understand how Black scholars navigate the university and experience digital humanities spaces. The potential for continued participation in the DH community relies on a critically reflective self-awareness of how its practitioners experience the spaces required to make, create, and produce research. The promises of recognizing the stakes of Blackness within the digital humanities community allow for greater awareness of the array of social realities that typify the experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) digital humanists as they grapple with the multiple dimensions of anti-Blackness in their day-to-day experience. Though Blackness cannot be conflated with other racial categorizations, the fact remains that recognition of the specific oppressed conditions of underrepresented groups opens up a reflective space to understand the wide continuum of oppression happening to BIPOC everywhere.

The spaces where Black digital humanists reflect on their positionality amidst their experiences of Black subjectivity runs the gamut, whether at the kitchen table, the coffeehouse, or on the work commute. When those critical reflections of one’s position take place at the university and are coupled with research agendas that address the university’s historical reliance on enslaved laborers to build and maintain their campuses, the convergence of the Black aesthetic, digital recovery, and community accountability can be disorienting. It is an overlap of the digital humanist’s cultural investment in telling the story, being accountable to the communities within the story, but also navigating the very structures where connected community members’ ancestors were oppressed on a daily basis. Within the digital humanities, those projects that examine relations among people, institutions, and places, past and present, allow for a range of opportunities for DH scholars to understand more closely how the digital Black aesthetic, as well as the stakes involved in being accountable to various publics, reveal themselves as vital features within a liberatory ethics of care. Recognizing and respecting Black digital humanists’ labor in navigating institutional barriers while connecting to the communities for which their work is accountable demonstrates a commitment not only to the work and all of its purpose but also to the value of working within a Black aesthetic framework.

The Hallowed Grounds Project and the Black Aesthetic

An ethics acknowledging the myriad forms of anti-Blackness and a politics of care must inform Black DH projects. Any resulting creative project must be rooted in the exploration of Black life without advancing the spectacle of Black death or the erasure of the complexity of Black aesthetic landscapes, such as smells, sounds, histories, and visual artforms.21 In this Black aesthetic DH imaginary, shared authority transforms digital spaces into assertions of Black presence through the creation of new landscapes, whether digital, physical, or cultural. This framework opens up an opportunity for thinking about recovery and pathways for engagement as the sharing of resources and expertise in a co-collaborative creative endeavor.

Here, it is imperative that Indigenous knowledges have equal weight in the collaboration. For instance, predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and research institutions (R1s), such as the University of Alabama, must avoid thinking of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the community as sites of extraction for their intellectual, cultural, sociopolitical, and financial capital or recipients of their neoliberal benevolence. Instead of replicating colonial and white supremacist authoritative practices, these institutions should redirect resources and provide the necessary (and expensive) infrastructure for sustaining the DH output in a true collaboration. This collaborative spirit must continue throughout the entire lifetime of the final DH project and not merely at the point of creation. In essence, the ongoing feedback loop between all co-creators and expansive public audiences breathes life into the decisions influencing updates, future directions for promoting additional lines of inquiry, and, ultimately, the project’s end.

It is not sufficient to design a DH project which Black and Brown communities, academic and nonacademic, may find useful. Rather, these communities must be at the heart of any inclusive DH project from its initial design, choice of content, and decisions about an overall aesthetic. Subsequent updates must respond to the feedback received from those communities. A Black aesthetic without a consideration of who constitutes a project’s public replicates the harmful and violent practices characteristic of so many traditional archives. The computational large data focus of many existing DH projects has become the shortcut for the continued dehumanization of marginalized communities and discounting of their historical and cultural practices.22

A careful eye toward the Black aesthetic has the potential to realize a future where African Americans and other marginalized groups are the center of DH projects. In these projects, their concerns would be actively sought out, heard, and not dismissed. If done properly, scholars would no longer be required to trouble the archive or do a close reading of white cisgender heteronormative sources in order to locate the voices and experiences of marginalized communities. Such a politics of care will allow communities to renew trust in a field where the racial complicity of methods and scholarship has sustained physical and epistemological harm.

The Hallowed Grounds Project represents one possibility. It responds to the whitewashed University of Alabama myths of slavery and its legacy, which were made legible to the author by a Black male student’s comment raised in January 2015. His comment—“But, Dr. Green, slavery did not exist here”—revealed the ongoing harm perpetuated by the absent history of the forced labor that built the Alabama flagship public university. This erasure rendered the lives and contributions of hundreds of African American men, women, and children invisible. Official campus tours, campus histories, building names, and traditions forced African American students to accept this erasure without question.

