“Afro-American, Afro-Brazilian and African studies in the Americas, Africa and Europe are facing new challenges in the digital era which also corresponds to a new stage in identity politics, especially around the issues of intellectual ownership, the power of the archive and repatriation claims. The digital turn and the internet, however, also enable online collaboration between researchers from various countries and diverse skills – mostly though not exclusively anthropologists, historians, journalist-biographers, literature researchers, artists – as well as facilitate the creation of effective tools for both crowdsharing and crowdsourcing. In this talk I tease out the history, politics and challenges of our experimental digital online platform that we have been developing, moving on from an archive of Afro-Bahian Studies to a much more ambitious Digital Museum of African Heritage. This digital museum, even though still very much in progress, can now count on six stations, five in Brazil and one in Portugal and is oriented by the notions of digital repatriation, digital donation, digital generosity and digital ethnography. It is our aim to engage archives, libraries, research groups and individual scholars in the US in our project.”
Livio Sansone (Palermo, Italy, 1956) got his BA in sociology at the University of Rome and MA and PhD from the University of Amsterdam (1992). Since 1992 Sansone has been living in Brazil and working at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).
