Recent studies that focus explicitly on the interplay between race and media include Brian Hochman’s Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (2014), Alice Maurice’s The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (2013), and the forthcoming collection: Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (Edited by Jonathan Senchyne and Brigitte Fielder, 2019). These studies, while invaluable, tend to focus on a single medium (the cinema) or genre (the ethnography). This panel situates these studies within a wider conversation about the role of literature in indexing media change.
In doing so, the panel responds to the call in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (Edited by N. Katharine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, 2013) to consider literature as a medium within a comparative context. At MLA’s 2019 convention, a number of well-attended panels explored this topic, including “Digital and Computational Approaches to Race, Gender, and Literature,” “Sensing Race in American Ethnic Literature and Culture,” and “New Media and the Humanities, 1900-1950.” These panels followed on recent studies that have generated new perspectives on literary texts by situating them within narratives of media change, such as Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (2013), Seth Perlow’s The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric (2018), Mark Goble’s Modernism and the Mediated Life (2010), Monica Cure’s Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (2018), and David Trotter’s Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (2013).
The panel identifies three moments in the history of media that historicize contemporary conversations about the digitization of race, a term coined by Lisa Nakamura in her 2007 book, Digitizing Race. Moving from mass print, to sound, and finally to the computer, the panel suggests that the history of race and media cannot be isolated to a single geographical area or time period.
The proposed conversation will begin with Kelley Kreitz’s paper on “Latinidad and Media Change Past and Present” Her paper asks what we can learn about digitizing race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century from notions of latinidad shaped in the context of late nineteenth-century media change. Kreitz reveals how nineteenth-century print culture in the Americas contains what appear in retrospect as alternative conceptions of latinidad, of media participation, and of hemispheric collaboration that ran into the limits of their own media and political moment. Some of those nineteenth-alternative notions of identity and community have resurfaced in recent efforts by activists, media practitioners, and scholars to create and identify hemispheric currents within the twenty-first century’s digital media. Ultimately, “Latinidad and Media Change Past and Present” sheds light on what is truly new about the digital, including its far-from-realized potential to compress the past into forms that can make its lessons and its omissions widely accessible.
The second paper by Kristin Canfield revisits Zora Neale Hurston’s representation of her own embodiment alongside advances in phonography during the late 1920s. By tracing the transition of sound recording from ephemera to permanent records, Canfield argues that Hurston understood phonography as an embodied and dynamic practice that aligns black bodies with recording equipment. Hurston’s concept of her racialized body as media anticipates contemporary accounts of the interplay between race and media.
Finally, Jeff Noh tracks how Ellison’s representation of the racialized body changes from his typescripts (1950s-1970s) to the computer files he left on labelled disks at the time of his death (1982-1994). By conducting a media archaeology of Ralph Ellison’s progress on his unfinished second novel, Noh unearths complications in the narrative representation of race across Ellison’s computer files, particularly as they address the built environment, data storage architectures, and the form of the novel. Indeed, if we notice Ellison experimenting with the ambiguously (or inconsistently) racialized body in the carefully revised 1950s typescripts (where a minor character’s “white skin” is described at length before he is revealed, in a later section, to be African American), his work on the computer addresses the narrative problems that attend the depiction of interracial crowds in the novel’s Washington DC setting. Noh attends to how these representational and interpretative problems of race register a set of co-ordinated discontinuities from the “typewritten” corridor (the “medial space par excellence” in mid-century America [Marshall]) to the “digitally archived” vestibule, reception area, and hotel lobby.
Each paper will be limited to 18 minutes to allow ample time for discussion. These papers all challenge narrow understandings of the relationship between race and media change. Bringing together three distinct historical moments of media change reveals how race shaped the formal and technological means of different mediums. The panel will stimulate a conversation among literary scholars who study race, particularly those who focus on print culture, visual media, and digital humanities.