Dive into the Ecosystem: Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil
K4BL’s Digital Curation Fellow tells us about scholarly confidence, her connections to the American Southwest, and why she starts all of her conference presentations with Langston Hughes.
Introduce yourself. Are you a student, postdoc, faculty? With what institution?
My name is Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil, and I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago. I was born in Long Beach, CA, and I spent many of my formative years going back and forth between southern California and Dallas, Texas. I can trace both sides of my family to the US Southwest and Gulf of Mexico region. Because of my many family migrations and movements due to socioeconomic factors in Southern California, we moved all over Southern California and eventually to Texas, my experience of home is fragmented and can’t be encompassed by a precise geographic point, like a city or state. What feels more precise, and what I have recently come to use to describe my origin, is that I am from the Southwest. No matter where I moved in adolescence, that remained the same, so it feels the most precise.
As a PhD candidate, I study these similar geographic conundrums, and the sense of belonging and non-belonging and the intricacies of empire formation in the 19th century. Specifically, I aim to create a sociolegal history of borderland diplomacy and security through Mexico Independence through the Mexican-American War, exploring how these developments shaped claims to Black citizenship and belonging, as well as how Black individuals navigated the shifting Atlantic slave systems. In many cases, the uncertainties and ambiguities in territorial maritime jurisprudence during that period that produced conditions for freedom, but also further precarity. I hope that my work will expand discourse about the highly contested spacio-legal landscape of the 19th century in the Gulf of Mexico.
As I was preparing for this interview, I realized that my fragmented geographic experience ties into the work and lives of enslaved people that I study in Texas in 1820-48. But I didn’t realize that until, really, today!
I have a theory that everyone who is doing a PhD is working something out personally through their research - I know that was true for me.
I think I am slowly realizing it has everything to do with me and my life [laughs]. I was born in Long Beach, came to Texas, and it was a jarring experience - it felt familiar because both Texas and Southern California have prominent Mexican cultural heritages - but [in Texas] you see the Texas flag more than the US flag. I remember on the first day of high school I stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance, as they make everyone do, and I tried to sit down after, but then they started another pledge - the Texas pledge! I was like, whoa, this is a whole new world. The history of this state is very… there are a lot of interesting tethers within Texas that I wanted to explore. Every time I thought I wasn’t going to study Texas, it just kept bringing me back. I think that people have a lot to say about Texas, so I want to add to the conversation that there are people here who are fighting against the systems that people talk about with regard to Texas, there were enslaved people here - there’s not a lot of scholarship on slavery in Texas - all of those things!
Tell me about your LifexCode lab or project and your role in it.
With LifexCode, I am the Digital Curation Fellow for Keywords for Black Louisiana. That has been a terrific experience, and I am happy to be involved in both the project and the larger ecosystem. It has made me a more informed scholar, and even beyond that, a more informed person generally with regards to how technology structures, or seeks to structure, our everyday lives. There is a lot of political education that comes with our education on the team, and that has been really transformative for me.
“[LifexCode] has made me a more informed scholar, and even beyond that, a more informed person generally with regards to how technology structures, or seeks to structure, our everyday lives.”
What does it mean to be a Digital Curation Fellow?
Formally, I am on the Digital team, but I often feel like my role is to bridge communication between digital and other teams. I engage with the concepts and concerns of the Research Team, and then I present them to the Digital Team and work collaboratively to imagine and create ways to represent the needs of other teams computationally. That’s how I would describe what the Digital Curation Fellow does.
How long have you been involved with LifexCode? What inspired you to join?
