ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that people use digital spaces to create real change and not just to attempt to repackage old fields of study. Hip-hop epistemologies and ontologies historically have created a space for the methods and techniques used in digital and multimodal writing. The melding of hip-hop epistemologies and multimodal composition and rhetoric seems like an easy connection. Hip-hop rhetoric as deployed in multimodal writing spaces, demonstrates the use of online spaces to fight for liberation and uplift for Black people. Digital spaces allow for the development for vast discourse communities that Black people can engage in challenging and critiquing structural systems that work to subjugate them across the globe. Black digital activism and the digital humanities should work together to engage in the work of transforming the academy and society. The most interesting and valuable digital humanities projects are those that seek to engage real world concerns and work to ameliorate inequality.
