Kaiama L. Glover

At the end of the month of May 2020, a forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd was killed by members of the Minneapolis Police Department. In the wake of his killing, the perennial question of whether or not Black lives truly matter in the United States came to the fore with renewed urgency and extraordinary global reach. Over the weeks and months that followed, both mainstream and social media sought to grapple with this tragedy, and scholars and intellectuals in particular seemed to feel intensely the heightened stakes of their public engagement.

As the world turned feverishly to Twitter to try to gain some sort of purchase on a moment that felt at once utterly despairing and somehow full with possibility, two related but contradictory phenomena came into view. On the one hand, a persistent rhetoric of surprise punctuated our media world: “How could this have happened? In 2020? In the United States?” Countless voices lamented as we watched (or could not bear to watch) a uniformed officer of the law kneel on the neck of an unarmed Black man. Then, as videos of local, state, and federal police tear-gassing, kettling, and otherwise brutalizing peaceful protestors surfaced, the bewilderment and righteous outrage intensified measurably: “American citizens treated like enemy combatants as they exercise their First Amendment freedoms of speech and of assembly? How could this be?” wondered the internet across six continents.

On the other hand, and in parallel to these expressions of shocked indignation, an unofficial cohort of Black women scholars—historians in the main, but not exclusively so—had also taken to Twitter, television, and radio, and to the op-ed pages of various print and online publications, to call bullsh*t on this narrative. And they had receipts. This moment, they declared, is nothing new under the sun. We have no right to be surprised. If what is happening feels “unheard of” or “unprecedented” or in any way astounding, then shame on us all for not seeing, not hearing, and not acknowledging our own history.

The #UnsilencedPast project emerged as a direct counter to the disingenuousness of a worldwide “awokening” that in many ways elided the unfettered police violence and equally persistent anti-racist practices of refusal that mark our national and global past. In four weekly conversations, convened and moderated by Kaiama L. Glover, professor of French and Africana studies and faculty director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University, the series sought to highlight the vanguardist work of eight Black women academics: Marlene L. Daut and Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Kim Gallon and Marisa Parham, Mame-Fatou Niang and Maboula Soumahoro, and Jessica Marie Johnson and Martha Jones, women who used the digital humanities and social and other media to intervene in this moment from perspectives rigorously grounded in historical knowledge.

The liberationist imperative that so thoroughly animates each one of these scholars’ contributions speaks to the too-often silenced past of knowledge production and struggle on the part of those who have been most marginalized by white supremacy and its constitutive structures of domination. Taking Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s foundational 1995 work Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History as their point of departure, the conversations we held in July 2020 were premised on the understanding that silence is a verb. As such, they proceeded from a committed refusal to be quiet or quieted, even at the risk of displeasing, shocking, or disturbing adversaries and would-be allies alike. More precisely, these dialogues make clear how we as Black women in particular have staked claims to unsilenced humanist inquiry within the potentially generative but necessarily perilous space of the digital humanities and the wider online world.

#UnsilencedPast signaled a specific response to this moment’s exceptionally muscular call for us all to mobilize whatever platforms we have at our disposal in thoughtful and immediate service to the project of racial and social justice in our local, national, and global communities. Inasmuch as the university has called on us to embrace the digital as a space of pedagogical innovation and enrichment, it felt particularly important to go beyond discursive claims. It felt important to use our resources, both human and capital, to engage decisively with the world beyond our campuses—to put our time and money where our mouths are—and to do so in step with that world, without limiting our interventions to the chronology of the academic calendar or to the brick-and-mortar space of our campuses.

These were the aims we aspired to meet, the call we aspired to answer in convening these conversations among these scholars in the summer of 2020. We know well that the tragic moment in time that inspired us to gather has by no means passed, and so the urgency that runs through each conversation is as deeply resonant now as it was then. We know, too, that while we cannot undo the past of our unconscionable present, we can commit to intervening persistently throughout the networks of our digitally expanded world. We can commit to demanding alternative futures. We can keep choosing to remain disorderly and unsilenced.