The Digital Afterlife of Nineteenth-Century Black Writing: Response to Genealogies of Black Modernity

Abstract

Abstract This response to the forum on the nineteenth-century genealogies of Black modernity explores how nineteenth-century racial and publication contexts continue to shape the digital circulation and digital afterlife of authors. A born-digital publication of a work by George Moses Horton reveals how nineteenth-century racial paratexts re-emerge in metadata and algorithmic capitalism. When Horton is hailed by a data marketing company seeking to claim him as an asset, when his writing is routed through or claimed by white editors and (re)printers (myself included), and when his work is circulated in networks and spaces far beyond his own, the nineteenth-century conditions that structured Horton’s life and writing are revealed to shape his digital afterlife.