This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Risam, New Digital Worlds
Discipline/Field: English, Digital Humanities, Postcolonial Studies
Year: 2019
Main Arguments & Concepts
In New Digital Worlds, Risam explores the potentialities of postcolonial digital humanities, and how a postcolonial approach expands on / intervenes in other DH approaches. Risam situates postcolonial DH within “critical digital humanities,” and defines the subfield’s goals as the aim to:“intervene in the colonial and neocolonial dimensions of the digital cultural record by fostering production of the multiple epistemologies for digital knowledge production that are needed to ensure that cultural heritage form communities of the Global South finds a place in the digital cultural record” (9).
Within the books, Risam discusses the ways that Western-based digital humanities can create limiting definitions of the field. For example, she criticizes the DH map, which attempts to trace the field by focusing on the location of DH centers, noting that “creating a global map based only on digital humanities corners erases the work of emerging digital humanities programs and the work of individual scholars” (73).
Digital Humanities Accent
To create a more expansive definition of DH, she advocates for locally-situated approaches. Risam terms this the “Digital Humanities Accent,” an awareness that positionality influences the way that DH work is realized, which, she writes, “is essential to undoing the center-periphery binary that produces hierarchical values of knowledge in digital humanities, according relative value to the Global North and effacing the contributions of the Global South” (82-83). Without acknowledging this DH accent, scholars will continue to reproduce colonizing power structures through digital humanities work.
Quotes
“Access to the means of cultural production that we have as people with the capacity to engage in digital humanities praxis means that we have the tools to reshape the dynamics of cultural power and to reclaim for individuals and communities the humanity that is routinely denied by the forces that produce oppression” (144).“With the move to generate software and algorithms that replicate ‘human’ processes, particular forms of the ‘human are authorized” (135).
Notes
Risam offers some really useful foundational information on the digital humanities, e.g. the discussion of the definition of DH, as well as potential and criticism (pp. 7-9). She also well-handles the hack/yack debate (53): she makes a case for the importance of building/breaking (which she notes is an important element of ‘hacking’), without dismissing theoretical approaches.The book contains useful pedagogical ideas: The Wikipedia class project was particularly intriguing (107) -- I could see using that assignment in an English class or a DTC class; it’s a great combination of practical skills, writing, and examining how platforms/contexts privilege particular knowledge traditions.
Risam offers some truly horrifying examples of problematic DH projects. In particular, I was suporsed to hear that some scholars are using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for labor (44; 129-130). Setting aside the problems with wages, the name of the platform itself references an erasure of human labor in technology, an illusion of automation.
Related
Mignolo and Walsh, On DecolonialitySpivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Risam’s point about AI and “authorized humanity” connects well to Spivak’s assessment of subaltern voices. If digital technologies reify the Eurocentric definition of ‘human,’ subaltern humanity could be even further marginalized.
Wemigwans, A Digital Bundle
