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The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. New Digital Worldstraces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon.
E-Book Content
Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2019 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2019. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Risam, Roopika, author. Title: New digital worlds : Postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy / Roopika Risam. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2018024920 I ISBN 9780810138858 (pbk.) I ISBn ’ 9780810138865 (cloth) I ISBN 9780810138872 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism—Study and teaching. I Postcolonialism in literature. I Digital humanities. I Digital humanities—Study and teaching. Classification: LCC PN56.P555 R57 2019 I DDC 809.93358—dc23 LC record available at https:/lccn.loc.gov/2018024920 CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction The Postcolonial Digital Cultural Record Chapter 1 The Stakes of Postcolonial Digital Humanities Chapter 2 Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive Chapter 3 Remaking the Global Worlds of Digital Humanities Chapter 4 Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy Chapter 5 Rethinking the Human in Digital Humanities Conclusion A Call to Action Notes Index 139 145 171 w J ACKNOWLEDGMENTS While writing any book inevitably has twists and turns, this one brought more than the usual number. Without the skillful guidance and encour agement of Gianna Mosser at Northwestern University Press, this book would never have made it to print (or e-book, as the case may be). Gianna’s continued belief in this project, even at its most perplexing moments, kept it moving forward. Matt McAdam at Johns Hopkins University Press also provided invaluable advice early in this process, which shaped the book I ended up writing in meaningful ways. Thank you, as well, to the Northwestern University Press team, including Nathan MacBrien and Marianne Jankowski, and to Paul Mendelson and Jonathan Farr for their careful copyediting and proofreading. I am especially grateful to David McCallum for lending his design talents to the book cover. I greatly appreciate the invitations to present parts of this book at Columbia University, University of Virginia, University of New Hamp shire, Emory University, University of Maryland-College Park, York University, University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, Amherst College, Temple University, Lane Community College, Pennsyl vania State University,