This page was created by Collin Hardwick. 

Re-Mapping Mansfield Park: In Search of the Silenced Spaces of Slave History

Theoretical Interventions

As I mentioned earlier, I see Re-mapping Mansfield Park: In Search of the Silenced Spaces of Slave History as a move from theory to praxis, from postcolonial reading of Jane Austen to decolonial re-reading of Western history and epistemology through her work. Since the beginning of our DTC 560 course, we have been reading theories of decolonial moves in Digital Humanities (DH) that prompt the DH scholars not only to question the creation and dispersion of knowledge by dominant races, but also to break the dominant epistemological structures to deconstruct layers of epistemological injustices and re-create narratives of resistance. This project to a larger extent challenges the logo-centric structure of knowledge that segregate the novel from its historical sphere and provides general audience a partial view of harmony and progress in British society, leaving out the fact that thousands of black lives are being taken to ensure that financial prosperity of the plantation owners’ families living in England. I would like to use Duarte's term "epistemic blindness" to define the gaps in readers' understanding of a larger scenario, constructed and manipulated by Western epistemology. According to Duarte, one of the important decolonial moves for a digital humanities scholar is to unpack the multidimensional epistemic blindness and I see my project unpacking not only the erased history, but also the systematic perpetuation of epistemic blindness through canonical culture. Echoing Tara McPherson, I would like to define my work as a creative criticism that explores alternative ways of looking at networks of objects, places, people, and ideas, that challenge western notion of linear narration, time, history, and space. I want my readers to experience, “networked  thinking” (Duarte 52) by navigating the “untidy” media-saturated text of this project that enmeshes distant geographical spaces and parallel historical times with Austen’s primary story universe.

One of my objectives to create this project was to take the conversation of historical erasures from scholarly research to the common understanding of general readers. While designing my Scalar book, I looked at the personal blogs and popular reviews of Austen fans to see how they perceive the manipulation of history in Jane Austen's work. Most of the readers' responses revolve around the debate whether Jane Austen was pro-slavery or anti-slavery; most of the conversations become either a criticism or a defense of this famous canonical author. However, my theoretical intervention into this conversation is to make the readers think beyond the cycle of blame-game and understand the larger context of re/framing, re/covering history. I want them to understand how an alternative reading of these canonical texts, read and loved by people for centuries, can help us visualize how history is re/formed, how the very epistemological structure that teaches us to perceive canonical authors in certain ways leads us to a pre-meditated trajectory of "epistemic blindness" that sustains the racial logic in more covert ways. The conversation that is necessary is not about the  author's ideology, but about the ideological structures of the system, about the networks of power that participate in the creation and dispersion of history and re-inscribe our understanding and define our relationship with history. I want my readers to leave this project with an alternative perspective, the discomfort of seeing the unseen, uncovering the “covered”.

I want them to see the "lenticular logic" that Tara McPherson talks about in her essay "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation". The project will propel the readers to see the patterns of racial formation and understand that seeing in new ways means knowing and interacting with the world in new ways. In “Making a Case for Black Digital Humanities” Kim Gallon also illustrates how digital technology can be used to "explore the racialized construction or humanity" and "restore" the humanity that is "lost and stolen" by the Western epistemological tradition. Thus, the aim of the project is not to make readers perceive Jane Austen as an author locked in past, but to think and explore the "so what" question that arises from Austen's silence about history; what does it exemplify about the ways history has been shaped and reshaped since the beginning of slavery and colonization? How this understanding shapes our relationships with contemporary representations of history? In "Decolonizing the Digital Archive" Cushman advocates similar form of intellectual decolonization that my project aims at doing by undoing the notion of “past” and seeing the persistent material consequences of erasures of time, history, and space.

I would like to conclude with a small success story that made me understand the theoretical intervention I have made through my project. One of the visitors of DTC Showcase 2018 at Washington State University was deeply influenced by the Story Map. A week later, when the person saw me on campus, she stopped to talk and reminded me how visually powerful and disturbing the Story Map was that made her re-think about the novel. She informed me that she has read Jane Austen and watched the adaptations, but never thought about the underlying patterns of racial violence in those stories. She called my project "cool" but in a completely different way! And this is how I measure the success of my scholarly intervention.

 

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