Today, I fell in love …with the internet. I returned to a letter written by a soldier for the Union Army, Spottswood Rice, that I first read more than ten years ago in Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era by Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland. In the letter, Rice (who learned to read and write as a slave by tricking his young “master”) leaves no stone unturned in letting a slave-mistress know what he has in mind if she continues to refuse to give him his child (who she believes is her property.) By visiting Angela Walton-Raji’s blog, I participated in Walton-Raji’s archival research that witnesses the life of this man and his family. Her website allowed me to finally fill in the picture that Rice’s letter gave me when I first read it more than 10 years ago.
Category Archives: AfroDigital Pedagogies
What Time Is It?
If I could become any kind of new media composer today, I would be the AfroDigital version of Jimmy Jam (a name I have always adored) and Terry Lewis, with every and anything that would entail, all the bells and whistles that we have come to expect from them and all the new surprises awaiting us, and just when we thought they were done! If you grew up listening to the SOS Band, Cherrelle, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, Klymaxx, and, of course, the Time (and so many others), then you might have a sense of what I am getting at here. I know that their music doesn’t translate simply as a digital movement, but it is their collaborative presence that I have in mind: what I thought of, way back when, as my generation’s version of Ashford and Simpson (who fueled the music of Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, and so many others.) You just know when you are in the presence of these folks’s creations which seem to take on a life of their own for many moons to come. I think that’s what digital spaces have to offer black communities: a unique AND African-Americanized presence that you come to know and incorporate into how you live your life.
I think about digital presence a lot lately, moreso than before, because I am more conscious of the digital spaces that I inhabit. Immediate, in-time interactivity like twitter is sometimes important to me, but not always. Even digital texts that are not updated can offer me multiple experiences, voices, and mental images vs. the usual, calcified and static repository of non-dynamic texts.
Here are some texts that I have come to enjoy because every time I enter them, I am, in fact, ENTERING something, becoming part of someone’s/something’s dynamism. Though the text doesn’t really change, I am still offered a new experience, a new way of hearing and seeing, each time I enter.
Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Polymorphous Perversity in Texts”, in the summer 2012 issue (16.3) of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy offers me a way of thinking about academic research and writing where the ideas just literally jump out at you. On top of that, Johnson-Eilola even offers an 89 MB zipped archive for readers/players/co-imaginers to go off and play some more.
I was inspired by this collaborative movement (movement is the best word I have because text just doesn’t seem expansive enough). This movement represents a course called “English 696e: Spatial and Visual Rhetorics” at the University of Arizona. The collaboration of amy c. kimme tea, adrienne crump & elise verzosa, crystal n. fodrey, anita further archer, jennifer haley-brown, ashley j. holmes, marissa m. juarez, londie t. martin, and jenna vinson allows you to see the work of a classroom as a relational space of understanding, conflicts, and contradictions so that we can now EXPERIENCE a whole range of perspectives. I can’t imagine a better entry point into a classroom and its composing.
I like the possibilities that such digital texts offer me. In my ideal world, I would re-mix all of this with a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis vibe. It is only when I imagine the kind of new knowledge-making that Johnson-Eilola and English 696e’s collaboration make possible, alongside the presence and worlds that black cultural icons like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have created, that I can imagine any reason and purpose for building digital competencies, code fluency, and tech skills.
Human vs. Liberalism
I didn’t know that the little icon next to a web address is called a favicon until mid-August when I set up this website. I have always noticed these symbols but never thought about how they got there. Needless to say, it took me more than just a few minutes to get the favicon (as pictured here at the left) onto this website.* Using the Faviconer website was smooth sailing. But then I had to figure out how to put my favicon.ico file in my theme folder using FTP clients. I had to learn how to use filezilla before I could even get started. The reality was that I had no idea what these nouns and phrases even referenced. I would go to the wordpress help sites and then have to google each sentence to find out what they meant. Nothing was intuitive. All alone in my house, I kept working at adding a favicon until I got it, hoping to accumulate yet more proof for my more digitally resistant students that if I can do this, really anyone can.
This story might seem rather silly and irrelevant, but I present my pursuit of a favicon here as a lens into how I think about self-esteem and the refusal to give in. What might seem even stranger here is that I connect these issues of self-esteem and perseverance to Sylvia Wynter’s work and the grounds on which she has always helped me to challenge the unhealthy, dominant logic of liberalism.
At moments like my favicon creation, I do not label or understand myself as unskilled, bad at something, deficient, or remedial. I simply did not know how to add a favicon right then, nothing more or less, and I did not attach any meaning to that. This seems like such a trivial and small thing, but really it isn’t. I say this because, as a teacher, I can see when students begin to run a script in their heads that they are dumb or slow when they bump up against something unfamiliar or challenging. What I suppose I got from Professor Wynter is that these moments require more than the usual protocols of self-esteem workshops, confidence boosts, and self-help guides. You simply need to forego a system of thinking rooted in liberalism that makes you think your success or challenge is about YOU and just go on ’bout your business. No drama, no second-guessing, no frustration.
Lesson #3
When I talk about liberalism, I mean the classical ideas about the individual, equality, democracy, and meritocracy: the idea that if you work hard, the fruits of your labor will shine like a pot of gold; the idea that individuals are the key foundation of everything and so laws and institutions exist solely to cater to the desires and needs of single individuals. Of course, the history of the collision of liberalism and Western empire is long and complex but a central axis is still: opportunities are everywhere and so it is the individual’s job to decide which opportunities to pursue and how and when. This means there is never a focus on equality of outcomes, actual social histories of oppression, or perpetrators of inhumanity. Why would there be? It’s all about YOU and YOU alone. This also means that if you are poor, then it is your own fault because you did not pursue the opportunities that everyone has; you are, in sum, cognitively/genetically deficient. Whatever you don’t have or don’t do well, it is your own fault: you did something wrong, because, after all, life gave you nothing but positive chances to get whatever you wanted and needed. With this kind of mindset and system of being, it becomes easy to see how someone sitting alone on a computer making mistakes with favicon uploading can simply think they are stupid. It is what liberalism trains you to feel and think, regardless of whether this represents any reality. This is the moment that I think many of my students often face: where they doubt themselves. Schooling is,of course, the prime example of where the virus of liberalism can be caught. Liberalism provides that thought and feeling of inadequacy as central to what school actually achieves.
Lesson #4
Of course, students are not only up against liberalism today, but also neoliberalism. I use neoliberalism to focus on the uber-glitz of free markets, choice, and efficiency. So if you ARE good at getting that favicon up there, you are supposed to use that to make money and more money. This is success and this is a new aim of schooling. Institutions of higher education are expected to have and market themselves with the ability to turn YOU into a consumable product. I think Professor Wynter has most brilliantly called this the social creation of a species that has been determined solely as homo-economicus.
At the end of the day, liberalism and neoliberalism are not inevitable ways of being that we must simply resign ourselves to. They are simply one choice amongst many. It seems to me, with my favicon generation as just one example, that you can go so much further without liberalism where there is no doubt that as a Human, in the way Professor Wynter means it, communal achievement is already there!
*My favicon is the adinkra symbol for ANANSE NTONTAN (“spider’s web”). It is a symbol of wisdom, creativity, and the complexities of life and makes its nod to Ananse the spider, a well-known trickster character.
eRace & New (Digital) Empire
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.
