Kaiama L. Glover (KLG): I will start by asking you to reflect on the ideas that frame the conversation we are going to have today: Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of silencing the past and Maryse Condé’s evocation of the particular disorder presented by women, as these two notions relate to your work.

Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel (AKJG): I really appreciate your framing of this series of conversations through the lens of Condé’s essay, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” because I think order, disorder, and freedom, and the West Indian writer are really pertinent intellectual lenses to be thinking through in this moment.

There’s a part of that essay that I want to quote because I think it’s a really useful way to begin our conversation. Condé, when she’s talking about women writers, says, “In a Bambara myth of origin, after the creation of the earth and the organization of everything on its surface, disorder was introduced by a woman. Disorder meant the power to create new objects and to modify existing ones. In a word, disorder meant creativity.” And I want to dwell on this word creativity, because when we think about the context for our conversation—about how Black women enter digital spaces, how Black women are present in digital spaces, how they use digital tools—we tend to think in terms of newness, in terms of novelty, in terms of departure from order.

But Condé is situating this in the myth of origin. It nudges us not just to think about creativity in terms of creation but also in terms of the ability to bring alternate worlds into being. Worlds that are against order. Because “order” doesn’t just say, this is how things are. “Order” says, this is how things should be. Order isn’t just descriptive; it’s prescriptive. So how do we introduce disorder into this sort of order, this prescribed silencing?

Currently, I’m thinking a lot with Shirley Graham Du Bois, who reflects on how we use technological advancements. How do we use tech tools in the work that we seek to do? Graham Du Bois is thinking a lot about the origins, the functioning, and the technical details of the new technologies that she hoped to use in the twentieth century in Black liberation struggles. So alongside Condé’s quote, I want to add a quote from Graham Du Bois. I like the idea of a constellation of women thinkers, of Black women thinkers.

This quote is from a moment in history, in 1962–1963, when Graham Du Bois is working as a founding director of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. Now, we’re talking DH [digital humanities] today, so radio and TV might seem quaint and antiquated in some ways.

KLG: But technology is technology.

AKJG: Technology is technology, right. And in that moment, radio and TV was that newness. So Graham Du Bois travels to Europe to visit the BBC to see how they are working with broadcasting and to think about how to implement a similar system in the newly independent Ghana. She writes to Kwame Nkrumah, who was Ghana’s president, and asks, “What line system does Ghana plan to use? Great Britain at present uses 405 lines. Channel Two, however, is being set up to use 625 lines, and as soon as possible, the old channel will switch to 625. All Europe today, including the Soviet Union, excluding France, uses 625 lines for television broadcast. But the United States and Canada have always used 525 lines. Now, most of our technicians are being trained in the United States and Canada, will Ghana therefore use 525 lines for broadcast, which will bind her to the United States and Canada, but separate us from Europe?”

I always pause at this moment when I read this letter because it is entirely gibberish! I have no idea what “lines” are, or how broadcasting works. But I am struck by the fact that the letter is so technical in its detail. Graham Du Bois was attuned to the relationship between function and content. For her, asking how many lines will be used for broadcasting is also about asking to whom her voice, to whom Ghanaian voices, will be bound. So, to return to our conversation about unsilencing, speaking out, articulating ideas, and sharing histories through digital media, I want to ask: To whom do these technologies tether us? And are those bonds or ties ones that we can live with? That’s where I am in my thinking right now.

For example, I work a lot with digital maps. My project, Mapping Marronage,1 tries to show how enslaved people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved through the Atlantic and asks questions about liberation and its connection to mobility. In the beginning, I was seduced by the idea of having Google Maps as the base layer for my map. I liked the idea of “Powered by Google” because it sounded like you could do so much. But knowing that Google Maps was founded on a desire and need for surveillance, it seemed to counter the very things I was trying to show. Also, Google’s linear way of mapping didn’t work for this kind of mobility. These people’s movement was a lot messier.

