Gallon seeks to highlight how technology can further expose humanity as a racialized social construct by conceptualizing a relationship between digital humanities and Africana/African American/Black studies, which she names black digital humanities. Naming black digital humanities as such helps to put a name to the unnamed, bringing the concept into existence—though precise definitions of what it constitutes might continue to be elusive. For Gallon, black digital humanities is less of a fixed ‘thing’ than a “constructed space to consider the intersections between the digital and blackness” (2).
Expanding on the potential of this space, Gallon specifically draws attention to black digital humanities as a ‘technology of recovery’ that is “characterized by efforts to bring forth the full humanities of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools” (2). This entails the recovery of lost historical and literary texts, as well as troubling foundational conceptualizations of humanity. Drawing Amy Earhart’s work on the ‘politics of recovery’, Gallon frames efforts at recovery as not just locating lost texts, but as also recovering black authors’ humanity.
For Gallon, the space of Black digital humanities also flags the significance of seriously considering the politics that have racialized literary, philosophical, and historical texts—thus digital tools and platforms ought to be “mobilized to interrogate and disclose how the humanities are developed out of systems of power” (4). This includes considering how the very tools and infrastructure applied in digital humanities were developed from a racialized foundation that privileges Western cultural traditions—and questioning if those tools would be used in the same way if they had been developed to explore texts that have been marginalized in the humanities. For Gallon, this demonstrates how the digital acts as “a mutual host for racism and resistance” (4).
EXEMPLARY QUOTES OR IMAGES?
“The black digital humanities probes and disrupts the ontological notions that would have us accept humanity as a fixed category, an assumption that unproblmatically emanates in the digital realm. The black digital humanities, then, might be defined as a digital episteme of humanity that is less tool-oriented and more invested in anatomizing the digital as both progenitor of and host to new—albeit related—forms of racialization. These forms at once attempt to abolish and to fortify a taxonomy of humanity predicated on racial hierarchies” (3)
