The Purple Perspective is a summer project that aims to build a digital feminist archive of Black women and gender expansive people’s print and material artifacts that utilize or feature the color purple, and illustrate the significance of purple to these cultures through qualitative-data visualization. This work is born out of my Master’s research on purple and Black women’s rhetorics, where I argue novelist and scholar Alice Walker’s definition of ‘womanist’–”Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (Walker, xvi)–has not only offset the radical concept and practice of Womanism, but arguably has set in motion a ‘Womanist aesthetic’(D. Bhagyathara) in the prominence of purple across Black women’s media broadly defined. From the dust jackets of books on Black women’s studies and marketing for Black dolls, to website interfaces, scholarly databases and digital fliers for symposia on Black femmes’ lives, the physical and digital artifacts have become staggering and far reaching within the contemporary moment. There has yet to be a dedicated archive to such artifacts; this, in addition to the phenomenon rarely being talked about, if at all. The Purple Perspective aspires to reformulate the digital feminist archive to also function as a visualization tool to best illustrate the depth and scope of the significance of purple in Black women and gender expansive people’s lives.

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