I couldn’t be more excited- please find the abstract for the paper below.
A History of a Life with its Deepest Intentions: The Analog/Digital After-life of Moses Grandy’s Narrative of Enslavement
The recovery, sharing, and witnessing generated through close readings of slave narratives digitized at Documenting the American South at the University of North Carolina promotes a remarkable extension from digital space for further discovery in African American history. Slave narratives formerly accessible only through a scattering of repositories are now reachable via the digital realm and as a result, readers interested in slave narratives may analyze, collect, and visualize these texts at a scale previously unseen. In spite of the promising benefits of this digital venture, it remains unknown how extensively this resource has substantively impacted scholars using it. The most recent report of the project’s Google analytics data has recorded 88,697 visits and 232,007 page views, with an average visitor duration of one minute, fifty seconds. Such statistics are useful to know, but do little to witness what users are retaining in visiting the site.
By close reading Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America (1843), scholars and cultural workers have created promising alliances in an effort to expand understanding of his life and deepest intentions. These efforts have provided new vistas into Grandy’s legacy as well as the slavery regime itself. From self-published works to digital narratives to experimental film, Moses Grandy’s narrative has inspired a breadth of recovery work that highlights the importance of digitizing rare and forgotten texts. This essay will highlight the recovery work stimulated through accessing the traces of experience in reading Grandy’s digital text. The author will also emphasize the need for interested readers to involve themselves in community engagement practices beyond the confines of the academy in order to amplify and recover the enslaved people’s lives illuminated within them.
read more about SHARP HERE
Christy Hyman 