2020/01/01 by Jonathan Senchyne · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Afterlife #Art #Art history #Capitalism #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Digital and Traditional Archives Management #History #Law #Literature #Metadata #Modernity #Political science #Politics
paper · doi:10.1093/alh/ajaa034
published in American Literary History 32(4), 797-803 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2020/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
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.