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Editor's Notes

• #2: I do want to acknowledge that we are on the occupied, unceded land of SQUA-mish, TSLAY-wa-tooth, and MUS-kwee-um nations. We can’t talk about postcolonialism without acknowledging that we are here because of settler colonialism and that talking about postcolonialism or decolonization as intellectual category is a privilege of people who do not continually experience the violence of colonialism.
• #3: In the interests of time, I’m going to talk about the pedagogical implications of putting postcolonial studies and the digital humanities in conversation with each other. I’ll illustrate these ideas through the example of a project I have been working on with my students. I can go into more detail during the q&a and will post more about this on my blog in the coming weeks. Plus, the ideas here are foundational ones to a chapter of mine on postcolonial digital pedagogy in the Postcolonial Digital Humanities book. Since the 1990s, scholars have been writing about pedagogical implications of postcolonial studies. The task of teaching postcolonial literature requires a different set of knowledges, tools, and approaches than, other kinds of literatures. Because of the nature of postcolonial literature and scholarship, postcolonial scholars have written at length about decolonizing the classroom and making the space student driven, helping students understand theoretical frames, and the challenges of interdisciplinary awareness and contexts for postcolonial texts. When we think about postcolonial studies in relation to digital humanities in the classroom, we’re left with many of the same concerns, plus a few new ones: additional ones include the way that building can be a form of knowing or of experiential education; the need for an orientation towards process instead of product, concerns about platforms, and the ethics of bringing students into our own research.
• #4: This is the protoype for The Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness. Pins on the maps indicate locations within texts that explore what ‘blackness’ means in a local context. The project began with my interest in tracing how black radical thought traveled through throughout the postcolonial world. While teaching a class on global blackness, I noticed that my students were having difficulty negotiating the multiple histories, cultures, and geographies in the books we were reading. I wanted to find a way to give them an experience of the relationship between textuality and spatiality so they could understand colonialism and settler colonialism better. So, I showed the students a map and assigned them to think about how we could use the map to enhance literary interpretation. On the previous list, student driven pedagogy is at the top. This project was a true collaboration: student-driven. More than an assignment given to the students, the project, platform, data, was selected and designed from the beginning along with the students. The process not product driven nature of the project – that we were not aiming for full representation or completion but from the knowledge gained in the process. Students sourced locations for texts, composing entries with photo or video, a location, geocoordinates, year of publication, and a quote with explication. We experimented with platform – Google Earth, GIS, and Google Maps – we ended up working with Google Maps engine because it offered flexibility without too much of a learning curve. I want to note that I had included platform matters on the list of pedagogical implications, but the spirit of postcolonial studies suggests that we should be leaning towards more accessible platforms, ones that are cheaper and lighterweight, technologies that are more wildly available. There’s an ethical angle there. The full screen shows a global distribution of locations.
• #5: Pins generate entries indicating locations within texts that explore what ‘blackness’ means in a local context. This is an entry on Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poem “Inglan is a Bitch” with video that pulls from YouTube. Immediately, there were problems – often locations in texts are fictionalized, contemporary maps and historical map data may differ. This is where the knowledge emerged from the building processes – one of the facets of postcolonial digital humanities pedagogy. In the digital humanities, we tend to privilege the The kinds of knowledges that emerged were frequently interdisciplinary insights for the students. This was a moment of success because of the interdisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies itself. A quick example, the novel Anita and Me by Meera Syal takes place in Tollington, a fictional place. My students became intent on deciphering where this might actually be. Trying to find a location corresponding to a map helepd them understand the relationship between writing and place. Here’s what a student said about this in a reflection paper: “ I visualize what’s happening when I read, what the characters look like or sound like, but I never really think about where they are. Rationally, I know the novel has a setting. Trying to find a location for Anita and Me, I learned something about the history of Birmingham, why immigrants from the Caribbean went there for work, and about the rise of racism in the 1970s. Using Google Maps and through street views and photos in my research, I had an experience of Birmingham that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.” So in assembling data for the map, the student was able to make important connections between geography and space.
• #6: Zooming in on the map shows local trends – this is London. This is really interesting because there are clusters here that correlate to settlement patterns for immigrants. So there are a lot of pins clustered around Brixton, where many Caribbean immigrants settled. Additionally Hounslow and Southhall were largely populated with South Asian immigrants. And it’s interesting to see that there were ways that South Asian identity was being conceptualized through the language of blackness – both a phenomenon of governmental labels and solidarity movements in the late 70s and early 80s. So while the larger map offers a scale of texts across the globe, there are local insights to be gleaned as well. This was another interdisciplinary insight
• #7: Connect to next steps In many sense the shape of the project as is is limited by the student engagement – that there are ethics to student labor. If doing this right, it should be more difficult for you than for them I’m intentionally putting next steps for this project last to emphasize that this project is collaborative with students – that this is the essence of pedagogy for me. Historical map layers Participatoryy Public More data Having show you these components of the the cultural atlas project, I want to say a bit about the pedagogical implications derived from my experience Minimal platform… (though not minimal computing standards) – should make students think criticall about technologies,
• #8: All of these ideas about postcolonial and pedagogy will be in praxis at HILT!