1 #staywoke: Digital Engagement and Literacies in Antiracist Pedagogy Christine Yao Abstract In this essay I explore how the hashtag injunction #staywoke associated with Black Lives Matter challenges digital engagement and literacies in American studies antiracist pedagogy. This phrase calls for an awakening into a sustained awareness of intersectional social justice focused on antiblackness through social media: I discuss my pedagogical experiments in teaching a course on Black American and Asian American comparative racialization, where #staywoke was the guiding principle for fostering a democratizing antiracist critical consciousness for students and myself as an educator. Following Amy Earhart and Toniesha Taylor’s STET (both scholars publish under this version of their names) dispersal model for digital humanities projects, I offer pedagogical strategies and models in the project of training critical thinking and unsettling the boundaries between the classroom and the world toward a potentially transformative politics despite the pressures of neoliberal higher education. Against the tendency for digital humanities pedagogy to revolve around centralized, major projects, my methodology focuses on the development of a holistic series of assignments building digital literacies and “minor” student- led and personalized digital humanities projects. In closing, I gesture toward the implications for the limits of digital humanities pedagogy as a practice in the university and profession vulnerable to problems identified by existing critiques of public scholarship and the digital humanities. 2 The imperative of the popular hashtag #staywoke demands sustained awareness of intersectional social justice focused on antiblackness: to “stay woke” requires an awakening into critical consciousness predicated on the active push to stay informed and connected. This phrase in African American Vernacular English, popularized by the cultural force known as “Black Twitter,” is linked to Black Lives Matter and the movement’s STET (there is now the Movement for Black Lives hence the capitalization)call to keep informed.1 American studies’ engagement with the digital humanities demands the field’s renewed commitment to open and accessible interdisciplinary antiracist work in light of Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi’s founding of #BlackLivesMatter as a grassroots movement mobilized through social media. Such hashtags share productive characteristics with the Raymond Williams–inspired Keywords for American Cultural Studies: both cohere unruly discursive genealogies that provoke collaborative and critical engagement. Indeed, as Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler point out, keywords organize and contextualize information and meaning in a manner akin to metadata or meta-tags in information technology.2 In turn, what if antiracist social media activism inspired new keywords for American studies? Addressing the entanglement between racial and technological formations, Tara McPherson argues for bringing together American studies and the digital humanities: “Politically committed academics with humanities skill sets must engage technology and its production not simply as an object of our scorn, critique, or fascination but as a productive and generative space that is always emergent and never fully determined.”3 In this sense, #staywoke expresses that meeting of political commitment and technological engagement. The practice of pedagogy offers us another way to consider Alan Liu’s challenge to the digital humanities to use its strengths in dialogue with cultural criticism toward the ideal of 3 public service.4 In digital humanities pedagogy at present, however, substantive considerations of critical race theory, feminism, and other critically engaged American studies approaches have been sidelined despite appeals by scholars like Miriam Posner.5 In his editor’s introduction to the 2012 Digital Humanities Pedagogy collection, Brett Hirsch STET (publishes under this name; thanks for catching typo) gives a historical overview of the inconsistent place of pedagogy in the digital humanities, arguing for its needed centrality to the field. Yet there is a marked absence of essays on race and gender in this volume, which Hirsch acknowledges, stating, “Such contingencies are unfortunate, and unfortunately unavoidable.”6 Similar omissions tend to recur, for instance, in the digital humanities pedagogy special issue of the CEA Critic STET (that is the full name of the journal) in 2014. Engagements remain the exception rather than the norm when we look at efforts like the 2014 series on pedagogical alterity for the digital journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Even important interventions like FemTechNet’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy Workbook struggle against the very problems they make visible, like a lack of sustained resources, institutional support, and wider recognition, not to mention the frequent precarity of these overburdened educators.7 Nonetheless, what work exists, like Earhart and Taylor’s pedagogies of race, demonstrates the radical potential of the intersection between digital humanities pedagogy and American studies. Now that #woke has entered the mainstream vernacular as a keyword for social justice awareness, we need to consider how the ongoing impact of digital engagements unsettles both our students and ourselves in the American studies classroom toward a potentially transformative antiracist politics despite the pressures of neoliberal higher education.8 How might centering the responsibility to #staywoke change our teaching? I came to this pedagogical dilemma as a graduate student who had the lucky confluence of circumstances to 4 both design my own upper-level undergraduate course and participate as a HASTAC Scholar as part of the Humanities Arts Science and Technology Collaboratory. In what follows, I unpack my pedagogical experiments in one course where I take #staywoke as the organizing principle in course creation, lesson planning, and assignment design as part of investigating models for interweaving digital engagement and literacies to foster an antiracist critical consciousness. Against the acquisition model for grand, centralized projects, Earhart and Taylor propose the democratic “dispersal model,” which avoids dependencies on traditional power structures, grant funding, and advanced technical knowledge.9 In this spirit, my methodology focuses on the potential of the seemingly “minor” small-scale rather than the “major” large-scale: the development of brief assignments focused on digital literacies that build toward “minor” student- led digital humanities