The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back : Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy

Abstract

This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical opportunities. Though separated by decades, Tumblr and This Bridge both represent vernacular pedagogy networks that value open access and have operated in opposition to hierarchically controlled content distribution and educational systems. Both analog and digital forms of open-access woman of color pedagogy promote the free circulation of knowledge and call attention to the literary and social labor of networked marginalized readers and writers who produce it, at once urging new considerations of academic labor and modeling alternatives to neoliberal university systems.