Built using limited resources, the Hallowed Grounds Project makes visible this history of enslavement, the diverse experiences of enslaved laborers, and fully considers the complex afterlives of slavery for the formerly enslaved, their descendants, the campus community, and the entire Black community of Tuscaloosa, where the University of Alabama (UA) is located. It transforms the physical campus into an archive of recovery through self-guided alternative campus tours, digitally accessible primary sources, and other digital tools for deepening understanding designed for diverse audiences and not merely for current campus stakeholders. All current materials are in a UA-approved web platform that can be accessed without UA community credentials, and on cellphones and other devices for audiences residing in broadband internet deserts. With future expansion to an Omeka-S platform, ensuring accessibility for diverse audiences will remain a priority (Green).

Based on feedback and requests received from a weary Black Tuscaloosa community, Hilary Green, the Hallowed Grounds Project creator, prioritized the incorporation of sources documenting enslaved women, children born on campus, and other materials on slavery’s afterlives and postemancipation institutions. This process has meant listening and allowing Black Tuscaloosa residents to set the terms of the project expansion. Through the in-person tours and DH project, they accepted Green as an ally who was willing center the full history, learn from community members, and partner with them as co-creators. Whether in person, email, or phone, community members often expressed a frustration in dealing with previous white UA faculty and students seeking to “save” them with knowledge. Over several conversations with Green, they also expressed a lack of awareness in navigating campus archival repositories and being afraid to ask the white institutional gatekeepers about such knowledge. As such, the DH project has expanded to include specific documents, short thematic overviews, brief contextualization per document, and a more robust bibliography. Sustained community engagement and responsiveness to shifting community needs continue to shape the project’s future.

Community engagement under a Black aesthetic framework dictates additional partnerships for fulfilling all of the terms set by the Black public. Black Tuscaloosans’ requests for the expansion of features has required Green to seek additional partners who are willing to embrace the Black aesthetic framework informing the Hallowed Grounds Project. Specifically, responding to requests for a digital re-creation of the antebellum landscape destroyed on April 4, 1865, when federal forces razed the campus, required partnering with archaeologists, geographers, and others with the necessary skills. The 1865 campus destruction and subsequent rebuilding erased the landscape where enslaved people labored, birthed children, resisted, and developed community, making it hard for individuals to fully understand the campus and community that enslaved people built. Remnants of the antebellum campus exist in the few surviving buildings, the quad green space, cemetery fragments, and recovered bricks placed in the first postwar building, and the postwar naming practices, campus histories, and traditions allude to the slave past; the UA community had firmly embraced a Lost Cause understanding of its past as well as a racially segregated landscape in Tuscaloosa and in the state until desegregation created the campus in its contemporary form. The absence of memory perpetuates the denial of the African American experience, the development of a campus forgetfulness as an act of purposeful memory suppression, and a difficult recovery process for African Americans and others desiring a more inclusive narrative (Ross, 94–119). The difficulty of this recovery process is compounded by the forces of gentrification and university expansion, which have eliminated some of the neighborhoods and institutions created by former enslaved campus laborers and their descendants. However, using the existing to-scale models of the antebellum campus buildings, 3D renderings, digital virtual reality (VR), and interactive mapping of the lost landscape becomes possible and informs the interdisciplinary partnerships necessary for making these requests a reality.

A richer Black DH aesthetic demands input from unexpected partners. Enacting some of these multidimensional understandings has required, for example, working with ethnomusicologists, professional musicians, and UA Music faculty to interpret and re-create songs performed at a major public address of Booker T. Washington in the early twentieth century—an event in which a formerly enslaved campus laborer hosted the white UA president as a guest in a Black Tuscaloosa church founded by other formerly enslaved campus laborers. It means working with food historians in order to understand enslaved people’s culinary knowledge so that it can be rendered through historical meals cooked for community reconciliation dinners. In short, it means collaborating with diverse community partners who have as much as say as the academics involved. Existing tools, expertise, funding, and infrastructure are the current project’s limits. Imagination, a politics of care, shared authority, and attentiveness to a Black DH aesthetic are not.

Woefully underfunded, the Hallowed Grounds Project has nevertheless had diverse uses. While it has been used for advancing scholarly inquiry, local African American homeschool parents, for instance, have used the virtual tour and primary source materials in developing a race-cognizant curriculum for their children pulled from the classrooms to prison pipeline. It has inspired the creative remaking of the difficult historical experiences and documented acts of enslaved people’s survival through poetry, creative nonfiction, and art. It has served as a cathartic meditation for faculty of color, students, and staff navigating a campus landscape haunted by the many specters of its slave past. The existing project creates beauty out of the painful and complex racial past. It inspires and expands the possibilities of future scholarship, creative inquiry, and praxis for making a more inclusive and just future—digitally, physically, and collaboratively. For these reasons, it has garnered favorable attention from current campus stakeholders, Tuscaloosa community activists, local news outlets, and scholarly publications.23

A Call to Action

Digital humanities must act to represent in the digital world a radical assertion of the Black self—our history, our beauty, our style, our imagination, our souls. It is the Black public that sets those terms. Digital projects must intentionally operate ethically, self-reflexively, and co-creatively. 

