Author Archives: Carmen Kynard

About Carmen Kynard

Carmen Kynard is Lillian Radford Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at Texas Christian University. Her award-wining research, teaching, and scholarship interrogate anti-colonialism, Black feminist pedagogies, and Black cultures/languages.

eRace & New (Digital) Empire

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When I listen to discussions about new technologies and digital pedagogies, I am always struck by how alien that discourse is from the historical and political experiences of African Americans.   This is, of course, no surprise given the ways that schools under racial apartheid could hardly foster a culturally or politically relevant education for people of African descent. But the nature and contour of these disconnections are worth examining.

I am reminded of conversations that I have heard about people’s general anxiety and discomfort about the public nature of digital texts.  I certainly agree with this stance but, at times, quite honestly, the paranoia seems completely unfounded to me.  This anxiety comes from an assumption that feels more nested with privilege than with any reality that I can see.  The underlying assumption goes something like this: when I show up, everyone will notice.  Meanwhile, the amount of time, care, and attention that bloggers and website designers must give to bring regular, continual “traffic” to their site is immense.  In terms of a digital universe, you do not simply post online products and have multiple readers and followers right away who then stay with you. What would make people think otherwise?  So another assumption operating here is this: as soon as I speak/write, people are listening.  I can’t imagine a reality more foreign to women of color.  I can’t pinpoint when and where I first learned this lesson but I can be sure that, as a woman of color (unless I am trying to be like or only “theorize” the likes of Basketball Wives, etc), mainstream perspective-bearers are seldom listening and if they are, it is often from the place of hostility, feigned interest, paternalism, or resistance.  I don’t know what it is like to assume that when I speak, write, or post online, or anywhere, that I have an immediate  and/or large audience.   That’s a kind of privilege I simply have not experienced.

Then there is another discourse that I hear a lot, a discourse that I myself have been working diligently to avoid: the issue of control.   I often hear this idea that in a digital universe, you can control your public image and presence.  Now that’s another hard pill for me to swallow.  At what point in history have black folk been able to control their public image?   I mean, really! Do we need to be reminded of what happened to Trayvon Martin for Walking while Black, wearing a hoodie and eating skittles?   Do we need to be reminded of the endless questioning of President Obama’s citizenship and birth status?  A black president can’t even control THAT!  This idea that people can control their public presence just reeks of a privileged mindset and history that I can’t understand as anything other than empire. This is not to say that communities of color have no agency, that we are mere victims of an onslaught of visual images that present us as animals.   We must, of course, actively construct our images and public presence in a world that is seeking to deny our humanity.  There is, after all, a word for that: RHETORIC.  The issue of control is a serious one for me because it is a concept so alien to how people of color have needed to imagine and operate in public spaces that it is void of any meaning for us.  I think here of a blog that I follow— the Crunk Feminist Collective— who quite forthrightly present themselves as inserting an unapologetic crunk, black, of/color, contemporary feminist discourse into the public sphere.  In my mind, that’s a very specific audience and yet, when I read the folk who comment regularly to the collective’s posts, I am often baffled that so many folks outside of that political vision assume the right to try and “correct” what the Crunk Feminists are doing, saying, and theorizing with an often unashamed homophobia, sexism, and/or racism.  To their credit, the Crunk Feminists handle them fools something lovely, which all brings me back to my original point: some of us simply can’t control our image and public presence in a capitalistic, racist, heterosexist world. But we DO fight for the right to have that public presence and resistance.

I will call my last point of disconnection the Sleeping Beauty complex.  As an educator, I see a wide continuum of how people relate to technology: on one far end are the people who fetishize any and every new thing; way on the other end are the folk who demonize anything related to technology (often while maintaining a Facebook account, of course); in between is a whole range of perspectives and experiences.  The folk who baffle me most though are those sitting and waiting for the institution to tell them exactly what to do and to train them exactly how to do it.  The kind of trust you must have in institutions to sit, wait, and expect all that is just not something I can relate to.  That kind of passivity and faith means that you don’t really understand or critique institutions as spaces in place and time that invent and sustain power, presumably because you share that power.   Or, similarly, you want a piece of that power and are waiting for the opportunity to cash in.  For me, this kind of Sleeping Beauty complex where I wait for the king to arrive means giving up all self-determination: the desire to willingly forego my own decision-making and meaning-making by simply waiting for the institution/empire to tell me what to do, in other words, to bestow its imprint on me.  That kind of waiting only works for  those who already expect and represent power, which simply has not been the historical experience of black communities.

