HELP WANTED: Creating an Ethnic American E-literature Course!

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I am beyond thrilled to be researching and developing a course titled “Ethnic American Electronic Literature” as a Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium Teaching Fellow. Here’s a brief description of the course, followed by a form that you can use to contribute to the research.

This course focuses on digital literature created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American people who reside in the United States and Canada. This kind of literature arises from a creative engagement with digital technologies that results in language-driven works that incorporate computation, animation, multimedia integration, interactivity, and/or networking and depart from the constraints and culture of the (printed/virtual) page.

The field of eliterature has long been dominated by white practitioners in its publications, histories, and pedagogy. This disparity is due to historically privileged access to digital technologies (aka the digital divide), unequal education in programming, digital literacy, and advanced digital skills, and a culture that sustains white supremacy by defining the field through privileged aesthetics. This course seeks to address this disparity in representation by focusing exclusively on work of American and Canadian writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds and creating lines of continuity that arise from their own literary and cultural contexts.

Here’s a link to the full course proposal.

The first stage of the project is to identify and research digital writers from historically underrepresented ethnicities in the United States and Canada. Please contribute to this research by filling in the following form or email me at leo@eliterature.org. The course and all resources and publications that draw from this research will be made available to the community open access.

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By Leonardo Flores

Professor Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. He is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.