Mapping Marronage is my attempt to account for that mess through a network map as opposed to a linear map. When you go to the site, you can choose to see two kinds of maps: flight and networks. You can also select a short biography of someone who’s featured on the map. These multiple options trouble the linear map as well as the standard triangular frame for thinking about the geography of the Atlantic. More generally, the project shows how movement can be subversive and how movement can be generative.

So, that’s where my thinking is currently in terms of questions about silencing, unsilencing, and the way that Black women introduce disorder into oppressive orders using digital tools.

KLG: Thank you, Annette. Marlene, I am going to ask you to pick up the ball and run with it.

Marlene L. Daut (MLD): I’m going to pick up the ball. I’m also going to address what just happened in the chat, because it is about unsilencing. When Annette was talking, I was thinking about another word: discipline. Part of discipline is imposing order, but another part is to discipline when there is disorder. We talk a lot now in the U.S. academy about interdisciplinarity. I work in two interdisciplinary departments, African American studies and American studies, and I’ve often wondered if it is enough to be interdisciplinary. Maybe we need to be undisciplined instead.

I noticed that the comment in the chat had the word “speaking” in it. That made me think of Tracy Sharpley-Whiting’s term, “seen invisibility,” the condition for Black women when we are simultaneously seen and not seen. And then reflecting on Mame-Fatou Niang’s comments on Twitter the other day, when she was advertising this event, and she said, “It is not that people don’t have a voice, it’s that people don’t listen.” It’s not even that they’re not heard—it’s not passive—it’s very active that people have willfully sought not to listen.

This idea both complicates and extends Trouillot’s concept of silencing. Because we use the word “silencing” a lot, but you really can’t silence people unless you actually kill them. This is actually the metaphor that Trouillot uses. He says, “You silence like you silence with a gun.” But this is a metaphor. Reflecting on what it means for us, as Black women, to constantly position ourselves or think of ourselves as people without voices when we see very strongly that we are speaking. And when we teach, I feel like it comes to the fore even more strongly. For example, when I am teaching Mary Prince and talking about the mediated voice and Prince’s subject position, the students’ response is, “Well, she’s not silenced, though.”

But what sort of voice can be heard? And how can it be heard, and who’s listening? I think that’s the larger issue for me, especially working in Haitian studies. In Haitian studies, you get these statements like, “No one has studied this!” or “No one has studied that!” I don’t want to constantly be that person who says, “Yes, the Haitians have! In the nineteenth century! Louis-Joseph Janvier! Antenor Firmin!” And yet, I think it’s so important to say because it’s just that people chose not to listen—they chose not to read, they chose not to engage, they chose to say that everyone is a Marxist, they chose to say that people were reading Foucault, and they chose not to look at how Frederick Douglass made statements about power and who has it, and how you can defeat it, many decades before Foucault.

To me, it’s the condition of seen invisibility that I constantly think about in relationship to my own work, and in relation to the various issues that I know we are going to get to later—that have recently erupted online and in digital spaces but that have really always been there. This moment of incredible wakefulness, or wokefulness, or whatever you want to call it, is baffling to anyone who’s really been paying attention. I grew up in Inglewood, California. I knew about police violence in the eighties. I never thought it was new when Michael Brown happened, or when Ferguson happened. And it was baffling to me that it was new for so many people, that they had forgotten about Rodney King, that they had forgotten about all the women and children throughout the years who were killed by police.

So I want to rest on that idea that silencing is actually an active process. It’s not passive. It is something that people do, and it is something that they try to do to others. Again, that Trouillot statement about silence, like when you put a silencer on a gun. It is something that you actively have to do because guns are very, very, very loud, and everyone hears them for miles around when they go off—unless you do this very active thing.

With that said, today what I want to introduce, before we jump to the next topic, is La Gazette.2 It’s a website of Haitian newspapers from the nineteenth century. I did not discover them. The vast majority of them were cataloged, although some of them were miscataloged, because cataloging is difficult work. For the website, we collected as many issues of these newspapers as we could from the State of Haiti first and then the Kingdom of Haiti, and we transcribed them. We also made the PDFs available, with the help of many archivists around the world.

