bahareads's reviews
1065 reviews

A sad short novella that made me cry and think about my own granddaddy.

I enjoyed the premise of the book a lot but it was too long. The struggle on racial lines was relatable. It was great to see what it would have been like - to learn how to deal with black hair while having a white mother - without the internet. I liked the ideas of race and racial harmony that were explored in the book. Sometimes the characters felt flat to me. And, once again, the book was too long.

Read on audiobook - This was my first foray into into Any Tan's work. I enjoyed it but it was hard to get into it at first. The book was split into three parts that did not always make sense to me. I loved the historical fiction elements of the book. I also enjoyed the exploration of family dynamics, particularly between Ruth and her mother.

The Digital Black Atlantic is a collected volumed edited by Kelly Baker-Josephs and Roopika Risam. It is comprised of a total of 19 essays, excluding the introduction. The essayists span University librarians to Historians to English Professors to the head of a Digital Humanities collective etc.

The Digital Black Atlantic is the first volume to put into conversation a cross section of Black studies and digital studies because they are often separated; it presents what a diaspora-based approach to Digital Humanities can look like.

The editors say they wanted to foster discussions from the Debates in Digital Humanities, and decided to use the inclusive term 'digital black Atlantic' to gesture toward the complex relations within and among the terms and geographic positionalities, and the interdisciplinary of the work. They acknowledge their privilege as being US based. They chose not to define but create provisional space and framework for academic conversation.

One goal of this volume was to shed light on the possibilities that define digital inquiry in African diasporic culture for digital Black Atlantic scholarship, discourse and citation. Another goal was to consider what "Black Atlantic" is as a formulation offers the study of Blackness and Digital cultures while articulating the challenges that approach offers to digital humanities.

The scholarship poses a direct challenge to the foundational assumptions of digital humanities, universality of language and parameters of access and epistemology of privilege. With the collection they ask and hope to answer the tradition of interrogating the texture and borders of the Black Atlantic that might be integrated with the negotiation of digital identities, tools, methods, and aspirations.

The chapters of this volume contribute to discourse and conversations within global Digital humanities. They decenter Global North/West digital knowledge production. The volume assembles multiple perspectives on the global Black and digital studies.

The digital Black Atlantic is a product of juxtapositions within the African diaspora. But juxtaposition is a transformative alchemical movie where the sum is greater than the whole. They begin with Paul Gilroy's work about Black Atlantic as the theoretical core and the articulating principle for the volume. They also critique his work, talking about point they do not wish to reproduce.

The Digital Black Atlantic draws on existing debates within digital humanities as a way of challenging the limits of humanities scholarship and emphasising the African Diaspora Scholarship. Digital Black Alantic pushes back against the ways technology has been historical used to disempower Black communities.

The thematic divisions are supposed to resonate in Black studies rather than the traditional ones in the Digital Humanities
1. Memory situates histories of and contemporary archival impulses towards African diasporic experiences
2. Crossings encompasses the fluid and flexible ways that BA DH negotiates movement across time and space, forging varied spatial and temporal relationships
3. Relations, derived from Edouard Glissant's conception of networked creolized cultures, reveals the rhizomatic connections created via exchanges in BA spaces.
4. Becomings outlines the dreams and aspirations of the DBA as scholars continue to create and imagine new configurations for the African diaspora.
- each concept is interdisciplinary, grounded in specific histories in BA studies while transcending traditional disciplines by spanning a variety of academic fields.

The editors say the attempts to represent and transform Black life with Digital Humanities must push against limits of traditions.

I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to go back and purchase a physical copy later. I've interacted with several of the people in volume at the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective over the summer.

Viola Muller says her book is an exploration of what space of refuge arose in the southern cities and how fugitive slaves navigated those spaces. She says freedom, with all its definitions and meanings, cannot fully capture the struggles of antebellum southerners of African descent.

Müller makes a lot of parallels between the undocumented in the US, and runaway slaves in urban environments. She mentions it throughout and brings it up heavily in the epilogue. She says she brings a new way of thinking about the conditions of fugitive slave workers and residents and allows us to concentrate on fugitive slaves legal and economic precariousness.

I'm always a huge geek for books that focus on Urban slavery. I enjoyed the latter chapter of these books, but I found (with my limited knowledge) that Müller didn't really add much to what's been done already. Particularly her first few chapters seem to be rehashing well known facts. Perhaps this needed more work to go from dissertation to book(?).

I enjoyed some of the arguments and methods Müller raises in the novel. She investigates how fugitive slaves navigated cities to breach the geographies of domination to find spaces of refuge. It's the phrases 'geographies of domination' and 'spaces of refuge' that intrigue me the most.

Müller claims historians need to be mindful of using runaway advertisements as quantitative sources. She says slaves in the paper were less likely to be found which is why they were publicly advertised in the first place. I do not know how well this idea translates over to other regions.

Overall I liked elements of argument.

ARE WE EVEN TEAL is great work! Brice's pieces have a fantastical whimsiness that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland. The lyricism is giving Dr Seuss (in the best way). The inspirations for the work shine throughout the entire book. Some of the poems could be songs. The illustrations are also amazing. The art work combined with the written work make the poems jump out on the page. Brice lays out raw emotions while unabashedly uplifting his queerness. It was a great read. I enjoyed picking it up before I went to bed, and reading a few poems each time.

Jennifer Morgan writes a THICK book. She does a lot of name/historiography dropping in the actual text, not just the introduction. She is concerned with the processes that divided people and economies along the distinct aces of value and commodity.

In the narrative, Morgan articulates the relationships and ideologies of the 16 and 17century that congealed in the 18th and 19th century into common sense understands that are still with us. She is concerned with the triangle of economic logic, black radical tradition and kinship as the basis of both racial formation and Blackness as enslavebility.

Morgan argues that kinship could be claimed only in freedom and Blackness signified freedom's opposite. This argument brings kinship and commodification to 17th century ideologies; it asks how the logics of racial slavery made sense to Europeans and what Africans knew about the terms of their captivity. The inability to convey kinship is the main issue here.

Morgan states there is a need to write histories that acknowledge the silences in the records as evidence of an irrecoverable w/hole. She seeks to denaturalize the system of thought that enslaved women's works were only just emerging in the early modern Black Atlantic. Kinship, motherhood, population and commodification were conceptually intertwined for slave owners and for those who were enslaved.

I enjoyed the many many themes, theories, and methods in this book but it was a lot. The first half of the book could be its own piece compared to the second half of the book.

A collection of stories by various Bahamian authors. They ranged from very dark to hilarious. I would love to see some of these stories fleshed out into longer pieces.

A beautiful anthology of 33 Caribbean women poets. All the poems are in Spanish and English. A few Bahamian poets are featured which made me very happy! The pieces cover a range of topics from very heavy to light. I cried in certain places. You can tell this was a work of love and tender care by the poets and the editors.

(read on Audiobook)

I enjoyed the narration but the story itself was bored in spots. I didn't realize this was based on a 'reimagining' so I was confused on a few things. Carlota as a character lacked depth at times.