Routledge South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations across Technology’s Cultural Canon

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review. Review "Pertinent, provocative, and powerful – the contributions in South Asian Digital Humanities align and advance, engage and intervene, together documenting, situating and resituating essential foundations, rich contexts and imperative perspectives that collectively inform this important area. Risam and Gairola have produced a commendable volume that situates timely dialogues and debates of the digital humanities in the historical, theoretical, and geographical contexts of postcolonial South Asia." - Ray Siemens, Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), Implementing New Knowledge Environments Project, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; and Global Innovations Chair in the Digital Humanities in the PVC Office of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia "The digital record has an increasingly important role to play in the study of South Asian texts and cultures. Gairola and Risam's timely collection is an important intervention at the nexus of humanities and digital research techniques, articulating the need for methodologies that embrace de-colonial, feminist and intersectional perspectives to understand South Asian approaches to identity, nationality, colonialism, and diaspora. Covering literature, poetry, digital archives, and data infrastructures, this formidable volume provides a roadmap for interrogating issues of diversity, equity, and representation, while providing a necessary platform for digital postcolonial studies that is inclusive of South Asian voices and cultures." - Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh's College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society; and Director of Research in the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Scotland "How do the digital afterlives of colonialism shape the formation of the digital record, and in turn, the cultural memory of humanity? In rais