[Air-L] Book Announcement: Digital Black Feminism

[Catherine Knight Steele]

Book Announcement:

*Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press)*
<https://nyupress.org/9781479808380/digital-black-feminism/>
Catherine Knight Steele, University of Maryland

Traces the longstanding relationship between technology and Black feminist
thought

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important
discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic
bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that
Black women’s relationship to technology began long before the advent of
Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,” Steele points to
the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its
ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about
the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor,
Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill,
communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s
labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and
offline.

Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past,
present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the
writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social
media mavens of the twenty-first century. She makes connections among the
letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past
and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some
of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. Linking
narratives and existing literature about Black women’s technology use in
the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, Digital Black Feminism
traverses the bounds between historical and archival analysis and empirical
internet studies, forcing a reconciliation between fields and methods that
are not always in conversation. As the work of Black feminist writers now
reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers both hopefulness and
caution on the implications of Black feminism becoming a digital product.

*"This book is a must-read in a time when we need to redouble our
commitments to social justice. Catherine Knight Steele helps us understand
and celebrate the powerful work that Black feminists do to make the world a
better place." ~Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How
Search Engines Reinforce Racism*