Speculative Black Digital Territories in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores the development of speculative Black digital territories in Brazil and examines the challenge they pose to online architectures of social control. It does so through an analysis of Baobáxia, an autonomous digital infrastructure project that connects the audio-visual archives of quilombo communities. I place Baobáxia, which is run by Rede Mocambos, within a spectrum of strategies of Black digital territorializations in Brazil before carrying out a closer analysis of the hesitation it evidences between seeking permanence for the archives of its communities and turning network precarity into a strategy of resistance against digital capitalism. The article ends by considering the Baobáxia network as an enactment of speculative technology by placing it in the context of recent works of Afrofuturist science fiction, including the 2019 film Bacurau, that have reimagined the quilombo for the digital age. While Big Tech platforms use online data to predict and therefore control the behaviour of internet users (which Sun-ha Hong describes as “technologies of speculation”), Baobáxia takes a step towards placing control of the future in the hands of communities and therefore reinstating the possibility of a future that might be different to the present.