Brown University Postdoctoral Fellow Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka SAMMUS) has been working on theKEEPER: A Digital Archive of Womxn in Hip Hop this summer as part of a team of artists, scholars, and activists led by Akua Naru, a performing artist who was also an artist-in-residence through Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Enthinicty in America in Fall 2019. Ms. Naru began developing the idea to build a public archive focused on women's contributions to Hip Hop while she was a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University in 2018-19. Since then, she has also enlisted an impressive of advisors for the project including Brown's own Tricia Rose, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ingrid Monson, Mark Naison, and LaTosha Brown.

Raising Funds for theKEEPER Digital Archive

Last week, the team launched a 30-day campaign to raise the first $50k of a $100k+ goal toward the development of theKEEPER Digital Archive, the first archive dedicated to cataloging and geospatially-mapping the vast contributions of womxn and girls to Hip Hop culture over the past five decades. The goal of the fundraising effort is to make the project available starting next year as a free, public resource akin to projects like the Black Quantum Futurism Collective's community-sourced event map of North Philadelphia or NYU Gallatin student Jenzia Burgos' Black Music Library project.

Learn More and Donate!

If you want to learn more about theKEEPER digital archive or you would like to donate, please follow this link: https://igg.me/at/thekeeperarchive.