Ancestors & Algorithms: Ethnocomputing AI with African and African Diasporic Heritage

(2022)

“Ancestors and Algorithms” brings together my research on mathematics as a constructed language from the Department of Comparative Literature, and creative computing Artificial Intelligence from the Digital Studies Institute. The project argues that the technical aspects of AI computing –data, algorithms, and mathematical statements – do not account for black cultural knowledge production or worldviews and is indicative of a longer history of anti-black epistemic injustice in the global West.

This dissertation project was conducted under the direction of Professor Frieda Ekotto, Professor Lisa Nakamura, Professor Irina Aristarkhova

Excerpt

As a descendant of Gullah Geechee people doing research on Gullah Geechee people in the American academy, I have come up against the “colonial library” many times. One that comes to mind is a classroom experience during my graduate coursework. In an introductory course on African American studies, a fellow graduate student felt obligated to address me mid-discussion in front of the whole class. First, he prefaced with an apology “I’m sorry but”. Then proceeded “ I don’t think we should call black Americans, African Americans, they are pretty much (white) Americans, they do not have a culture and other black people have managed to retain their African identity stronger than they have”. Everyone in the classroom nodded in unison agreement, including the professor instructing the course. So taken aback at the sudden blatant ignorance and cultural exclusion I said nothing. I quietly raged on the inside and vowed to never sit in another course that claimed to be telling me about my history and culture again.

Beyond the trauma of experiencing this event, and the many like it during my graduate and undergraduate education, I have come to understand this offense as not personal, but a product of how the “colonial library” takes shape in my life. In the seminar on African American studies the course material encompassed a broad interpretation of Africans in the Americas, spanning North and South America as well as the Caribbean. We covered the middle passage. We discussed popular slave revolts and insurrections. We examined how rich cultural religious practices that lay claim to indigenous Africanity still thrive in the Caribbean and Afro Brazilian cultures. We reviewed African American political resistance (abolitionism, Civil Rights, the beginnings of Black Lives Matter) as African American culture. The course material never once mentioned African American subcultures but used African American political resistance as culture to encompass (if not amalgamate) all subcultures including black and Native American intersections, Gullah Geechee, and the Creoles.

Through the course material a narrative about blackness and Africanness emerges. A narrative that begins blackness from a fall from Africanness through the birth of the middle passage and uses an implicit rubric to measure expressions of “original Africanness” post- middle passage through the visible upkeep of cultural practices. This rubric to measure Africanness relies on a performance of distinct visual cultural Otherness from whiteness and implicates a reductive sameness in the naming of Africans (‘nativism’), all the while not accounting for (or devaluing) implicit practices, cultural transliterations, and the vibrant histories in which Africans name and rename themselves.