Spring 2021 Lab Notes from the Director
A long post for a long year, but we are hunkering down for the fight
Welcome to the Spring 2021 Lab Notes! If you are reading this on mobile in Gmail, spoiler alert: This post is long. Click “Read On” to read the whole thing on the web straight from the source.
We survived. When we began this adventure into doing Digital Humanities against enclosure, we couldn’t be sure that we would. Last January, chaos seemed to be the theme of the world. From the attempted coup on January 6th to the debates over vaccination plans to the mass murder of Asian women in Atlanta to the volcanoes exploding in the Caribbean to the Derrick Chauvin verdict coming at the same time as the murders of Adam Toledo and Ma’Khia Bryant to the closed archives and the closed Europe and the open classroom with Delecia and Tree Africa’s bones on display to the rising rates of infection in Puerto Rico to the to the to the and and and….
We survived and yet who is the we and did we survive if we aren’t all here (although we also believe in ghosts here at LifexCode)? And what are we to do here on the other side of a survival that reverberates with enclosure and “Pox.”1 As the U.S. contemplates going back to normal (and as the pandemic rages in India, across the African continent, in Brazil, and even as only forty-two percent of the population in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama have been vaccinated) the rush to get back to business as usual is pervasive. We are nearly a year forward in time from Dionne Brand’s words on the pandemic, but they could have been written yesterday:
“I know, as many do, that I’ve been living a pandemic all my life; it is structural rather than viral; it is the global state of emergency of antiblackness. What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expose even further the endoskeleton of the world.”
Whatever the old normal was, we reject it. Whatever the new normal is, we are down to build. We embraced the keyword INSURGENCY to face down this thing that is the Pox and is also “pandemic and protest” and is also these attempts to extend the terrors of 1441 into the future and we will use all we’ve got to dismantle, bit by bit, the enclosures that seek to destroy us.
Yeah sure, but what did you REALLY do this year?
Follow me camera.
First of all: Congratulations!!!!
A huge congratulations to all of our LifexCode members and projects for creating and being in community this term. A few specific congratulations to:
Georgia McFarland (Food Apartheid Podcast) who will graduate with HONORS in Africana Studies and a major in Psychology. A 2021 Center for Africana Studies Honors Thesis, Mcfarland’s LifexCode project is titled “The Creation of a Food Apartheid in Baltimore” a podcast and website on food justice and gentrification in Baltimore. The project incorporates zoning maps, newspaper clippings, interviews, and ethnographic work with the Black Yield Institute, and offers an analysis of the relationship between property, poverty, and Johns Hopkins University’s interventions in the city of Baltimore. Explore the site and listen to the interviews here.
Ayah Nuriddin (Taller Electric Marronage) will defend her dissertation and graduate from the History of Medicine Program at Johns Hopkins University. She will begin a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University in the fall.
Sarah Bruno (Taller Electric Marronage, and the “coming soon” Microdatas carolineses: Fernando Pico’s Archive) will defend her dissertation and graduate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. She will begin work on a new LifexCode project, publishing a digital collection of Fernando Picó’s research on Puerto Rico. She will also be facilitating Afrorriqueñes, a Black Puerto Rican global solidarities event in Chicago that starts May 24th.
Robin McDowell (Keywords: Research New Orleans) will defend her dissertation and graduate from the Department of History at Harvard University. She will begin a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her fall course, “Free The Land: Black Histories of Environmental Racism (L90 AFAS 288)” is open for registration right now!
Leila Blackbird (University of Chicago, Keywords Colonial Louisiana) has a book chapter in the forthcoming Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community, edited by Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé, and Andrew J. Jolivétte (University of Washington Press, 2021).
Olivia Barnard (Johns Hopkins University), Emma Bilski (Johns Hopkins University), Leila Blackbird, Ellie Palazzolo (Johns Hopkins University) and Jessica Marie Johnson (Keywords Colonial Louisiana) will be presenting at the Association for Documentary Editing Annual Conference on July 13, 2021. They are working on a digital edition of colonial Louisiana documents titled “Kinship and Belonging: Reimagining the Place of Black Life in the Louisiana Colonial Archive.”
Olivia Barnard, Maya Kortezky (Johns Hopkins University), Robin McDowell (Keywords Research New Orleans) and Christina Thomas will be presenting at the Southern Historical Association Annual Conference in New Orleans in October presenting their research on Black historical methodologies for researching Black New Orleans.
