Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

Abstract from First Paragraph:

This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices.