We 🖤 #BlackDH | Reviews in DH + Jamila Pewu Moore

We love amplifying #BlackDH work! In 2022, AADHum completed a double issue of Reviews in DH, edited by Marisa Parham, Aleia Brown, and Trevor Muñoz. Over our next few newsletters, we'll be highlighting projects reviewed in those issues, as well as #BlackDH projects we weren't able to include. This issue we highlight two projects from Reviews in DH.

Braiding, Braiding / Morning 0 is an experimental publishing project investigating African hair braiding as a marker of diaspora and a form of technology. 

Developed by Zimbabwean artist, designer, and educator Nontsikelelo Mutiti with support from designer and programmer Julia Novitch, the project explores hair braiding spaces as essential sites of self-care and community. Reviewer Sheila Chukwulozie reads the technical form and content of Braiding, Braiding as a digital insistence upon the world which makes room for Black women to “stroll in one way and leave another way.” 

Christy Hyman’s GIS storymap, The Oak of Jerusalem, plumbs enslaved person Moses Grandy’s narration of his experience working in the Great Dismal Swamp. Hyman's work offers a productive understanding of the difficulty of archaeological research in swamplands, while also identifying some of the fugitive possibilities of swampland as a site of marronage.
Hyman's project combines an exploratory and investigative assemblage of scenes, documents, and imagery. In Reviews in DH, J.T. Roane interprets The

Oak of Jerusalem as a “fabulous contribution and teaching aid for the fields’ collective return to the Great Dismal Swamp as a site of insurgent social and ecological worldmaking.”

Finally, we also highlight Jamila Moore Pewu's Mapping Arts OC. Pewu's project is part of a larger series of digital mapping projects inviting "communities to engage with the spatiality of urban life through the lives and times of various artists," As a digital resource produced in

 collaboration with students, Mapping Arts OC is, as Moore Pewu puts it, "a project invested in mapping public art as a way of better understanding how artworks that are produced for public consumption do something to the landscape."

Dr. Moore Pewu is also our newest colleague here at Maryland, having joined the Department of American Studies in January 2023. With digital engagements like Mapping Arts OC and community exhibition projects like Reimagining Little Liberia, AADHum is so pleased for this newest addition to UMD's ever-expanding circle of artists and scholars doing #BlackDH at Maryland!