Postcolonial Digital Humanities

Yousaf, Zunaira; Yousaf, Zunaira

Roopika Risam in her New Digital Worlds (2019) argues that the postcolonial digital pedagogy aims to show “how print culture has played a role in constructing a world that privileges the stories, voices, and values of the Global North and how digital cultures in the twenty-first century reproduce these practices, contributing to the epistemological marginalization of the Global South” (89). To counter the cultural imperialism of the Global North, this panel combines pedagogical, archival and critical projects which empower and represent postcolonial perspectives. The pedagogical projects reflect on digital humanities in the higher education institutions of postcolonial Pakistan. The archival project emphasizes the use of a digital collection of stories through active engagement with the community of the Pakistani diaspora in the US. The critical project foregrounds the indigenous maps of 18th century colonial India to disrupt the colonial cartography.

To open the panel, Fatima Syeda introduces digital pedagogies to teach Pakistani anglophone literature. Her purpose is to initiate a dialogue between digital literacy and the conventional scholarship in literary studies, and determine the future of digital literacy in Pakistan. She discovers the function of digital tools in literature and the impact of the same on literary expressions as well as interpretations. She argues that digital technology affects the production, reading, and analysis of literature. The paper reinforces the need for developing digital skills in literary studies, and enables the analysis of literature to explore diverse ways of interpreting literary texts by using digital tools such as N-Grams, CLiC, Voyant, and AntConc. The presentation will share examples of literary research projects based on Digital Archiving, Digital Literary Analysis/Computational Text Analysis, Digital Storytelling, Digital Mapping, Oral History Projects, etc. in Pakistani context.

Adeel Khalid proposes the inclusion of Digital Multimodal Composing (DMC) in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms. Scholars of composition and computers argue that academic writers must be prepared for unique experiences in the digital world (Passions Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies, 1999) which involve writing and reading multimodal texts in today’s digital communication. The multimodal texts in the ESL context include visual and textual components to communicate and convey meaning. With emerging technologies, especially during the pandemic and post-pandemic phases, the ESL academics have produced complex multimodal texts for numerous audiences and purposes (Jiang, 2018). This presentation showcases how multimodal composing practices allow students to develop multiliteracy and creative skills for holistic student engagement and how digital instructional techniques and a range of technological tools help students compose several genres of writing that are translingual, transdisciplinary and transnational.

With these two pedagogical presentations in the background, Shruti Jain argues that digitally mapping the 18th century ‘Indies’, as the British understood it through their narratives, against indigenous maps brings out productive friction points. Using indigenous maps instead of colonial ones, helps us bring together the two knowledge systems that encounter each other before the full-fledged colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Using Jemima Kindersley’s Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (1777), Jain demonstrates how a British woman’s colonial travelogs ‘plotted’ against indigenous maps, visually misrepresented Indians, and advanced the British understanding of these maps. In this unmapping project, Jain relies on pre-colonial Indian cartography to resist colonial cartographic and epistemological projects that overwrote or conscripted indigenous meaning-making through maps.

Zunaira Yousaf applies digital humanities strategies to the South Asian, especially Pakistani, diaspora in the US. She showcases a digital archive centered around the oral histories of Pakistani migrants moving from New York City to Broome County. This mass migration started in 2020 because of the pandemic and continues into the present. This proposed digital collection addresses the representational and social injustice experienced by a diasporic and marginalized Pakistani community by collecting, archiving, and preserving their stories in the form of a website. The project foregrounds the community’s financial struggles, discrimination in schools and other public spaces, and how linguistic and cultural barriers limit their voices in Binghamton. The project also focuses on this community’s stories of survival, success, resilience, assimilation and social mobility. The project creates “a digital home” where the stories of this invisible, but inspiring community can reside (Roopika Rissam’s Ted Talk).

Each presenter will speak for 12 mins, leaving 27 mins for the presider's comments and the questions from the audience.

85 Postcolonial Digital Humanities: Calls for Papers