Christina Thomas (Johns Hopkins University, Taller Electric Marronage, Metropolitan United Methodist Church Archive, Visualizing Mississippi Freedom Summer & LifexCode Program Manager) recently completed a StoryMap celebrating the 195th anniversary of Metropolitan United Methodist Church, a historic Black church in Baltimore, Maryland. Developed with church members, this StoryMap details the history of the church incorporating sound, videos, and archival material. The site will go live this summer—stay tuned!
Kelsey Moore (Johns Hopkins University, Taller Electric Marronage) with Dark Laboratory’s Tatiana Eshelman is co-author of a roundtable titled “Electric Laboratory: Black Feminists on Freedom, Land, the Body, and the Archive: A Virtual Roundtable” at Public Books.
Jada Similton (Michigan State University, Taller Electric Marronage) gave a talk at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute on Tourism, Colonialism and Racism across the Diaspora, moderated by Dash Harris.
And on and on and on.
This spring, LifexCode sponsored or hosted an array of events that challenge the container of DH to create something new.
Keywords Colonial Louisiana Lead Chair Emma Bilski, Sheridan Libraries Librarian Heather Furnas and LxC Program Manager Christina Thomas organized two French paleography workshops, both led by Johns Hopkins graduate student Rachel Waxman.
Our first public event for Electric Marronage, organized by Electrician Kelsey Moore and Dark Lab Technician Tatiana Eshelman, was a collaboration with Dark Laboratory. Led by Tao Leigh Goffe, the “Dark Lab” is a collective of Black and Indigenous scholars doing intellectual and creative work at the intersection of Black and Indigenous life. Electric Laboratory, the Dark Laborary x Electric Marronage crossover event, featured Tao Leigh Goffe (Cornell University), Tiffany Lethabo King (Georgia State University), Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vazquez (Michigan State University), and Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University) in conversation. The video is archived and available to the public for one month here. Also visit our Public Books conversation and digital exhibit here. Thank you to Professor Goffee for the editorial direction!
Taller Electric Marronage also welcomed it’s second artist-in-residence, the amazing Rebecca Mwase. Mwase delivered an artist talk in conversation with capacity builder and Art-in-Praxis founder Jessica Solomon at the Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, Future conference organized by Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
As an artist-in-residence, and in collaboration with artist-in-residence Halle-Mackenzie Ashby, Mwase hosted workshops for the Electricians and the public, and is currently designing a public/digital showcase.
Electric Marronage welcomed Bombazo Dance Co. into the taller. We hosted bomba dance workshops every Wednesday of February as a celebration of life and African diasporic history. Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vazquez also founded and curated the Afro-Latinx Lab, a series of conversations and workshops by Afro-Latinx scholars on history, culture, and life from a Black and Latinx perspective.
Along with posts on race and tourism, bomba, family, and more, Electric Marronage offered interviews of cutting edge black digital practitioners Kristina Kay Robinson (and her avatar Maryam de Capita) and Cierra Chenier of Noir N’ Nola. As Robinson stated about her work with Maryam and the Temple of Color and Sound:
“The lesson about Black freedom is the people: We always fought for it. Freedom is our natural state; it’s natural for the body to do what it has to in order to find it. In our case, it was to rebel. By living in rebellion we are also bound to those in captivity. Temple of Color and Sound is a space where we affirm these truths through ritual, recreation, through song, dance and conversation. So it’s not about marronage as an exceptional state, even if it is exceptional in the experience of Black people. It’s about willing freedom to be possible for us and others. “
We also gasped, cried, screamed, laughed, and died over and over again at the Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought book launch. Edited by Briona Jones (MSU Ph.D. Class of ‘21, incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut), Jones was joined by black feminist artist, writer, and interspeciesist Alexis de Veaux. Revel in our joy for each other through our group poem here.
Keywords for Black Louisiana continued to welcome collaborators and expand its skillsets, critical knowledges and community. Digital Chair Ellie Palazzolo organized a TEI/XML workshop with Dr. Alex Gil (Columbia University). The Keywords Marronage team welcomed expert visits from Dr. Tom Lippincott (Johns Hopkins University), computer scientst and creator of Starcoder, a machine learning framework for humanists engaging data, and Lead Chair organized the visit of Dr. Annette Joseph-Gabriel (University of Michigan) of Mapping Marronage, “an interactive visualization of the trans-Atlantic networks of intellectual, creative and political exchange created by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century.” We also partnered with the JHU History Department’s Digital History Workshop to bring Simon Newman, author of “Hidden in plain sight: Long-term escaped slaves in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Jamaica,” the William and Mary Quarterly’s first born-digital publication and Josh Piker, editor of the W&M to discuss the possibilities open and digital publications offer scholars.