While these expectations related to audience, control of public presence, and the benevolent caretaking of  institutions seem so simple and “everyday”, they are deeply invested in social hierarchies. Since I do not sit at the top of these hierarchies, the view down here gives me a different perspective on how and why these everyday topics circulate.  These are perspectives that digitally-emboldened, color-conscious students also need to hear and think about.

 

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Inflecting and Bending: Black Life, Language, and Literacies

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On this first day of school, I want us to begin to craft metaphors, tropes, or images that can best capture African American Life, Language, and Literacies.  The trope I choose today is inflecting and bending: inflecting the social world in which you live but always bending it to your own purposes and vision at the same time.  The best way to explain it is to do as the Staples Singers once crooned: take you there.

It is February 13, 1983 and it is the NBA All-Star Game hosted by the Los Angeles Lakers.  Here is what I remember from the starting line-up: MVP Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Isiah Thomas, Moses Malone, Maurice Cheeks, and Larry Bird… up against Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Alex English, David Thompson, and Maurice Lucas. I was 12 years old watching at my father’s home since he had the biggest television.

I watched for three reasons: 1) it was the all-star game; 2) Dr. J was in it, and; 3) Marvin Gaye was singing.  I have no idea who won (I’ll throw up my East Coast signs here and, most naturally, go with that) and I no longer remember Dr. J’s plays though my eyes were riveted on him.  I do, however, remember my jaw dropping, everyone in the room being speechless and almost in tears, and then cheering louder than the Olympics Games for this move right here:

While I have offered Marvin Gaye’s rewriting of the National Anthem in personal terms, there is a larger historical and political terrain.   As we move through the semester in this course, you will see how African American literacies have to be conceived inside of rigorous historical knowledge.  Marvin Gaye’s anthem is no exception.

The timing of Marvin Gaye’s 1983 anthem and its impact come at a very specific time in U.S. history of race relations.

The organized struggles for African American empowerment that characterized earlier Black Freedom Movements of the Civil Rights and Black Power era had moved to urban city-centers.  So you had a new populist movement of black, urban, working class groups in what you might call the Second Great Migration.

Black urban city-centers were looking at a level of militarization and police surveillance that they had never seen, triggered largely by the State’s (i.e., Cointelpro, J. Edgar Hoover, etc) ongoing covert and overt attacks on the most radical black activists.

Middle class blacks were abandoning urban city-centers for greener pastures, not unlike Gaye’s original recording label, Motown, which had abandoned its black-community-base of Detroit, went Hollywood in the hopes of tapping into a more mass-consumer culture, and set up in Los Angeles.  Meanwhile, a largely working class black culture found their jobs transformed by Post-Industrialized economy into a service-based economy, creating mass poverty and even bigger racialized gaps in wealth in the U.S.

With Motown perhaps as a guiding (because now even more co-opted) symbol, the black protest movements of the 50, 60s, and 70s were now commodified.  For instance, Martin Luther King and, albeit to a lesser extent, Malcolm X’s images could be found everywhere but their visions for equity and equality were not: blacks faced a level of economic and social inequality in the late 1970s that was arguably worse than what they had faced in previous decades.

Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On (which included the song of the same title, where he charted his own brother’s military service in Vietnam, and ended with the song, “Inner City Blues”) have made him an iconic figure in the Black Freedom Movements.  Gaye already had a rhetorical excellence such that black audiences came to expect him to do all of the following:

  • offer his own personal experiences as a lens into a larger black struggle
  • critique American imperialism at home and abroad
  • capture the best of what Soul music is and does— merge R&B and Gospel to capture, inspire, and sustain mass freedom movements
  • bring back the Blues (in both titles to songs and style) as central to the framing of black, urban life
  • layer a falsetto, mid-range singing, and a gospel shout into one seamless whole (it even sounds like he is saying oh lawd in between lines of the Anthem)
  • articulate a voice of resistance in a public black discourse despite all of the State efforts to thwart that voice;
  • grieve and lament the Freedom Struggles of the previous era (we don’t often talk about it this way but the deep need for a  communal grief after brutally violent assaults and murder on beloved heroes and heroines, towns, and communities was dire)
  • seemingly predict the world stage that Hip Hop would take given the kind of Hip-Hop beat that Gaye sets his version of the Anthem to

and last, but not least, and perhaps my own most favorite “bullet” of all…

  • resist, as best as he could, the public expectation and marketing desire that he present himself as a black male sex symbol (part of the reason he chose to perform so many duets with leading black female singers) though he didn’t back down from themes of black love (I stress this final point given both popular and academic tendencies to make opposite camps of music with overt themes like War in Vietnam vs. music about love/sensuality)

