Title: Digital Black Counterpublics: Leveraging Technology for Impact, Engaged Research, and Territorializing the Freedom Colony Diaspora
Stream: Ethnicity, Difference, Identity
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Andrea Roberts, Texas A & M University, United States
Valentina Aduen, Texas A & M University, United States
Jennifer Blanks, Texas A & M University, United States
Schuyler Carter, Texas A & M University, United States
Kendall Girault, Texas A & M University, United States
Abstract:
After Emancipation, formerly enslaved African Americans in Texas, a state in the U.S., founded historic Black settlements known as freedom colonies. Since their founding, their populations have dispersed, physical traces have disappeared, and memories of their locations, borders, and founding vanish as descendants die. Surviving descendants around the world, steward what remains of freedom colonies in Texas because of cultural practices and commemorative acts through which identity is reproduced. Our research shares insights from our interactions with the freedom colony diaspora—geographically dispersed descendants—during a crisis. Their greatest challenge--intangible heritage--is also the source of their persistence and cultural agency. Culturally rooted approaches and memory transfer, for example, have prevented the complete erasure of freedom colonies which are often unmapped and unrecorded in public records or archives. A now more challenging endeavor, when contending with twin pandemics—COVID-19 and racial violence. Our team has leveraged technology to engage, collect, spatialize, and secure place data alongside traditional ethnographic methodologies. Though not a new idea in the humanities, using a digital Black Commons focused on recording Black feelings, memories, and affect is a novel approach to public engagement in urban planning. After being forced to conduct collaborative research and heritage conservation planning with our community partners entirely online, we analyzed transcripts of interviews from our online engagement during 2020-21. We examined freedom colonies’ descendants’ conceptions of identity, how they define community and emergent cultural resilience strategies when contending with COVID-19, and the racial uprising after the murder of George Floyd.
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