The idea was to make it less easy for people to have the excuse of inaccessibility for not consulting these documents. Because these newspapers are collected in libraries and archives all across the world: Ireland, Jamaica, various states in the United States, England, France, Haiti, etcetera. Bringing them together provides a fuller picture of what life was like under Henry Christophe, the ruler of the Kingdom of Haiti, at least from the official perspective. Hopefully, La Gazette makes them more accessible.

The last thing I want to say about the project relates to the concept of silencing. There are layers to the silence here. These are state-run newspapers, so they constitute the official record. They contain the stories that the state built, by Henry Christophe and his journalists, that they wanted you to remember. The vast majority of the Haitian people do not appear in these papers. These are papers about world events and the nobles of the kingdom, and, yes, anti-slavery and anti-colonialism and combating Napoleon. But they are not papers about the everyday lives of Haitian people, those who lived in the countryside, those who deliberately put themselves outside of the eye of the state, or what Jean Casimir calls the counter-plantation. To me, this is a silence that is heavy—like the statement in Silencing the Past, it’s a silence “thrown against a superior silence.” I want to bring to the fore that this is one record and one archive, but it’s not the record or the archive of early nineteenth-century Haiti.

KLG: Thank you so much, Marlene. There are some keywords that thread their way through the questions I asked and the answers you all offer. In earlier conversations, I talked about frustration, and you used the word baffling. I think we’re talking about a similar thing, which is an inability to recognize or to really grapple with the history of the present. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have this opening conversation with the two of you because I know that in your work, both analog and digital, that’s what you’re up to: the history of the present, refusing the rhetoric of surprise that would have us become somehow suddenly undone by what’s happened yesterday, when we have accepted for so long the things that have happened so many yesterdays before.

That’s what animates my next question, this question of the history of the present. Can you give me your thoughts on the idea of looking backward in this present moment, past the moment that we are often encouraged to compare it to—the 1960s? We’re quite comfortable talking about the echoes of 1967 and 1968 and just before. But what the two of you have done in your work is to show that this is a longer history. Yes, a longer history of anti-Black racism and oppression, but also a long history of anti-racist struggle and achievement and success and a peeling back of these layers of silence, as you put it, Marlene. And as you said, Annette, standing before archives and not understanding everything but knowing that there’s something there that deserves attention. I was hoping either of you or both of you could comment on this notion of the longer history of the present.

AKJG: The question of the history of the present is so crucial because Black uprisings and Black refusal of white supremacy—these things have existed for as long as white supremacy has existed. We think about the Haitian Revolution as one of those key moments, and there were also labor movements in the Caribbean throughout the twentieth century that were about wage theft but were also about racialized policing as part of slavery’s legacy in the present.

One of the examples that comes to mind is the Affaire des 16 de Basse-Pointe, in Martinique, in 1948, when an agricultural workers’ strike ended in the death of a white plantation overseer. The ensuing events were about Black workers’ refusal of police violence and of racialized police violence. Most gendarmes in Martinique are white, and at that moment, police violence was used as a tool to protect property and profit for the descendants of the white planter class. Like Marlene said, we are seeing things that are not new. But at the same time, there is also a feeling of uniqueness in this moment because we are looking at the confluence of Black liberation struggle and a pandemic.

One of the ways that we can think about this beyond, or in addition to, the question about the historical moments that give us precedence is the question of how we rethink revolutionary time. What are the qualities of time, as cyclical, as linear, as disrupted, or as repetitive, that allow us to rethink ideas of progress? Because we’re all trying to think about this against the backdrop of Covid-19, I’ve gone back to earlier Black women’s writings to look at how they were thinking about the convergence of health crises and time and Black liberation struggle. And when you look specifically for that, you see it everywhere in astounding ways.