I suggest here that we stop and pause… and really listen again… listen to Marvin Gaye again, but this time with the intentionality of really hearing all of this African American history and experience that Marvin Gaye consciously represented.  This time, HEAR this history in Marvin Gaye’s rendition of the anthem…. (and let it play again)

All of the history that I have presented above are right there in Gaye’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the “Star Spangled Banner” and it was what my own family and countless other black families sitting around the television were both consciously and unconsciously responding to.  The “Star Spangled Banner,” composed by Francis Scott Key, which gained anthem status in 1931 had only once before been so radically altered (and was then also regarded controversially): by Jose Feliciano at the 1968 World Series.  Gaye’s choice to so dramatically alter the Anthem (which Whitney Houston was herself inspired by when she sang her version at Super Bowl XXV with its now platinum record sales) for televised sports showed his right and responsibility to politicize the African American experience and to do so, quite literally, in the context of one of America’s most sacred texts.

Gaye inflects all of the history of his moment, but he bends it his way, toward his history and towards the future he wants to create. Democracy, as represented by the Anthem, as represented by Gaye’s revised version of it, is now an African Americanized/African American-inclusive Democracy.  

Think about the ways Gaye and his audience are reading the world.   And now think about how and why Gaye and his audience are (re)writing that world.  This is what we look at when we talk about African American literacies.

 

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eBlack Archiving and Pedagogy

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I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.

~Toni Morrison

If I had to define what AfroDigital texts look like and do, I would re-mix Morrison’s arguments above and include issues of digital composing and design.  I am drawn to her singular goal of offering an unapologetic, self/community-determined right to think, imagine, and create with and for black communities.  An AfroDigital pedagogy would seem closely related.

I’ll start here by wondering/wandering about the intellectual, textual community that digital texts can  provide.  I mean something beyond (for now, at least) the seemingly endless experimentations in classrooms with new technologies as if the experimentation itself is the pursuit of knowledge, a rigorous theory of new media, or the creation of socially critical or meaningful action.  I have seen enough youtube videos online made by young people, often for their classes, that deploy quite ingenuous uses of technology but say nothing critical about black communities, fail to transcend the tradition of book reporting, or, at worst,  showcase dazzling multimedia tools about nothing.  I love when these kind of tech-creative projects are done by 11 and 12 year old students but when the creators are college students, I have some questions, to say the least.

So I am not talking about digital products as the sole marker of an AfroDigital pedagogy.

I am also not talking about the replacement of books and articles since nothing of the sort would be true of my own life.  The reading that I do on blogs and other websites does not replace the reading that I do in books and articles, some of it online/e-Book and some not. Nevertheless, I still believe that it is simply no longer enough for a group of students to connect with one another in classroom dialogues or via online discussions alone.  Nor is it enough to simply read a book outside of the digital universe that can give vision and audio-dimension to the text. We need to contextualize the world of ideas as part of the digital life that many students already have.  For an AfroDigital pedagogy, I am talking about the creation of a fierce, eBlack mini-archive that complements each of our classes.

While students certainly have access to more information and knowledge about black communities and their histories than ever before,  I see no evidence of a greater understanding of power, race, and culture today than 20 years ago when I first began teaching when there was no such thing as google, iTunes, or widespread use of DVDs.  I don’t expect this understanding from young people since this is the reason, after all, that they are in my classes.  However, to talk about the unlimited exchange of knowledge that can be found online severely miseducates students.  A google search, for instance, is as coded by money, power, and access in relation to whom and what gets listed, not unlike previous power dynamics that determined whose books/nations made it into a library or printing press.

