Abstract
I open my contribution by underscoring the urgent assertion that it is impossible to conceive of “race” as a finite, even overdetermined, taxonomy of human social experience just as we concede that there is not, and cannot be, a single or fixed definition of “the digital humanities” (Nyhan, Terras, and Vanhoutte 2013, 7). I make this opening claim as “critical race theory” is a socio-political flashpoint across the USA as that country abandoned Afghanistan while forging a defense alliance with the UK and Australia (AUKUS). In a related vein, the latter has witnessed an explosion of violent Indophobic and anti-Asian violence over the last two decades. I begin with such observations since the digital milieu too has a transnational context, and one that is, moreover, linked to situated, fiscal interests.
This is perhaps more the case in the digital milieu than in the traditional arts, humanities, and social sciences as the former have had much more time to crystallize into the global, human psyche through both overt and surreptitious networks of domination. It thus behooves dominant sites of the digital humanities (DH) to experience, in Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel’s words, a “disruption” wherein:...