We recognize that this digital praxis centers on American Black souls. Eduard Arriaga and colleagues at the Digital Humanities 2017 conference asserted that Black digital humanities in the Global South required a borrowing of some of these elements while diverging toward its own path (also see Fiormonte). Language, for example, offers dynamic elements that add body to global Black culture. To that end, this chapter is very much situated within a particular temporal, physical space that changes and transforms not unlike culture itself. Indeed, the argument for adaptability, keeping to the beat (syncopation), and improvisation actually means that Black aesthetics will constantly refigure digital humanities like jazz, changing over time. It is the job of each digital project to keep pace and time, inserting a Black aesthetic at all levels. The legitimacy of future digital humanities projects rests in one final consideration: Does your work reflect a community or act to exploit it?

Notes

1. Tara McPherson has a similar argument, examining the history of coding and the covert elements that hide epistemology, while Domenico Fiormonte situates this issue as part of the larger colonizing tendencies demonstrated in digital humanities. Toni Morrison’s broader critique on language misuse is also helpful here. In her 1993 “Nobel Lecture,” Morrison notes that there is the “tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

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2. These circumstances were also driven by the “dark side” of digital humanities, discussed by Chun et al. The inclination of foundations and university administrators to stem humanities’ decline by funding digital humanities projects or hires has expedited unthoughtful production and emphasis on individual promotion. Writ large, humanities has reasserted legitimacy on the backs of marginalized communities.

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3. The question of what constitutes a Black aesthetic appears throughout the years. As historians, we pull from the earliest of these scholarly interventions with a focus on “soul.” However, other theorists engage similar questions about Black cultural production, style, and/or ways of being. In the process, intellectuals have directly and indirectly built on this conversation to reconsider soul or add elements like generational difference, Afro-futurism, or queer and feminist identity construction. Each adds layers to the earlier theories that emerged from 1960s Black scholarship. See, for example, Houston Baker; Paul C. Taylor; Mark Dery; Patrick Johnson; and Mark Anthony Neal. Key here is that we deliberately draw from a historical period whose purpose was to reflect empowered black assertions of self. Black aesthetic definitions that exclude power do not apply.

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4. As Addison Gayle wrote, this is not the definitive description of a Black aesthetic (xxii, 197). Similarly, Gayle’s introduction to The Black Aesthetic is the first of many treatments of how digital humanities can conform to Black aestheticism. Other references in the essays within The Black Aesthetic proved quite useful in constructing the digital Black aesthetic. See Hoyt W. Fuller, “Theory Introduction Towards a Black Aesthetic”; Larry Neal, “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic”; Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks” and “Drama Introduction: The Negro and the American Theatre”; Jimmy Stewart, “Music Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music”; Ron Wellburn, “The Black Aesthetic Imperative”; Don L. Lee, “Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties (after LeRoi Jones)”; Langston Hughes, “Poetry Introduction: The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”; Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement”; Ronald Milner, “Black Theater—Go Home”; Clayton Riley, “On Black Theater”; and Adam David Miller, “Some Observations on a Black Aesthetic.” Neal, Miller, and Lee are particularly useful for their references to Black aesthetic as utilitarian and ethically driven to represent truth and reality of Blackness, particularly Larry Neal’s point that Black theater “exists in direct relationship to the audience it claims to serve” (263).

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5. Global Blackness offers far more opportunities for dynamic definitions of Black aesthetic. Whether this dynamism proves unwieldy or not will depend on how each DH project chooses to handle these complexities.

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6. The authors of this chapter also proffered our notion for merging race and technology in a conference paper at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (Frazier, Hyman, and Green, “Black Digital Protocols”). In it, we suggested specific guidelines for consideration to move conversation from abstract ideas of Black digital humanities to a how-to manual for incorporating Black subjects in DH projects. We also embrace the work of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (“Race and/as Technology”), who asserts that the question of race and technology is not just about what race is but what relations and questions engender race. In a sense, this is the backbone of Black aesthetics. By focusing on Blackness, digital humanists are guided to ask different questions about what they produce and its relation to the Black public. Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips also speak to this concern along with Black twitterstorians who combine Black Studies to construct digital scholarship as an outgrowth of processes that advocate and produce recovery along with transformation.