projects integrated into the ongoing holistic collaborative framework of the course community. In closing, I gesture toward the implications of #staywoke as a keyword for mobilizing considerations of digital humanities pedagogy and intellectual labor within and beyond the academy. Teaching Digital Citation and Literacies as Antiracist Practices #staywoke challenges the digital humanities to stand by its public investments in openness and access by engaging in intersectional, antiracist work. The immediacy and reach of digital activism has heightened the sense that scholars in American studies and related critical fields should be responsive and responsible to communities in their research and their teaching. One democratizing effect has been the conscious development of pedagogical practices in solidarity with activist work made possible through digital platforms. In 2014 Marcia Chatelain used Twitter to bring together educators for the #FergusonSyllabus crowdsource campaign, opening 5 the way for other movements to develop online interdisciplinary syllabi and digital resources accessible to the public.i (forgot to insert citation; the endnote numbering isn’t working correctly, possibly because of Track Changes, but I’ve inserted the formatted reference and hope you can clear up the endnote part?) Since then, prominent examples include #StandingRockSyllabus, #CharlestonSyllabus, and #PulseOrlandoSyllabus. On a smaller scale, paying heed to online grassroots actions and conversations can inspire syllabus development. In my case, the genesis of this particular course owes its life in part to my use of Twitter as a junior scholar following hashtags and conversations around social justice during my graduate school struggle to understand the stakes of my research in long nineteenth-century American literature. While I first joined Twitter as a response to the pressures of academic professionalization, the urgency of #BlackLivesMatter reoriented my use of the platform and made me wonder about how I could support such antiracist digital activism not only in my private life but from my position as an academic. In the fall of 2015 I taught Black Power, Yellow Peril, an expository writing course on Black American and Asian American comparative racialization through literature and culture. My course title was explicitly indebted to a Twitter hashtag of the same name started in 2013 by Suey Park, an Asian American social media activist, one of several hashtag campaigns from the Asian American Twitter community in solidarity with Black Twitter.10 The messy but productive assemblage of online conversations among both academic and nonacademic voices that coalesced around #BlackPowerYellowPeril helped draw attention to the often-overlooked cultural and political histories of Black American and Asian American comparative racialization, conflict, and coalition. The layers of citation within the hashtag reflected my interest in bringing together a broad array of readings by predominantly women of color that could tie our 6 contemporary moment back to the ideal of Third World solidarity that was integral to the Black Power vision and the late nineteenth-century construction of the Chinese in the United States as the Yellow Peril in the wake of slavery’s abolition. The hashtag itself was a reference to a 1969 photograph by Roz Payne, known for documenting the Black Panther Party, which depicts members of the Asian American Political Alliance protesting the imprisonment of Huey Newton alongside the Panthers in Oakland, California.11 In the photograph one protester’s sign depicts the Chinese character for “East” with “Free Huey” written underneath; the other proclaims “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power,” giving the image its name for archival posterity. Payne’s photograph has had a rich meme-like afterlife recirculated on Asian American activist online spaces acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter through initiatives like #Asians4BlackLives. In the first week of class I presented these historical linkages made visible through social media alongside Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s STET (published under this name) foundational discussions on Black Power, coalition, and their transnational vision involving the need “to reorient this society’s attitudes and politics toward African and Asian countries.”12 In this way the course approached the present- day call for social justice that my students knew as #woke by having them explore the intertwined genealogies of Black American and Asian American resistance and representation framed by critical interrogation about the possibilities of developing viable, intersectional solidarities. After drawing on hashtag activism as inspiration for syllabus development, I designed a series of opening class lessons and brief assignments to introduce students to the implications of “staying woke,” establishing principles for the sequence of “minor” student-led digital humanities projects to come. I wanted to encourage thinking about “wokeness” by awakening 7 students to their own place in the world, in keeping with Paulo Freire’s injunction to invite “reflective participation in the act of liberation.”13 The promise of the digital presents an occasion for the kinds of critical thinking American studies seeks to foster by bringing together students’ studies and experiences, in Tanya Clement’s words, “to be more engaged citizens in the world.”14 The immersion of digital humanities assignments encourages such a critical stance toward the world: to highlight some examples from FemTechNet’s Workbook (realized had to change for consistency), see Dana Simmons’s exercises using different document archives and simulations of historical case studies or Joseph Dumit’s Donna Haraway–inspired implosion project.15 “Rather than embodying the conventional false assumption that the university setting is not the ‘real world’ and teaching accordingly,” says bell hooks in Teaching Community about pedagogy writ large, “the democratic educator breaks through the false construction of the corporate university as set apart from real life and seeks to re-envision schooling as always a part of our real world experience, and our real life.”16 In my teaching I took the literal sense of hooks’s appeal by making our own university the focus of analysis. As an opening day exercise, I projected the university’s diversity website on the screen juxtaposed with a brief excerpt from Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: “Diversity has a commercial value and can be used as a way not only of marketing the university but of making the university into a marketplace. . . . Scholars have suggested