Malika Imhotep at the National African American Digital Humanities Conference
Malika Imhotep received a Fall 2018 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending the first National African American Digital Humanities Conference. Read more about her experience in her own words below!
Attending the First National African American Digital Humanities Conference hosted by the African American Digital Humanities initiative at the University of Maryland, College Park this past October reignited my commitment to working in the intersections of black studies and new media. With the theme “Intentionally Black, Intentionally Digital” the conference welcomed a variety of critical engagements that pushed black studies beyond its perceived limits and challenged Digital Humanities to fully account for raced, gendered, and sexed experiences of the digital. I was particularly inspired by the work of black archivist in digitizing records the US and the Caribbean that help the diaspora to see itself more fully. Another highlight was the panel “Digital Life and Death” during which my colleague in the Department of African Diaspora studies, Rashad Timmons, presented a paper on “Hashtag Bodies” alongside Dr. Tonia Sutherland’s (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) work on “Dead Reckoning” and the violences of post-homous digital reproduction, and Victor Bramble’s (University of Maryland) work on survival and black digital practices of life making. This panel was phenomenal. The scholars engaged black death in the digital with a deliberate rigor and care for black life. In the panel “A Black. Digital. Future” D’arcee Charington Neale offered us an immersive engagement with the “(Afro) Future” driven by the survival of a black queer disabled protagonist. And the panel on “Black Code” based the Special Issue of The Black Scholar which was edited by Mark Anthony Neal and Jessia Marie Johnson was absolutely spellbinding. Marisa Parham presented an example of what could be called ‘black feminist coding praxis’ that was completely paradigm shifting. The work shared by the folks invested in “black code” as both a technology and a history asked us to imagine a new ethics of engagement with the digital in which our theories could break and dance through the interfaces and servers we turn to to hold and share information.