Decolonizing the Digital

This course offers a critical new perspective for the study of computer, electronic, digital, and internet art. Since the late 1990s, theorists of digital culture working with frameworks from critical race theory and postcolonial studies, such as María Fernández, Lisa Nakamura, and Alondra Nelson, have decentered whiteness and Eurocentrism, both of which had historically overdetermined this area of study. Building on that work, this course incorporates decolonial theory and Indigenous studies, demonstrating that coloniality and Native dispossession have structured digital culture as much as race and Western imperialism. Ideas such as discovery, invention, and technological expertise have largely excluded Native peoples from histories of computation and digitally mediated art. Furthermore, the material consequences of computer manufacture—contingent on Indigenous dispossession, as well as exploitative labor practices that disproportionately impact Black, Brown, and Native people—are often overlooked. This course therefore considers a range of visual material culture from the ancient to the contemporary, expanding the timeline for the study of digital art while also reimagining digital epistemologies and histories. It centers on the hemispheric Americas given the relationship between coloniality and modernity (Aníbal Quijano), maintaining that the continuing effects of colonial systems legitimate displacement and extractivism.