Finally, Electric Marronage and LifexCode were honored to accept the 2020 Garfinkel Prize from the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association. The ASA DHCaucus has been a space for insurgent, creative, and community-oriented DH thought and is full of incredibly smart and thoughtful scholars. This award means so much to us. Thank you.
As we move into the summer months, we have a few project updates:
We love it when our projects find supportive homes where they can spread their wings and fly! The Rachel Flowers Digital Exhibition (PI: Christina Thomas) will be leaving LifexCode and moving to Messiah University Libraries. This archive centers Rachel Flowers, an alumna of the college, was the first Black woman to graduate from the institution.
constellations: More interviews on black digital practice to come and they will now be part of constellations, a black digital practice interview series, a collaboration with and hosted at salt.codes, a new Digital Black Studies publication at Medim hosted by the irLHumanities: Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities and LifexCode.
Electric Marronage will be slowing down a bit and moving deep into an incubation year of writing, community-building, and publication. This means fewer but more intentional events and a slower blogging schedule. But look out for pieces by the Kin Curators and the Electricians in the months ahead. On May 13th, we’re excited to host SOLIDARITIES: A Conversation about Solidarities, Abolition and Relationality (co-sponsored with JHU’s Latin America in a Globalizing World).
This conversation features Kim Tran, Janey Lew, FuifuilupeNiumeitolu, Amarilys Estrella, and Shariana Ferrer discussing activism and coalition building in Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, Indigenous, Asian, Black, and all of the overlapping and cross-relations between. We’re also looking forward to hosting a poetry event with some surprise guests this June. More soon.
The Visualizing Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, led by Christina Thomas, also completed the beginning stages of a dataset on the more than 1,000 participants of the Mississippi Summer Project, a strategic civil rights initiative led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the summer of 1964. This project is part of research Thomas is completing for her dissertation on Geraldine Wilson, a Freedom Summer volunteer and civil rights education activist.
Keywords for Black Louisiana will be moving deeper into our commitment to New Orleans with partnerships with Dr. Rosanne Adderley and Dr. Guadelupe Garcia and students (graduate and undergraduate) at Tulane University. Keywords Colonial Louisiana continues to identify documents and keywords for their digital edition of documents on Black life from the colonial archive. Keywords Marronage has finished extracting material on Louisiana runaway ads and is moving into project planning with ontologies of Black fugitivity and black geographies as their guide. Keywords Research New Orleans continues to chart out methodologies for doing Black historical research, whether from the visual archive or following Black reseachers through their attempts to preserve Black history in the city.
Finally, LifexCode would like to wish Program Manager Christina Thomas a bon voyage into her dissertation writing year! She will be stepping back from her LxC roles of Program Manager and Lead Editor at Electric Marronage to focus on her dissertation, a biography of civil rights activist Geraldine Wilson. Halle-MacKenzie Ashby will step into her role as Lead Editor at Electric Marronage and Brooke Lansing will join LxC on Logistics and Programming. Congratulations Christina, Halle, and Brooke!
The world has changed and will continue to do so. There is no going back to “normal.” In the United States, several states, including Louisiana, are attempting to pass bills banning “critical race theory” or so-called “divisive topics” in an attempt to shutter humanities education that teaches about the history of slavery, genocide, conquest, and extraction that characterize so much of the nation’s history. In France, 2021 has been declared the “Year of Napoleon” Bonaparte, “the man who restored slavery to the French Caribbean” among other atrocities. A report issued by a UK Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (that has since been challenged on the methodology used and claims made) claimed race and racism might exist in the UK but “geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion all have a greater impact on life chances.”
These attempts only prove that making history and creating knowledge at the intersection of Black, Ethnic, and critical race studies remains a site of struggle (and the university has never been the final destination or sole site of that struggle). Our insurgency continues, but as we turn to the summer and imagine what Fall 2021 will bring, we are also aware of how much we’ve been through and how long the struggle will be. To face down whatever comes next, we will need to learn to hold more than we ever have before, perhaps more than we think we can bear. In the year to come, year two of our work against enclosure, we return to Tina Campt’s reflections at the Loophole of Retreat exhibit and gathering held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019 and we turn to the dictionary of Black feminist resistance she created for a new keyword to guide the work ahead.
The keyword for Fall 2021 to Spring 2022 is VESSEL: “a container for holding something; a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused”
Stay well,
Jessica Marie Johnson, Director
Ways to support the work:
I’m listening to the Octavia’s Parables podcast with adrienne marie brown and Toshi Reagon. Season two opens with the book Parable of the Talents and Bankole, one of the characters, describing exactly the timeline we are living now as a slow apocalypse or “The Pox.”