Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: It is exciting though not a little unnerving to have one's work the subject of a scholarly forum in the Quarterly.I am very grateful to my colleagues for their thoughtful reflections on my article, and I hope that their musings and my response can help inspire others to experiment with digital scholarship.The OI Reader has the potential to allow us to conceive of new kinds of scholarly articles, deploying different kinds of sources and media, and this forum shows how considering both methodology and substance can lead us to new ideas and understandings.I agree completely with Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles who suggests that borndigital scholarship has the potential to enable us "to break free of traditions of methodological bondage".He believes that this kind of digital scholarship can encourage "a new way of reasoning and writing," which in this article may help enhance the ways in which we see and experience the world of the enslaved: this was my objective.The readers have raised many interesting ideas, suggestions and criticisms, and I shall try to address a few of these in ways that I hope will encourage Quarterly readers to think about both freedom-seeking enslaved people in Jamaica and the potential and drawbacks of digital publications utilizing new media.All of the readers have been kind enough to assess "Hidden in Plain Sight" as an honest attempt to contribute to historical knowledge and understanding, and I appreciate Beckles' thoughtful assessment of how this article fits within the larger subject of resistance to racial slavery in Jamaica.His brief discussion of the nature of walking, running and escape emphasizes its significance as an assertion of humanity by black people that was denied and oppressed by whites.The digital tools and additions form part of the evidence and the analytical framework for what remains an academic article, one which seeks to address that humanity by trying to describe the world of enslaved people who, as Prof. Edward L. Ayers suggests, "were not meant to be seen."How can we hope to "represent, reconstruct, and remember the humanity of each and every enslaved woman, man,
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly
Author: Newman
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2911507206