When I want to link course content to various websites and videos, I clearly need to know that content first in order to sift through the options.  For instance, I wanted to build connections for my university program to current scholars’ counter-standardization and counter-testing movements in New York by locating politically challenging video-presentations.  I had to know first to look for Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine because what I got before including their names in my search was inane, at best, and racist, at worst.  What about our students who do not know Fine and Noguera as critical, radical thinkers and educational activists?  Do we assume they will find these sites and people on their own because the internet is so amazing in the way it equalizes information-gathering from multiple perspectives?  Do we assume the internet is so highly interactive and engaging to young people that students will automatically do the work of sifting to find radical nooks and corners?  Do we assume they will know, in the example above, to follow the NYCLU on twitter to see the latest activist work they are doing in and for schools?   And if they are following NYCLU on twitter, is that the beginning and end, the creme de la creme, of their intellectual work? I say no on all this.

Do we just include a link on a syllabus (or classroom text) or pull up a video in class where oftentimes, like in the case of the panel which hosted Noguera and Fine, contending for our attention, are comments from racist whites about how and why they refuse to send their white children to schools with the poor and dumb black kids in the district?  After all, isn’t this what digital spaces allow— free exchange of ideas we may not get otherwise?  I say no on all that too.

I can’t afford to assume that our digital universe readily provides access to students to fully humanized representations of black communities.  I can’t assume that the most race-critical perspectives have been digitized and easily located for them.  I can’t ever assume that students’ possession of a new technological toolkit means that students have a radical or culturally-relevant use of it. So as I plan my class this fall, I am mindful about one, important use of my own website: to gather up and (re)present digital texts as a mini, eBlack archive so that my students and I can focus, think, be, do, and listen better to the black communities we are learning about.

When I first began using the term, AfroDigitized, in 2005, I had not heard the 2001 “The Shrine” album compiling a variety of artists from Africa forging what they call futuristic and future sounds of the Motherland.   After now hearing that album, I like the term even more as well as this notion of looking and listening digitally to the future, as if it were already here, rather than assuming that we have now is enough. These realizations, at least for me, are small but necessary first steps toward an AfroDigital Pedagogy.

 

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“Beyond Miranda’s Meanings”: My First Two Lessons

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As an undergraduate student in her classes, I once witnessed Professor Sylvia Wynter receive notification of an award that she quite forthrightly declined.  This is something that she has done many times in her career, as far as I can tell, if the award and its circle of privilege did not represent the social-intellectual work she was doing or believed in.  As a 21-year old, I simply thought she was FIERCE with an audacity that just awed me!   And while I assumed I knew the weight and integrity of the kinds of decisions she was making, I really had no clue.  It is only now that I am also a professor that I have reached some level of new understanding.

I suppose I think about Professor Wynter and this moment so much now because her ideological stance is so far removed from the decisions that I see most other bourgeois professionals making.  And while this issue of declining an award might seem like a trite issue in comparison to what her scholarship achieves, such a stance seems, indeed, part of how and why she does that scholarship.

Lesson #1

There is the obvious, main lesson that I learned from Professor Wynter: that scholarship and research matter, that the ideas and knowledge we pursue do real work and have material effect in marking out the systems in which we live.  There is a whole continuum where we can imagine new social possibilities or we can impose more limitations.  This rather basic lesson is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.  I think of a graduate student who once asked me for advice on what was the minimal amount of thinking and work she could do in order to receive her doctoral degree.  She insisted that she had no desire to do research or scholarship and that she just needed the degree to get a full-time job at the community college where she was working.  I didn’t have any answer for her and was too stunned, quite honestly, to come up with anything.  I wish I could say this was the first time I had heard something like this from a graduate student.  I found myself, at that very moment, trying to imagine myself and my peers stepping into Professor Wynter’s office as 19-year olds (or any professor) and telling them that we just wanted to do the least amount of work possible, that we had no intention of pursuing research, that we just wanted a job.  Why would we have even taken her classes if that were our only motivations?  I am reminded here of the volume sponsored by the American Anthropological Association, Racism in the Academy: The New Millennium. One of the volume’s contributors argues that my generation and those who are coming behind me treat becoming a professor like they are just getting another professional certificate or license rather than wanting to do the work of thinking.  It’s a harsh statement that certainly does reflect many of us at this point in the history of the academy (albeit I think the scholar tends to regard his own generation more positively than he should).  Because university teaching confers a greater deal of prestige than, let’s say K-12 teaching, I see many opting for university teaching but without the concomitant focus on research and writing (this is not to suggest that k-12 teachers do not do research and write since I know many k-12 teachers who certainly do and I certainly did also; it’s just that tenure expectations aren’t nested to publication like at universities).   Given the debt that families and young people are incurring for a college education today, it seems there are, in the least, some ethical questions here.   What might it mean for students to sit in classrooms where someone like the graduate student who I just described is responsible for their learning while having not fully committed to her own learning of the content she is disseminating?  I find myself more frequently these days thinking back to my favorite mantra from Professor Wynter’s classes: Nothing is ever simple. There is always an idea behind it.  The value and purpose of relentlessly interrogating ideas, especially those that form a system of oppression for people of African descent, was the first lesson I ever learned from her.

