In Whispers and Furtive Glances: Assessing Digital Literacies and (H)ac(k)tivism in Post-Embargo Cuba

As the digital humanities has attempted to develop and find a home in various disciplines, it has produced a kind of urgency to articulate a set of values or "best practices" that might encapsulate the sort of work that digital humanists actually do. And while some of these debates have taken a sort of "big tent" or gate keeping approach to this push or call to define the digital humanities, most digital humanists have agreed that collaboration is among the highest regarded principles that provides structure for their work. In her essay, "'This is Why We Fight': Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities," Lisa Spiro extols the virtues of collaboration in the digital humanities by juxtaposing it against work in the traditional humanities:

 

"Whereas the traditional humanities typically value originality, authority, and authorship--an ethos based in part on the scarcity of information and the perceived need for gatekeepers--the Digital Humanities Manifesto instead promotes remixing, openness, and the wisdom of the crowd. For the digital humanities, information is not a commodity to be controlled but a social good to be shared and reused."

 

In advocating for moving beyond an emphasis on "originality, authority, and authorship" and embracing the "wisdom of the crowd," Spiro in many ways implies that the content that is produced in collaboration with others, is a collaboration that is not restricted to classrooms, departments, universities, disciplines, or any other manner of perceieved geographical or linguistic obstacle; rather, she suggests that each member might bring something different to the table, so to speak. As it concerns my own profile as a prospective digital humanist, my strengths lie mostly in my strong theoretical background and my capacity to extend that theoretical background to consult with others on how content is developed, formed, and delivered to others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While these strengths may appear banal or ordinary on the surface, they are integral to the work that is done in collaboration with others in the digital humanities insofar as they help parse, clarify, and remediate content and/or rhetorical decisions that might overlook some of the more formative and presumptuous moves within work around cultural criticism and identity politics. Responding to as well as sharing much of what inheres in Alan Liu's critique of existing digital humanities practices in "Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?", my approach is very much predicated on building advocacy and critical consciousness into the very fabric of traditional work in the humanities. By accentuating the ways in which Cuba's specific context shapes and provides structure for the Cuban peoples' engagement with and development of digital literacies, this project proposes "to extend reflection on core instrumental technologies in cultural and historical directions."

 

Working in and around the Cuban example in this way affords humanists and digital humanists alike a way to productively and ethically re-evaluate the prospects for public writing, reaching end-users, manipulating infrastructure, collaboration, and, perhaps most important, exposing and critiquing the very "lenticular logic" that underlies the various iterations and affordances of the Internet, telecommunications, and digital technologies, as they are mediated by and domesticated in different social, cultural, and historical contexts.

 

The idea of "lenticular logic," according to Tara McPherson, responds to trends within scholarship and discourse, in which discussions of race and/or difference and technological design and/or coding are considered mutually exclusive. However, McPherson suggests that compartmentalizing these ideas disregards the possibility that the very logic or code with which technological systems are constructed might actually "underwrite" or produce the very racism and bigotry that digital humanists perhaps seek to contest. Given the many threads of colonialism, cultural appropriation, revolution, dictatorship, and disavowal that have contributed to Cuba's effective insulation and global remoteness throughout the course of their history, it is no surprise that the emergence of digital technologies in Cuba has brought with it a whole new set of "lenticular logics" that are both local and global. As a scholar, I thrive on uncovering and contesting these sorts of "lenticular logics," and I can do much the same if invited to collaborate with others on this project.