Singing the Nation: memory and the afterlives of Lift Every Voice and Sing

Description

Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) welcomes Dr Sonya Donaldson from New Jersey City University for this seminar as part of the Digital Afterlives Network. This seminar will examine how performances and creative re-compositions of James Weldon Johnson's 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' also known as the 'Black National Anthem,' alert us to the ways in which digital ephemera operate as distinct and interacting sites of ‘memory'. These compositions, as part of a collection in the DH project, Singing the Nation Into Being, raises questions about the relationship between the archive and the afterlives of ephemeral objects.

Dr Sonya Donaldson is Associate Professor of English at New Jersey City University. In addition to her digital humanities work, Donaldson is also completing a book manuscript, Irreconcilable Differences?: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora, which examines autobiographical narratives, music, and performances by Black writers and artists in Germany, the U.K., and the USA. She was a recipient of a Mellon Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellowship, a Virginia Humanities Fellowship, and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab. Her scholarly work has appeared in Callaloo, The Feminist Wire, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color. She serves on the advisory board of the Black German Heritage and Research Association.

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The Digital Afterlives Network meets on the second, sixth, and seventh Tuesday of every term from 4 – 6pm. Find out more about the Digital Afterlives Research Network and subscribe to the network’s mailing list.