I mentioned Shirley Graham Du Bois already, but Suzanne Césaire was thinking similar things. Césaire was thinking about that with real urgency as she was battling a brain tumor. Marie Vieux-Chauvet was also thinking in terms of urgency in the context of the dictatorship and her own illness. You have lots of Black women writers who are thinking about this convergence. And then for others, it’s a question of time as direction. Graham Du Bois keeps asking, over and over again, “Progress which way?” Where do we go from here? She sees time as direction. So the question becomes how we rethink revolutionary time in ways that push back against the idea of progress as technological advancement—when we are still in the same moment, and we even see a retrenchment in terms of racism and racist attitudes.

I’m trying to think a lot about how the convergence of these different things asks us to consider not just what are the historical moments that give us precedence, but also how we rethink time entirely to bring that necessary disorder into the order of the notion of progress. What kind of anti-progress narratives are Black women writers working with that allow us to think about the future that we are really trying to build and create?

MLD: I’ve seen so many people posing the question, “How is it different?” Which is, again, a passive question. I want to turn that around and say, “How are we going to make it different?” Because it isn’t going to just be different. It will be exactly the same if we allow it to be exactly the same. In three months, six months, we’ll be right back here when the next police killing happens that flashes up. Because the fact of the matter is that it’s happening all the time. Almost every day, there is some account of some police brutality somewhere in the United States. So how are we going to make it different?

That’s what I see in the Black women writers of the 1960s and beyond, to Toni Morrison, to Maya Angelou. They kept asking, “How is it going to be different? How are we going to make it different?” But no one was listening. Again today, we hear the refrain on Twitter, in op-eds, and online in various media, “When are you going to listen to Black women?” Again, it is up to us to provide the answers. For example, Black women have been decrying the high mortality rates of women of color for years, not just in the United States but in England, in France—but who is actually listening? I think settling on not just what we can do, but if it is other people who are asking that question, ask them how it is going to be different, and what they are going to do as well—put the question back to them.

KLG: I am trying not to get totally depressed by your answer, because it dovetails but then goes in a different direction from the way that Annette was talking about refiguring and refashioning time and our notion of cyclicality. You used the word answers, and obviously the three of us aren’t going to come up with all of the answers in this conversation, but one thing that seems clear is that there’s the listening and then there is the answering, and there needs to be some space for those two things to come together for the people who are the most capable, or have not been allowed to show their capacity to address them. That’s part of the frustration as well. We have been using this expression, “the rhetoric of surprise.” And this surprise comes from a sort of tunnel vision or a holding of the ears, an active silencing of the voices that are out there saying the things that need to be heard.

I’ve asked about time, and its partner is space. I want to ask the two of you, who work in spaces beyond the borders of the United States, to think about the importance of thinking about #BlackLivesMatter and anti-racist struggle beyond the geocultural bounds of the United States, and even beyond the geocultural bounds of U.S. Black studies and U.S. Black activism. I know the three of us are attentive to thinking more broadly about the Black diaspora and its expression in other places, but these places are not often brought into the conversation because just as the U.S. is hegemonic, or has been hegemonic, broadly speaking, U.S. Black studies and U.S. Black voices have also been rather hegemonic in diasporic thinking with Blackness globally. Can you talk about the places that you work on, outside the United States?

AKJG: In the same way that Black refusal of white supremacy has existed for as long as white supremacy, Black uprisings have also refused the limited boundaries of what the local means. Police violence in the United States is also local in relation to police violence in France. There’s this astounding mural right now in Paris which juxtaposes the faces of George Floyd and Adama Traoré, which makes a powerful statement about how we think and rethink the local, and how we think and rethink space. For example, Suzanne Césaire’s archipelagic thinking is one that connects Martinique not just to France as the imperial power but also to Puerto Rico and Haiti as sites of U.S. imperial aggression.

