Who is this human in digital humanities?

A hacker-fanonian critique of the white nerd burden

Abstract

In this article, we propose a dialogue between anti-racist theories and the field of digital humanities, grounded in the ideas of Frantz Fanon and the theoretical productions of hacktivism. We explore some possibilities of history in a digitalized society, but also the contradictions that manifest in the phenomenon. The relations between capitalism, colonialism, and racism are fundamental to research based on digital humanities. Although colonialism, in Fanon, is, above all, a particular form of economic exploitation, its reproduction would be unfeasible without the use of particular forms of domination and sovereignty in which racism appears as a fundamental element. In the article, starting from Fanon's sociogeny method, we seek to articulate these knowledge with the field of digital humanities and history. However, the nature and depth of the violences that accompanied the advent of modernity and even of Western humanism, but also their critique, allow us to raise the following questions: who is this human of the digital humanities? What theoretical contribution possibilities to History emerge from the intersection between the hacker-Fanonian critique and the digital humanities? Colonialism is embedded in the theory of history, under the aegis of the ideology of Eurocentrism, hiding African and Afro-diasporic theoretical productions, disregarding intellectual tools, methods, and crucial concepts for the understanding of our society. Just as in cyberculture, digital colonialism projects the Californian ideology with the rehabilitation of the white man's burden, now reworked under the aegis of the white nerd's burden. Here, the horizon of Hacker-Fanonian Studies is projected, the use of digital technologies in research and teaching, must accompany the understanding of how they are possible, what production relations they hide, how they are realized.