Lesson #2

My 20-year old self understood Professor Wynter’s decline of an award as highly principled, but I did not fully understand the conscious and deliberate decision to forego the prestige-conferral ceremonies of Western education.  Even though these ceremonies are often divorced from liberatory politics and instead only offer social capital and power, those  ceremonies are very enticing for the ways they offer popularity, status, attention, monetary advancement, and upward mobility.  This is not to say that we decline all awards, that is not what Professor Wynter did, only that she always rejected any decision that would mark her as part of what Cedric Robinson has called “the selective breeding of Black intellectuals” where control of Black knowledge production has been as important to capitalism as the control of their cotton-picking production.  (Robinson reminds us, for example, that some of the most well-funded research on Black youth are basically police studies.) Racism significantly impacts who and what constitutes research on Black communities in the academy.  So while I have greatly appreciated (and agreed with) many scholars’ rage at Professor Wynter’s sometimes peripheral status in the uber-chic world of critical theory and its pre-selected critics of color, we need to still make sure that we do not forget the questions we must ask about new modes of commercialization and consumption in the academic metropole that underly popularity.  What I learned early on from Professor Wynter is that a fierce integrity on how you construct your identity as a scholar is deeply connected to its substance.  I see more and more each day how her own work and life represented the “demonic ground” that she so infamously delineated in her masterful piece, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’ ”, a way of thinking that Katherine McKittrick has brilliantly taken up in her book, Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle.

In “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” originally published in Carole Boyce Davies’s and Elaine Savory Fido’s Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, Wynter introduces the notion of “Demonic Grounds” based on theories of math and physics where a system that is in place is called demonic when it does not have an already determined or knowable outcome. This means that the methodologies and assumptions that are traditionally used to construct meaning and understanding will not work and trans-disciplinarity is required.*  She uses this notion of “demonic grounds” to represent the “absent presence” of Black women using Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a system of thinking. Instead of focusing on Caliban’s mother, as Aime Cesaire did, Wynter focuses on Caliban’s female peer, “the woman of his kind” — a woman who is so “outside of the bounds of Prospero’s world of reason that she cannot even be imagined, and so appears nowhere in the play.”  The demonic ground is, thus, a space not imagined and thereby, radical, in that it can re-position the governing, fixed codes of the social order which are presented as the only option rather than merely one option amongst many. Social transformation imagined from the demonic ground, as Wynter argues it, ushers in a new “human discourse” that goes “beyond the ‘master discourse’ of our governing ‘privileged text’, and its sub/versions.”  Wynter is, of course, exploding the role of black women in traditional constructions of feminist theory and its applicability outside of whiteness.  I now also see the ramification of her embrace of “demonic grounds” in terms of what it means to be a scholar who questions the ways that knowledge and power are maintained in the academy without getting caught up in it and, ultimately, lost in the academic sauce.

On those days when I look more like an attention-and-prestige-seeking charlatan acquiring status by chasing (usually white and male) networking gimmicks, then I too am caught up in the struggle to represent the kind of intellectual life that Professor Wynter has achieved.  But on those days that I am really being and living an alternate definition of researcher/writer/teacher/scholar than the mainstream corporatization of knowledge that the academy privileges,  that’s when I am simply representing what Professor Wynter taught us.

 

*Trans-disciplinarity here is different from inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary in that it calls into question the very nature of our disciplines as they maintain the logic of existing social crises, and thereby, replicate them.

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