Creative Conversations: Legacy Russell with André Brock Jr.

the participant’s conversation will draw from their research-based practices and recent writings to illuminate the ways technology and digital platforms are used both to uphold systemic oppression by hegemonic forces, as well as offering liberatory tools and structures made for/by BIPOC communities.

Curator and writer Legacy Russell’s latest book, Glitch Feminism (Verso, 2020), is a vital new chapter in cyberfeminism, one that explores the relationship between gender, technology and identity. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that the glitch performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypt, mobilizes and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.

Academic and author André Brock Jr.’s recently released publication Distributed Blackness: African American Cyber Cultures proposes that issues surrounding race and ethnicity are inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains.