The Postcolonial Studies @ Emory website, launched in January 1996, stands as an early example of digital praxis in the humanities. When I began teaching at Emory, Postcolonial Studies was still a relatively young field — its canon expanding rapidly, publications surging, and theoretical formulations being produced, debated, and contested around the world. Yet where was the library, the guidebook we could turn to as the field itself evolved and shifted beneath our feet? My students needed pedagogical scaffolding. Information on emerging writers had to be generated in real time, as their books were appearing; theoretical concepts associated with figures such as Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’O required accessible translations that both undergraduate and graduate students could readily grasp. We needed a resource capable of keeping pace with a field that was developing faster than the infrastructure needed to support its teaching. Traditional scholarly publication moved too slowly for the demands of the classroom.
The convergent rise of Postcolonial Studies and the internet pointed to an obvious solution: a born-digital resource in continuous development, updated each semester. It would transform students into producers as well as consumers of knowledge. It would cultivate internet literacy. And it would be freely available to anyone, anywhere, with access to the web.
I introduced a new course requirement across my syllabi: the creation of a web page on an author, critic, or key term in the field. The goal was to provide basic, vetted, curated information freely available to all. Working within the culture of Web 1.0, my students and I sought to compile verified information — introductions to major themes in works by emerging authors, explanations of key theoretical concepts, bibliographies of print sources, and links to relevant sites. Each page was signed and dated by its author. We were in the business of responsible curation, and on occasion conducted interviews with new authors to generate the information needed to teach and discuss their work. The page on J. Nozipo Maraire, for instance, incorporates a student’s interview with the author in 1997; Wikipedia still links back to our page for her biography. As of February 2026, approximately 120 Wikipedia pages link to the Postcolonial Studies @ Emory site.
Over time, the site grew to over 200 web pages. In the pre-Wikipedia era, it served as a vital resource for students at Emory while establishing itself as a reference point worldwide. Several pages were reproduced in textbooks, and well over 2,000 academic and informational sites linked back to it. I held to a firm editorial principle: we did not create pages on topics or authors already responsibly represented elsewhere on the web. After Wikipedia’s founding in 2001, our mission continued largely unchanged until Wikipedia’s own coverage improved in credibility and rigor. In successive revisions, the site evolved to incorporate user-generated content, commentary, tagging, and crowd-sourced book reviews and conference announcements. Although a far cry from 6,000 hits per day in pre-Wikipedia years, in 2016, the site still averaged 10,000 page views a month, with active commentary by worldwide visitors. Today, spam messaging has overtaken what we were hoping to foster–responsible debate, dialogue, and information sharing–but global visitors continue to engage with this site.
A final word on the future of sites like this one. Keeping a website online is a persistent challenge: web-building software becomes obsolete, is updated, or loses support; maintaining a large database demands considerable ongoing labor; information grows stale, requiring constant updates; archived pages vanish even from the Wayback Machine; and entire archives can disappear overnight when a server is no longer available to host them. Sic transit gloria digitalis mundi.
This website lives on as an archival document in the history of postcolonial digital humanities.
Credits
In 1996, Deepika Bahri launched the Postcolonial Studies @ Emory with her students. In 2011, she won a Mellon grant from Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) to redesign the site in collaboration with the DiSC staff. Postcolonial Studies graduate students involved in the last update of this site include Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, Asha French, Joseph Fritsch, Michael Lehman, Roopika Risam, Caroline Schwenz, and Molly Slavin.