Analyzing the Hashtag as Performance Site

Jeannine Murray-Roman

A multi-media digital humanities book project that looks at the way artists and activists create work in response to socially produced disasters.

Overview

Context

Visualizing #4645 : Digital Writing and Illustration after Hurricane María is a multi-media digital humanities book project that looks at the way artists and activists create work in response to socially produced disasters. My focus is particularly on the hashtag “4645,” which symbolizes the hurricane’s death toll and the government’s obfuscation of it and came into usage eight months after the hurricane and a year before the historic Ricky Renuncia protests of Summer 2019. This book examines how artists, writers, and citizen-journalists used social media platforms to form the hashtag 4645 into a representation of María’s dead who could be brought to the protests to denounce the government and demand justice. I propose that the tactics for mobilizing the Puerto Rican Summer 2019 were forged in the collective, public and online rituals of resistance-in-mourning shortly after the 4645 revelation a year earlier. Through digitally circulated and in person commemorations, denunciations, and reflections, artists and activists elaborated a healing process of “sanación”—collective healing practices that can address the effects of colonialism on the land and on the people of Puerto Rico.

#4645 is therefore more than one stepping stone on the way to the protests and constitutes a moment of reckoning in its own right. Drawing from the historical moment of anticipating the Summer 2019 revolts, “Visualizing #4645” makes the case that the mutual aid, decolonizing projects of “sanación” originating in a response to María’s death toll propel the Puerto Rican Summer 2019. It therefore contributes to the necessary research on twenty-first century coloniality and the specificity of Puerto Rican anti-colonial actions within it.