Looking at the Caribbean is one way to rethink how we think about space, how we think about spaces that are contiguous, and how we think about the idea of the local. There’s a quote by Ramon Grosfoguel that I really appreciate, which says that a global problem cannot have a national solution. We are talking about policing, police violence, anti-Black violence in the United States, but we need to understand those as manifestations of the global problem of white supremacy.

I always get so frustrated because sometimes in conversations online, you’ll have a smug European who jumps in and says, “Well, in Denmark, things are not as bad as the U.S.” And I’m like, “Who are you speaking to in Denmark? Who are you speaking to in the Netherlands? Who are you speaking to in France, and do you think their experience resonates with yours? Or are you going to enact that kind of holding the ears and being surprised because you are being forced to confront a reality that you have always hoped was not the case?”

So, the ways that we should think about space as a set of continuous repeating manifestations of a global problem, which is global white supremacy, is something that the Caribbean can point us toward. Especially because of its geographic terrain—of islands that are not closed off—the archipelago is asking us to think about islands that open out in the rest of the world. The way Suzanne Césaire asks us to think about archipelagic concepts of space is one way that really forces us to grapple with the global nature of this problem.

The last thing I’ll say is that sometimes when we think about U.S. imperial aggression, we think about it as projected outward. But if we go to Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire reminds us that in Europe, for example, the violence that it had previously turned outward on the colonies eventually came home to roost, as manifested in Nazism. The fascism that we see internally, in the spaces we’re in currently, are always continuations of the imperialism that is projected outward. To think about space as neighboring and contiguous spaces as opposed to as separate ones is a really helpful framework.

MLD: As Annette was talking, it made me think about the passage in The Wretched of the Earth where Frantz Fanon says the goal cannot be to replace a white police officer with a Black police officer. One of the things that happens when you take a more global perspective is that it becomes clear that the color of the police officer is not the only problem, but policing itself is a problem. We cannot reform policing. We have to reimagine what it means to live communally with other people with a sense of justice while also preserving freedom. When you look at a case like Haiti, and you look at the Tonton Makouts, you can very clearly see that violence and brutality are baked into the concept of policing itself.

For another example, in eighteenth century France with the Police des Noirs, we see the very word police, and the policing of Black people, at this very early date. So the Europeans, who want to point the finger—literally had a body called the Police des Noirs and made codes and laws that were specifically targeted at Black people: the Black codes. These laws and policing and surveillance that have been around far before the internet, broadcast television, radio—all of these techniques—are really just ways of shoring up and making it easier to do what the state has always sought to do, which is to police its inhabitants and to lure them into a false sense of security.

Now, when you talk about abolishing the police, people come up with the most absurd scenarios like, “What if you’re kidnapped for seven days and thrown into the Grand Canyon?” That’s what they imagine will happen if the police are abolished, instead of using their imaginations—the same imaginations that brought us Google, that brought us the iPhone, that brought us people in screens like us now talking—to think of a better way to organize society with a sense of justice and freedom. I think of bell hooks and what she calls “feminist masculinity”—the idea that we can teach ourselves to love justice and freedom while not giving into the patriarchal idea that the way to achieve justice is to discipline bodies, to put people in prison, to throw them in the back of police cars when they don’t behave exactly the way that you want them to. To be sure, it’s not an easy question, and as Kaiama mentioned, we are not going to come up with the answer here. But I do think the conversation starts by posing the question as legitimate, not as a radical or crazy.

This should be a question that everybody wants to answer, not just people who are the victims, or the biggest victims I should say, because really, policing is dangerous for everyone. That is something that some people learned for the first time during the George Floyd protests. When they saw police shoving an elderly white man down to the ground, when they found themselves tear-gassed, when someone—a white woman—died from being tear-gassed, when Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville. They have learned that policing and white supremacy are dangerous for everyone. That was really Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire’s point, and so many others, that you’re not safe from this. You might be safer in numbers, but you as an individual can also fall prey to it. So that’s what I would like to see, this sort of imagination, what Edward Brathwaite calls the womb of space. Let’s use this and let’s think more deeply about it.

