Recent Lecture: “Technological Imperialism and Digital Writing”

spectrums of dh poster

On January 15, 2021 I gave an invited lecture as part of McGill University’s Spectrums of DH lecture series. Here’s the abstract for my talk:

In my talk I will offer an exploration of how the development, distribution, and access to digital technologies have replicated imperialist and colonialist practices of the past and have led to an unequal development of digital writing across the world. I will discuss how the development of electronic literature as a field has happened in privileged academic spaces with institutional resources, research investment, and prestige economies that favor wealthy countries and replicate imperialistic relationships with elit created and researched in the rest of the world. I will conclude by offering some ideas on how we can help decolonize and seek more equitable development of the field.

You can see the lecture here, which, including a great Q&A, lasts 1:11.

And here is the slideshow:

Huge thanks to Dr. Cecily Raynor and the McGill DH team for organizing this lecture series and inviting me to be a part of it!

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.