Digital Humanities

.break .dance

By Marisa Parham

.break .dance is an experimental digital project that uses Beyoncés visual album Lemonade as a keystone text to ground musings about time, code, and internet experience. Published in Small Axe Archipelagos & produced in response to the theme Slavery in the Machine, .break .dance includes discussions of Flying Lotus' "Never Catch Me" (ft. Kendrick Lamar), Toni Morrison's portrayal of Baby Suggs in Beloved, "Becky" from Jean Toomer's Cane. The critical work of .break .dance also emerges from engagements with Marlene Nourbese Philip's Zong, Kwame Dawes' "Stop Time," Fred Moten's In the Break, and Dalton Anthony Jones' "Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy."