Gallon connects the digital humanities to Black studies by using the concept of technology as a space for “expos[ing] humanity as a racialized social construction” (Gallon 2016, 1). Pointing to the nearly nonexistent literature on Black studies represented through the digital humanities, Gallon makes a case for considering technology as a moment in a longstanding mode of Black resistance within practices of Eurocentric oppression. I liked especially that Gallon points out practices of “black technophobia” within academia – the idea that Black people have an aversion to technology. I was not aware of this term before reading this piece, and I found it both surprising and unsurprising – in an age of employing Instagram and Twitter infographics in order to disseminate racial, gendered, and sexual theories on resistance and oppression, I imagine that many Black people and people of color are actually providing an abundance of emotional labor. In the same vein, it is unsurprising that this emotional labor remains unrecognized in a world structured on racialized hierarchy.