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7. These circumstances were also driven by the “dark side” of digital humanities discussed by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun et al. This “dark” legacy has led humanities to reassert legitimacy on the backs of marginalized communities.

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8. This, of course, includes all oppressed peoples. Other communities (Indigenous, LGBTQ, and feminists scholars) have addressed these issues from the standpoint of their societal vulnerability as well. The 2017 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations conference, where the authors met, was replete with sessions from these various communities countering DH conventions. Also see Gandy (131–32, 135–36, 139–40); Beydoun and Hansford; Cowan; and Christen. It is also important to acknowledge digital tools like Mukurtu, a content management system that was created to address the concerns of Indigenous people about open access.

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9. This is an epistemological reference to Outkast.

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10. This is also an epistemological moment referencing Tina Marie’s musical style, lyrics, and her manifestation within Black culture as feeling and through communal events. This is also an exercise in engaging Black knowledge production over the digital (search engine) that provides only partial information.

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11. See Laughlin. Patrik Svensson suggests another variation by changing the “big tent,” with its connotations of hegemony, to a term like “meeting place,” in order to allow “bridge building and the bringing together of epistemic traditions [that] is not optimally done from the position of discipline or department.” Although, notably, the Black aesthetic insists on more than a bridge due to tendencies to build it for extraction versus direction from differing epistemic traditions. Another take on this is Domenico Fiormonte’s concern over “unity in diversity” versus federation, particularly because unity simply reflected white hegemony with cursory inclusion versus a transformative system for digital humanities. In this case, this federation acknowledges the variant methodologies, systems of thought, and stylistic expressions (Fiormonte).

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12. On oral history, see Frisch (A Shared Authority: Essays and “Sharing Authority: Oral History”); Snopes; Thomson; Adair, Filene, and Koloski.

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13. vMLK Project Team, Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project, 2019, https://vmlk.chass.ncsu.edu/about/.

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14. A more detailed breakdown of Omeka as digital theory within Harambee is available in Frazier (“About CORE and Black Economic Power”); each definition has its own subheading.

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15. This site fluidity allows Frazier to avoid institutional control until both projects can be maintained by an entity that adheres to Black aesthetic principles. The University of Kansas will be the next institution to hold both the Gentrification Project and Harambee City. These links will change, requiring readers to conduct an internet search by project title.

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16. On the Black digital humanities and recovery, see Gallon.

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17. Moses Grandy was an enslaved Great Dismal Swamp canal waterman who freed himself from bondage and later freed his wife and children. Grandy had to leave Virginia after purchasing his freedom and went on to became a free Black sailor who traveled the world as well as worked in the cause of antislavery. See Grandy (1843).

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18. Grandy’s narrative refers to places in Virginia as well as North Carolina because the Great Dismal Swamp is located along the border of both states. There is the Moses Grandy Trail, a two-and-a-half-mile, four-lane road in Chesapeake, Virginia; the section was named in 2006. This was a citywide venture.

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19. Sheppard is a retired defense management consultant and has written a book, Ancestors Call, which traces his lineage to Moses Grandy and contains a reprint of Moses Grandy’s narrative. When Hyman began thinking of ways to collaborate with Sheppard on efforts to commemorate Grandy’s life, she emailed him to introduce herself. In contacting Sheppard, Hyman wanted to make two things clear from the beginning: her appreciation for his efforts in commemorating slavery’s history in the Great Dismal Swamp Region without any institutional resources, and the assurance that she could be trusted as an historian invested in both Grandy’s memory and the legacy of descendant communities related to slavery. Today’s more ethically concerned scholars explore “questions of authority, control, and ownership of heritage narratives, plus the material remains that result from research based work” involving community stewards of the past (Gasby and Moyer). Sheppard is a community steward who has opened up the history of Grandy’s life for hundreds of visitors to the Great Dismal Swamp each year.

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20. For a list of digital projects that cover the history, culture, and consciousness of Black people on a number of scales, please visit the Black Digital Humanities Projects and Resources document created by the Colored Conventions Project at http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/2017/08/resource-Black-digital-humanities-projects-resources-google-doc/. For a discussion of digital work created beyond the confines of the academy, consult the work on building the Supercommons (Risam et al.).

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21. For examples of this work, see Vincent Brown and also Jessica Marie Johnson.

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22. See Johnson and Neal, and also Benjamin.

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23. See Kutzler; Crain; Griesbach and Haney; and Brooks. Kutzler’s review is of Martha A. Sandweiss et. al’s Princeton & Slavery Project website at https://slavery.princeton.edu.

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