As a fellow in the African American Digital Humanities Initiative at University of Maryland-College Park, I developed Black Belt Brooklyn: Mapping Community Building and Social Life during the Urban Crisis. Black Belt Brooklyn is a digital humanities project that aims to illustrate and historicize Black practices of vitality, mutual-aid, and institution building during a period of widespread neglect by formal political institutions at every level. Using Black spatial production (or an emplaced “making a way out of no way”) Black residents articulate a Black spatial imaginary counter to official geographies and understandings of urban space that draws from practices of Black resistance, community organizing, and institution building. Thus, this digital map serves as a tool in a “technology of recovery,” (Gallon 2016) excavating time-space activities, events, and socialities; and arguing for the significance of these histories and geographies for the contemporary period.
Gallon, Kim (2016). “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Laren F. Klein, 42-49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Black Belt Brooklyn is currently under construction, but still available here.
Learn more about this project from videos that appeared as part of AADHUM’s Black as X symposium, including my conversation with artist/archivist Joyce LeeAnn.