News/Research

Conference Grants: Malika Imhotep on Toni Morrison and Digital Humanities

18 Aug, 2019

Conference Grants: Malika Imhotep on Toni Morrison and Digital Humanities

Malika Imhotep received a Spring 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending the American Literature Association annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. Imhotep presented "On Sethe’s Back: rememory, afro-cyborgues and black feminist ante-humanism." Read more about her experience in her own words below!

This past May I was honored to present on a panel focusing on Toni Morrison and the Digital Humanities organized by the Toni Morrison society during the 2019 meeting of the American Literature Association. During the session, which was moderated by Dr. Dana Washington, I presented my paper “On Sethe’s Back: rememory, afro-cyborgues and black feminist ante-humanism.” The paper, which was born in Dr. Gail De Kosnik’s History and Theory of New Media seminar, uses Morrison’s Beloved as a new media text alongside close readings of the 1998 film adaptation and scenes from the HBO SciFi Drama Westworld. It was a privilege to be in a room full of Morrison scholars committed to knowing and working deeply with her canon. We had conversations about the ways technology shows up in Morrison’s texts, the ways mapping software can be used to chart a course through her character’s migrations, and the ways our personal journey’s with Morrison’s work have been by turns both enhanced and interrupted by different tech/digital innovations in reading and comprehension. Now that Toni Morrison has ascended and become an ancestor it feels particularly special to have had the space to think about all the different kinds of networks, she knew, cultivated, participated in, critiqued and loved.