I began my involvement with LifexCode in 2023. I remember that because I was working on my dissertation prospectus and was interested in exploring digital storytelling tools in my work. At that time, the theme of the Black World Seminar was Digital Humanities. I was able to take the class virtually, and two seminar meetings in, I decided I wanted to be involved in one of the LifexCode projects. I ended up with Kinfolkology because I love their commitment to memorialization, justice, and redress. It was a great experience. Eola Dance introduced me to the term “structural parity,” which is a model of shared organizational authority or governance that was developed by the Montpelier Descendants Committee. Everything we did had descendants at the heart of it in ways that were new to me. Defining descendants is really difficult, and while I had an understanding of myself as a descendant of slavery, I never really knew what that meant community-wise. Those were a lot of the questions we worked through when creating our site. I joined Kinfolkology when it was new, so it was a sandbox of opportunity. It was a really fun, informative experience, and I think while Black women historians have always had descendants at the heart of their academic work, both explicitly and implicitly, it was nice to see ways of doing descendant engagement beyond writing books or presenting at conferences. Being able to create a digital interface where descendants can share stories and use our data, connect with other descendants, it was directly impactful work and that was a joy to bring into fruition. Before joining LxC, my form of direct engagement was writing, and that’s fine, but not everyone has time to read your 35-page article and look at the citations, but there are other ways of doing that type of work, and it’s been nice to see all the ways of doing it.
What is something you have done with LifexCode that you are especially proud of, were inspired by, or generally considered a great or significant experience?
There have actually been a lot. When I joined K4BL in 2024, a lot of the work I had done in Kinfolkology primed me for the work I have been doing in K4BL, which has been great, but the digital stuff was super new to me like the weeds of how the site comes to be and data management. For the longest time, I didn’t think I knew how to talk about it very well, so I would defer to the big-brained, brilliant digital specialists on the team. They would encourage me, like, “I think you know what you’re doing!” but I didn’t believe them. We presented at Johns Hopkins Love Data Week, and the Digital Team told me that they knew I knew what I was talking about and believed in me to go ahead and present. I was so nervous, and I was working on it at least a week in advance because I didn’t think I knew what I was doing, but at the end of it, I survived. I realized that I have learned a lot and made a lot of progress! I learned to trust myself in ways that I don’t think are always nurtured organically in the doctoral process. When you produce work as a doctoral student, you’re under scrutiny from the outside and yourself. So trusting myself and trusting what I know has been really difficult. Having that experience with the Digital Team trusting me and encouraging me to trust myself was really transformative and huge. I kept saying that, and they were like, “okay,” and I am like no, you do not know how much that changed everything for me! Now it extends beyond that, I feel comfortable talking about my own work, too, because they showed me that it’s okay to trust what I know.
That’s really powerful, and you will definitely carry that forward. Now I would love to know about a piece of media that inspires me. This is an opportunity to tell us about something you love, whether it’s a text you read in grad school that impacted you or an album you listen to on repeat.
I came back to poetry, actually. Aimé Césaire said that, "Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge." In undergrad, I was really nurtured and supported through Caribbean political theory, but also poetics, which are often political in nature. So every time I start a project, I also try to find a poem that encompasses the affective terrain that I am only getting the academic, sometimes very clinical understanding of. I make sure the poem adds the affect, and it raises the stakes of the work. Before I started my current project on slavery and the Gulf of Mexico - and Texas specifically - I created a River Reader because I was thinking about the Rio Grande, and lots of people have talked about the Mississippi River, but who has talked about the Rio Grande? I was able to use “Backwater Blues,” which is a song by Bessie Smith, and even “LSD,” which is Lakeshore Drive by Jamila Woods, to think about rivers and Black aquatic relationships. And of course there’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes, which I open almost all of my conference presentations with, and “Two Ways of Seeing a River” by Mark Twain. I also recently bought a poetry book about finding a forgotten river in Mexico, which has been amazing. I go to poems mainly, and songs, for specific inspiration.
Why do you begin conference presentations with a poem?
The affective element is really important to me and grounds me. It also grounds the work because a lot of the sources are obviously not written by the perspectives of enslaved people and the people I actually care about in the work, so finding another way to get at the personal experience or the personal emotional stakes of the work is important to me. Poetry really helps me get there. Derek Walcott is also instrumental in that.
What DH tools, methods, or theories do you recommend for folks exploring digital humanities against enclosure?