that the managerial focus on diversity works to individuate difference and conceal the continuation of systemic inequalities within universities.”17 At first, students were uncomfortable with the exercise: what I speculate to be a combination of first-day anxieties, unfamiliarity with explicit digital analysis, and perhaps a sense of scrutiny as to their individual situatedness within the discourse of diversity in higher education. As a class, we 8 navigated the website while I encouraged students to share their observations about the visuals, language, and construction of the website in relation to Ahmed’s critique of diversity. Initially, the general attitude was that the composition of the website barely deserved analysis as an ordinary digital object that they might have encountered in passing before applying to our institution or just after matriculation. Drawing attention to their experience of this nonuse, however, combined with the anodyne design soon sparked enthusiastic engagement. Some of their most critical comments were about the intended audience for the website— “parents and donors”—along with how the site was structured to both highlight and hide actual on-campus diversity statistics and studies. This exercise was a way into cultivating students’ existing abilities to formally analyze internet content; as Freire puts it, “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”18 Using the university’s digital face against itself to place the marketing of “diversity” under the scrutiny of “wokeness” gave my students a framework that allowed them to articulate what they as students, particularly underrepresented minorities, had already recognized as the limits of “diversity” in their experiences with higher education. After affirming students’ self-awareness of themselves within the university, I turned to developing a similar stance toward our objects of study. Integrating digital materials into our teaching helps highlight the porousness of the boundaries between the university and the world; however, to include these objects responsibly, we must avoid presenting them as consumable and disposable. While I chose to base my teaching around free digital work and technologies with easy entry points for the sake of student accessibility, I did not want to present this openness as an implicit devaluation of the often-gendered and -racialized labor involved; for, as Lisa Nakamura observes, “Cheap female labour is the engine that powers the internet.”19 Responding 9 to these concerns, the Center for Solutions to Online Violence paired with FemTechNet for a series of online workshops and videos addressing research ethics, social media, and accountability for teachers, students, and journalists.20 In this regard, I taught Alicia Garza’s important essay “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” not only as an introduction to Black Lives Matter but because she demonstrates how denigrated “hashtag activism” combines a profound critique of anti-Black{Au: OK to uppercase “Black” throughout?” (yes) racism along with the importance of citation as a political practice to undo the erasure of queer Black women. As Garza states, “When you adopt the work of queer women of color, don’t name or recognize it, and promote it as if it has no history of its own such actions are problematic.”21 Inspired by Garza’s critique, I paired “Herstory” with a homework assignment for recognizing these grassroots voices engaged in projects of self-determination and community creation. Students had to collect tweets related to #BlackLivesMatter and other trending race- related hashtags like #NotYourAsianSidekick and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. Students appreciated how this simple homework enabled them to share discursive reference points drawn from current conversations about race: these tweets displayed a range of voices across a spectrum of commentary and critique that often mingled anger and wit. Material support is also key. Since the free nature of many digital writings and resources obscures the labor that goes into them, I tried to make a point of sharing different online donation or “tipping” services like Patreon for creators whose work I assigned. Through such exercises we can introduce our students to the value of online discourse and the politics of citation beyond the rote obligations of academic context and toward an ethics of respect bound up in the responsibilities of community. Next, this respect manifests in the teaching of responsible methodology by highlighting the literacies necessary for careful analysis of digital technologies that attend to 10 differences in practice and structure. In her essay on reimagining teaching through the internet, Adeline Koh states, “The Internet poses to us an active challenge to deeply reconsider what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century.”22 Not merely a need for learning new skills and updating established methodologies, these literacies can productively defamiliarize everyday technological materials and practices, like FemTechNet’s guide to teaching with Wikipedia through “feminist wiki-storming.”23 For instance, in our discussions on hashtag activism we considered the economies of attention and networks of influence involved in individual tweets, threads, and conversations in communities like Black Twitter along with how the 140-character limit encourages close reading’s focus on precision of language and tone. In the case of #staywoke, for example, its uses on Twitter {Au: “its” refers to Twitter?} (yes; have changed to reflect) can be variously sincere, ironic, and playful and should be read with an eye to retweets, likes, and followers. By way of contrast to the deliberate public actions of individual social media users, I assigned homework that asked students to input partial phrases related to Black and Asian peoples into Google in order to illustrate how the autofill feature allows us to tap into the anonymous collective consciousness and to question the neutrality of search algorithms.24 In preparation for the following class, students completed this assignment alongside reading Claire Jean Kim’s influential work on racial triangulation.ii (same as above)As I soon realized with the halting in-class discussion, this combination was a challenge: there was a tension between my students’ varying levels of experience with formal academic discourse and the perceived informality of the autofill results. It became apparent, however, that Kim’s visualization of comparative racialization and its terminology by way of a graph resonated across their disciplinary backgrounds. In a moment of improvisation, I shifted to an in-class activity to help