New Literary History

Abstract:

As a part of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, TEA (directed by Bruno and Johnson) is concerned with Black Puerto Rican data and those impacted by it. The projects, as discussed later in this paper, deal with and mitigate the limitations of diasporic archives while also riding the tension of the methodology of curating digital data sets and archives. Together, as two Black Puerto Rican women, we engage the practices Black Puerto Ricans, particularly Black femmes and other queer-identified Black Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, have used to forge a self-conscious, Black and African-descended (Afrodescendiente) community. Black Puerto Ricans have fought against the systematic erasure of Blackness from Puerto Rico's archive, as well as against the erasure of histories of Puerto Rican slavery from mainstream Puerto Rican, US, and even Caribbean popular memory. This paper explores the troubling and troubled water that spills forth when computational humanities meets the edges of empire and when Black diasporic life is centered in data analysis. What does it mean to confront people in data as we continue to lean into it? And where can that confrontation lead us and leave us? This paper is an exercise and calls to reexamine the digital with a Black digital-humanist lens to grapple with individuals and communities who might appear as binary code or, in the archive, as equations, parts, or marks. How can we look beyond the restraints we sometimes put on our data and ourselves and allow ourselves to be called into deeper intimacy with our materials? Black feminists have given us a choreography to build from if we are brave enough to fall into step with them.