It’s not a formal method, but since joining K4BL, I often hear, “Move at the speed of trust and move at the speed of capacity” in our meetings. I feel like that is an important method for DH. The most crucial questions for us are not about whether we have a bunch of metadata that distills vast documents into discrete informational categories, but how we collect information and objects and why are they necessary and for whom are they are necessary. I’ve learned a lot about how metadata and informational objects are not neutral. Whether or explicitly stated or not, all digital projects have internal frameworks that are seeped in cultural and historical conventions and they guide how these objects are interpreted, distilled, and framed. As a team, we strive we strive to make collective decisions about our terms, our data collection, and more importantly, what we want our outputs to be and how they should be interpreted by the communities that matter to us. This process is necessarily unhurried. It’s not necessarily slow, but it can be slow. At its core, it is unhurried. It’s taught me a lot about the importance of slowing down and thinking collectively. It’s a humbling experience that I hold dear.
Established DH theories and frameworks that I adore and champion wherever I go are “technoskepticism,” which is an approach to technology introduced to me by Dr. Johnson and was created by the collaborative efforts of the DISCO Network, and “minimal computing,” a framework that guides computing practices and is designed with users facing constraints, such as limited hardware, software, network capacity, technical knowledge, in mind.
“The most crucial questions for us are not about whether we have a bunch of metadata that distills vast documents into discrete informational categories, but how we collect information and objects and why are they necessary and for whom are they are necessary.”
You know so much more than you think you do! What do you like to do in your free time or how do you recharge? We like to prioritize rest as part of our decolonial praxis.
I collect records, which is actually very nice. I never understood myself as a hobbyist, but I guess record collecting is one of those things! Whenever I go to a new city or place I’ve never been to, I try to look for 1) a record that I really, really want or 2) a record from someone who is from that city. For example, I went to Mexico City for my archives [in February] and they have so many record stores. I went in and was like, “Hey, I like jazz, what are some jazz musicians from Mexico City or Mexico generally?” and I just buy them. Sometimes I don’t even listen to them, I just trust the person at the record store and it’s an exciting surprise. It’s a really fun thing that I do. It just so happened that the owner of that record store was in a band, so I got his record, and it was really good!
Outside of record collecting and listening, I started playing Pokémon, which is also really fun. I grew up with Pokémon, but the constraints of undergrad and grad school, I just don’t play video games. I think I consider myself “too serious for video games,” but going back to those innocent enjoyments has been amazing. I’m realizing that I take myself too seriously. It’s been really great.
I really relate to that because my secret video game loves are Nancy Drew games and a Disney video game. It’s very relaxing and such a nice break from the real world.
This new Pokemon game is very calm, the music is lo-fi, there’s lots of water. You can be attentive to how many of us are looking for calm and ease because of everything going on in the world. I discovered Animal Crossing during the pandemic because I couldn’t go outside, so I would walk around the island and watch the waterfall. It’s really, really nice, a break from everything else.
Is there anything I didn’t ask about that you want to share?
One thing I want to share about how Keywords has inspired me beyond just the digital is the multi-lingualism of the group, which has been really awesome to witness! Like Cyntoya living abroad in Afro-Latinx communities, everyone reading and sometimes speaking multiple languages has inspired me to be more serious about my language acquisition. I studied French all throughout high school, but was I fluent? Not at all. When I started studying Texas closely, I realized I really needed Spanish, specifically for research. But I think being on the team has inspired me to think beyond the research. Having another language is beautiful and should be a priority. Now I am an A2 level Spanish speaker, and I attribute a lot of that drive to this being on this brilliant, brilliant team. And I think studying New Orleans and seeing how everyone pulls theories from the French Antilles and Latin American Studies, and how all of that collides here because of its imperial history, has empowered me to think similarly about Galveston, which rivaled New Orleans in terms of exports at the time. I remember I saw a source of a free black person from Trinidad who was taken into Galveston and falsely enslaved, and that was when I realized that Texas hasn’t gotten the Atlantic treatment, but it should. Working on this team, everyone is thinking transnationally and on that scale, which has empowered me to think on that scale and not shy away when the sources are telling me, “Cuba is important to Texas,” Trinidad is important to Texas, and really figure out what that means.
