[Air-L] Digital Unsettling

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
James Slotta encouraged Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan to
discuss their book, Digital Unsettling  on the CaMP anthropology blog.

https://campanthropology.org/

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: The revolutionary aspirations that fueled decolonization
circulated on paper—as pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, and brochures.
Now—as evidenced by movements from the Arab Spring to Black Lives
Matter—revolutions, protests, and political dissidence are profoundly
shaped by information circulating through digital networks.

*Digital Unsettling* is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts
contemporary “decolonizing” movements into conversation with theorizations
of digital communication. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan
interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced
neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at a time
when digital networks—and the agendas and actions they proffer—have
unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways.

*Digital Unsettling* examines events—the toppling of statues in the UK, the
proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in
North America, the trolling of academics, among others—and how they
circulated online and across national boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and
Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an
invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented
conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order,
and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those
that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework
for placing digitalization within the longue durée of coloniality, while
also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with
persistent global calls for decolonization.