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The imperative of the popular hashtag "#staywoke" demands sustained awareness of intersectional social justice focused on antiblackness: to "stay woke" requires an awakening into critical consciousness predicated on the active push to stay informed and connected. This phrase in African American Vernacular English, popularized by the cultural force known as "Black Twitter," is linked to Black Lives Matter and the Movement's call to keep informed.1 American studies' engagement with the digital humanities demands the field's renewed commitment to open and accessible interdisciplinary antiracist work in light of Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi's founding of #BlackLivesMatter as a grassroots movement mobilized through social media. Such hashtags share productive characteristics with the Raymond Williams–inspired Keywords for American Cultural Studies: both cohere unruly discursive genealogies that provoke collaborative and critical engagement. Indeed, as Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler point out, keywords organize and contextualize information and meaning in a manner akin to metadata or meta-tags in information technology.2 In turn, what if antiracist social media activism inspired new keywords for American studies? Addressing the entanglement between racial and technological formations, Tara McPherson argues for bringing together American studies and the digital humanities: "Politically committed academics with humanities skill sets must engage technology and its production not simply as an object of our scorn, critique, or fascination but as a productive and generative space that is always emergent and never fully determined."3 In this sense, #staywoke expresses that meeting of political commitment and technological engagement.
The practice of pedagogy offers us another way to consider Alan Liu's challenge to the digital humanities to use its strengths in dialogue with cultural criticism toward the ideal of public service.4 In digital humanities pedagogy at present, however, substantive considerations of critical race theory, feminism, and other critically engaged American studies approaches have been sidelined despite appeals by scholars like Miriam Posner.5 In his editor's introduction to the 2012 Digital Humanities Pedagogy collection, Brett D. Hirsch gives a historical overview of the inconsistent place of pedagogy in the digital humanities, arguing for its needed centrality to the field. Yet there is a marked absence of essays on race and gender in this volume, which Hirsch acknowledges, stating, "Such contingencies are unfortunate, and unfortunately unavoidable."6