KLG: I promise after this we’ll get back to DH. But picking up on Annette’s really rich encouragement to think of both time and space less teleologically and less linearly and less bordered, and thinking back to the idea of the Black code, and the Police des Noirs, and how these are things from the European past—the inability of, let’s say, certain Europeans to recognize the persistence of that past in their present and in our present is part of the inability to see the concentric circles of time. Rather than say, “Oh, that’s part of our past. We have progressed to a new place but the U.S. is still stuck in that place,” when in fact that same claim of progressiveness is what enables them to do things like take race out of the constitution—you would have thought that we learned our lesson about the impossibility of post-racial societies. But that’s still being dangled as the carrot that the U.S. somehow has not managed to get to. It goes back again to what you both stated, which is this inability to see the inextricability of the past in our present.

I also wanted to put out into the world a term that I love so much, from your book, Annette, in the introduction: the “geographies of resistance.” I’ve been thinking a lot about reconceptualizations of space and the offerings that Black women scholars have given us to reconceptualize space. Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds is another one, of course. But this we can save for later.

I need to bring us back to the digital, and the digital humanities pedagogical tools that the two of you have put together—Marlene, primarily your curated digital archives, and Annette, the mapping visualizations. They are useful within the classroom and in a research context. And you also recognize that this is knowledge and information that plenty of folks out in the nonacademic world clearly need. So I want to ask you to think from inside the classroom space to the outside, to the possibilities and the perils of public or online scholarship, and we can certainly get into but hopefully not be undone by what happened recently on H-France.

AKJG: The primary utility of doing digital work with students in the classroom is a sense of accountability. Because the students immediately feel accountable to a wider audience. The site I just described, Mapping Marronage, is entirely student-produced, save the profile of one person that I set up as a model. The content was produced in the context of a class, and I structured the entire course around the map. The project is different from a paper, where they have to perform the kind of knowledge they think I want them to have. Instead, they’re accountable to a larger audience. But—and this is not something that I quite factored in when I began teaching the course—the students also feel accountable to the people that they are writing about. They feel accountable to the enslaved people whose narratives they are bringing to the fore. I had one student who went up to Montreal, to photograph sites where she thought Marie-Joseph Angelique might have been or might have fled, and brought those back as images to overlay on the map.

Students felt responsible for doing this right. I am still trying to interrogate with them what it means to tell someone’s story the right way. But I found that conversation to be really generative. Students always feel a lot more beholden to a larger audience outside the classroom. But to the historical figures that they’re writing about as well? The promises and perils are many. Hopefully, the promises outweigh the perils because we are still doing this. To be honest, one of the promises for me is being in constant conversation with the community outside of the privileged and hallowed halls of the academy, because much as my students feel accountable to the people they’re writing about, I too feel accountable to the communities that we write about, that we study, that we think with. So, having that opening out into that wider community is, I think, one of the promises of doing DH work.

And then also the ability to escape institutional mandates and accounting. Who matters, what matters, what kind of work matters? A lot of the things that you shared in introducing me, Kaiama, are things that I realized, much to my chagrin, are not on my CV because I don’t know how to account for them in institutional language. To hear them be the things that are valuable for this conversation is interesting to me because it suggests the need for a rethinking of what is valued, and that even if an institution will not value those things, then we must ask how we determine and shape value for ourselves. I don’t think that I will ever put them on my CV because maybe the idea of marronage—the escape from that institutional accounting—the idea that this kind of work for me will remain outside of that framework of productivity might be helpful. For me, those are the promises.

The perils are many, as we saw in the chat, and as we saw with some of the recent kerfuffles on message boards and such about what kind of history you want to remember, who you want to remember in history, and even what the purpose of history is. I think that what we need more conversation around in DH is how we think about protecting ourselves and our work but thinking about protection outside the framework of gatekeeping and exclusion. I haven’t yet found that balance, and doing editorial work online is one of those moments where I ask myself, “At which point are we gatekeeping and excluding? At which point are we doing the necessary work of protecting people who are targeted and victimized by vitriol online?” I think that finding the balance is a potential promise, but right now feels a lot more perilous than promising.

