Black Digital South

For many scholars and creative practitioners of colour, the digital seems code for deferral in terms of achieving a more just and equal world. Yet technologization has already begun to reshape our modes of work – in research, teaching and practice. If the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated processes of automation and digitalization that maintain racial biases, how do we seek racial or economic justice? What regimes of care, governance or safety are emerging? From the southern hemisphere, and Africa in particular, which holds almost 30% of the mineral deposits essential to the global digital economy, what modes of analysis, critique, imagination and care are needed to attend to the unequal relations of raced, gendered, sexualised and economised difference to the digital?

Digital technologies have made new kinds of archives and research access possible. In doing so, they have also reinforced research silos and ‘silenced’ debates around power in terms of archive, access and difference through the myth of data’s ‘neutrality’ [1] . Globally, people of colour are often outside of high-level decision-making processes around the implementation of digital technologies while deeply embedded in the labour economy of ‘big data’ through mineral extraction, infrastructure building and offshore services [2]. As recent events in India show, digital technologies (especially social media) have enabled unprecedented attacks on democratic pluralism that build upon older notions of national ‘purity’ [3]. Yet critical theoretical interventions around difference remain woefully underutilized in analyses of digitalization and data often replicating inequality and disenfranchisement. In fact, despite the bulk of the world’s population residing in the Southern Hemisphere, debates around digitalization and automation continue to centre the North. Further, even when theoretical interventions around difference – especially race – pertain to the South, they emerge from the North.

Residency programme

The Black Digital South residency programme forms part of RGC’s broader umbrella, Critical Digital Humanities South. Through this NIHSS funded initiative, RGC seeks to shift the geography of the conversation, creating hospitable spaces and platforms for artists, scholars and activists to address the digital turn from Global South locations, perspectives and experiences. In doing so, we hope to answer Safiya Umoja Noble’s call for Digital Humanities scholars and practitioners to engage African and Black diaspora studies, and for scholars and practitioners in African and Black diaspora studies to push the digital humanities beyond purely “campus-based initiatives” [4].

RGC awards two Black Digital South residencies annually. Residency fellows are encouraged to engage with the centre’s research community, and to enrich its programme with creative, interdisciplinary projects. As a digital residency, fellows can work remotely, but in-person research trips, activations and exhibitions are also supported. In recognition of their extraordinary work, we are thrilled to welcome our inaugural fellows, Haydée Bangerezako (scholar in residence) and Thandi Loewenson (artist in residence).

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[1] Benjamin, R. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. London: Polity Press & Rolph-Trouillot, M. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press [2] Arora, P. 2016. “Bottom of the Data Pyramid: Big Data and the Global South.” International Journal of Communication 10:1681-1699 [3] Udupa, S. 2018. “Enterprise Hindutva and social media in urban India. Contemporary South Asia.” 26 (4): 453–467 [4] Noble, S. 2019. “Toward a Critical a Black Digital Humanities.” in Debates in the Digital Humanities eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.