Debates in #BlackDH: Key Moments and Queer Directions in Black Studies Scholarship

Historically, the study of the digital has been an amorphous undertaking, spanning multiple fields and disciplines and positioning the digital as a democratic space open to multiple communities and perspectives. Despite this ideology, scholarship, including research on #transformDH to #BlackDH, has demonstrated the need for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion within the digital humanities. Specifically, these hashtags have been used to curate diverse scholarship while demonstrating the need to create a scholarship that focuses on an intersectional understanding of the digital humanities. By drawing on the histories of research and researchers both within and outside of Black studies, this article will illuminate the means and methods of producing scholarship at this critical intersection while speaking to the need for greater inclusion of Black feminist, queer, and justice-oriented perspectives. Pushing back against the impetus to add identity to the title of a field or framework in name but not practice, this article refines the histories and contributions of multiple disciplines and standpoints that should be included and credited when defining the Black in Black digital humanities. Whether sparking hashtag activism and crowdsourcing digital labor to developing new terminology and fields, Black digital humanities draws on and develops work that is already critically engaged with the intersection of identity and digital studies in theory and praxis. By focusing on the development of the Black digital humanities and its defining characteristics, this article will also articulate how the nexus of digital research, activism, and pedagogy offers key interventions and new directions for both Black studies and the digital humanities.