MLD: I really appreciate this discussion about “does this go on the CV or not,” because I had that same sort of discussion with myself when I remember going up for tenure—like, “Oh, should I put this website on there?” And then someone said, “Just don’t introduce that as a question that your committee might not know how to understand.” Now, there’s a different question, and I’m not sure if it’s a problem or not, but it’s interesting to think about. Maybe a CV is a problematic gatekeeping thing in and of itself, and the goal shouldn’t be to have more kinds of things eligible to put on the CV. Maybe the goal is to rethink what accountability looks like. Somebody being really valued by the community that they’re engaging with can’t ever go on a CV, but it is far more important than whatever journal or whatever the outside reviewers think, right? At least I hope.

With the Gazette website that I discussed earlier, one of the most surprising ways in which it has been used is by genealogists in Haiti who are going back through the almanacs and the newspapers and finding information about their family members to construct family trees and family histories. It wasn’t what I had intended when I thought of putting these papers online. I also wasn’t sure if we should transcribe the almanacs because they are over one hundred pages each, and mostly lists and lists and lists of names, but there are also all kinds of symbols and corresponding legends to tell you who each of those people on the lists were, and we need those symbols to be there to understand the full significance of the almanacs. I couldn’t just leave them out.

Initially, I thought it might just be enough to put those PDFs there and make them accessible. But it was the searchability of the transcription that really allowed people to use the website for genealogical projects. So then, thanks to the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at UVA [the University of Virginia] that funded the transcription of the almanacs—because the site was done with essentially no funding before that—which preserved not only the diacritics but all the symbols, it allowed the site to have this life and accountability that is greater and more wonderful than I had ever imagined because it became a kinship project, and it was allowing people to connect.

The last thing I will say is that barriers to entry is one of the reasons I first began to be interested in digital humanities and digital archiving. Because if you are at these really well-funded universities, you’re getting grants to go to archives all over the world, and you’re collecting all of these documents. The typical scholarly model is that you hold these documents precious and they are yours, and then you write a story about them and you’re the only one who has access to them. When you read a lot of historiography from the 1990s and early 2000s, and certainly from before that, it’s all about how this one person gained access to this archive, and they’re the only person. It’s just a way to gatekeep and keep other people out. That’s a way to keep independent scholars from having access; it’s a way to keep high school teachers who are engaged in a lot of digital humanities projects and a lot of public scholarship from having access. It’s a way to keep the communities that are “understudied” from having access, as well as scholars from institutions where they don’t have the same kind of access to institutionalized capital. So one of the reasons I wanted to do the project, and was encouraged by a general climate in which others were already doing this type of work, was just to put these documents out there. Let’s see what others have to say and what they will do, just like with the Gazette newspapers. And they always do something beyond what you could even have imagined yourself.

To the question of pedagogy and teaching, I would say that the digital humanities projects that I have done, and when I taught the Caribbean Digital—which was riffing off the conference with Kaiama and Alex Gil and Kelly Baker Josephs—the students knew that other people inside of UVA who wanted to use this same software would be able to see what they did. And they knew that the class, because they had to do a presentation, would see it. And they knew that the other people in their group were counting on them. So even though collaboration is something that some people are better at it than other people, and some people like it more than other people, it has a way of encouraging a kind of accountability that, when we’re the lone sojourner, as Frances Smith Foster says, “Creative collaboration is as African American as sweet potato pie.” That’s her phrase.

I think that in the digital humanities, collaboration is the only way to get many of these projects done, especially for someone like me, who doesn’t have the coding skills to be able to create an apparatus for a website myself. I need help, and that help is just as intellectual and baked into the project. There is so much dialogue happening, and forgetting that obscures the community-based aspect of digital humanities. That’s what we are doing in the classroom as well, creating a community and a space for these dialogues to happen.