“The Cypher is Forever” (Fall Semester Ends…)

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Da_Brat-stunning_thumb_585x795This fall semester is now officially over: the last individual meetings are happening now; the final projects are due today; and Jack just stopped by with his Finals-Week-Full-Beard in Full Effect!   (You know the semester is over when your students talk about going back home to sleep and shave.)

Like I have said before in this forum, this is my first time teaching the class, African American Literacies and Education.  Together, with the use of Jigsaw Reading assignments and literature circles (see course introduction and syllabus), we have discussed more than a 100 texts related to histories and polemics of race, black cultures, people of African descent, and literacy.  When I walk out into the library, I see laptops and stacks of those texts everywhere and students so focused, they don’t notice me walk past.  Yes, the end is here!

For lack of a better way to say it, the students in this class were always “good sports.” Whatever pedagogical concoction I had going for the week, they smiled and tried it out.  My favorite experiment of the semester was the chart-making we did during the week that we read and discussed Adam Banks’s book, Digital Griots.  Writing on the walls via charts and colorful markers tends to always make its way somehow into my classrooms.  On this day, I wanted us to really unpack what Banks was defining and theorizing as the intersection of digital/griotic traditions, African American rhetoric, and multimedia composing in the 21st century.   Equally important, I wanted an initial, full and equal discussion representing every single person/voice in the room.   Instead of having oral conversations, we had visual/charted conversations to jumpstart the discussions of the evening.  What I liked most was the verbal creativity students spit on the walls and the shower of words, images, and symbols we had created in relation to and with African American rhetoric, right there in the classroom.

In three different areas of the classrooms, I taped (very large) charts to the walls.  Each corner had a different discursive function, a different sentence for each student in the class to finish on the chart itself, and each student was expected to rotate the room and add their sentence “tag” somewhere in each corner.  Now my students might find me overly sentimental here when I say their writing/tags were HOTTT, so maybe their verbal gangsterism can speak for itself.  The bullets below are a sampling of how it went down collectively with my sentence starters (in yellow) and their collective finish-closers (in bulleted italics):

The African American Deejay is central as a cultural figure/icon and metaphor because…

  • s/he is a constructivist, archivist, and figure who provides access to people who were never supposed to receive the message in the first place!
  • s/he blends cuts for listening and feeling to give us history, technology, purpose, commitment AND tools of persuasion.
  • she molds space, takes it, interprets it and brings all that into the future for her people.
  • she re-sparks the interest in and for her people.
  • s(he) brings a different lifestyle to the world, representing those that live it, keeping it current and liquid, while bonding it to its people.
  • the digital griot moves past just deejaying and makes it a form of pedagogy that links Black language to the people as a new technology.
  • they make the co-existence of “the contradictory, overlapping, open, closed, and fluctuating systems of exchange” into art.
  • she creates direction and guidance for new thinking and social unity.
  • they rock the party and set the mood.
  • they are a living symbol of what African American literacies do.
  • they reactivate black participation.
  • it’s in the mix that the story gets told… and the sequence determines how the crowd moves to it.
  • he/she studies the people’s passions, reconfigures their perspectives and their experiences and motivates them to mobilize/move.

Putting this concept of a digital griot, into words, basically taking a book and reducing it into a sentence or a 1-hour discussion was not so easy so I was hoping this collective showers of words pasted to the walls in the room would add the necessary dimensionality.  Here is how that looked (my sentence starter is in yellow and students’ collective finish-closers are in bulleted italics).

Digital Griots are…

  • the spaces and spacemakers that have a humanistic, individualistic, communal approach to knowledge, knowing, and writing.
  • activists with a digital groove.
  • the manipulators of technology where the keeping of history is maintained for positive sociocultural recognition, change, and advancement.
  • ethically responsible, constantly searching, provocative seers.
  • modern-day perpetuators of oral tradition, storytelling, and time-binding.
  • interactive archivists.
  • my uninhibited space-makers who let us exist without judgment in real and protected ways.
  • liberatory Lil’ Jon.
  • the new school transmitters of new Black narratives.
  • the modern-day storytellers who bring “back in the day” into the right now.

And of course, there was my favorite corner: the re-mix of the SAT analogy! Yes, we can re-mix that too!  (My sentence starter is in yellow and students’ collective finish-closers are in bulleted italics).

The African American Deejay/Digital Griot is to the multimedia age what _________ is to ___________:

  • collard greens are to cornbread: always integrated and soul/body-sustaining.
  • parents are to children: conception and birth.
  • grandparents are to parents are to children: past, present, AND future.
  • head chef/big mama is to the kitchen.
  • red bottoms are to stilettos.
  • new kicks are to my favorite dress.
  • Jazz is to America.
  • voice is to words.
  • the pastor is to the church community.
  • Marvin Gaye is to Taleb Kweli.
  • Nikki Giovanni is to Jill Scott.
  • line break is to poetry.

In many ways, this was the kind of intellectual and political energy that students were pushing themselves to write and think into all semester as I read their response papers each week.   This sampling of my students’ writings on the classroom walls encapsulates the semester quite well for me.

I am thinking now about conversations that I had with two students, Cassandra and Ancy, in my office this week, namely that African American Literacies, Black Language, right living, just schooling, and racial equality are not just the subject of study: it’s how we must remember; it’s how we must remember to live and act and fight.

I opened the semester talking in my syllabus how I once missed the mark (i.e., my artwork/essay showcasing da Brat) with my high school students to fully examine and center African American Literacies as a practice and lived theory.  As to whether or not I hit it right this time, well, I will need more time and space to reflect on THAT.  All I know right now is this semester’s focus on African American literacies and education came with an important message about what that work means: Lateef’s reminder in class a few weeks back that… the cypher is forever.

So to: Ancy, Cassandra, Dan, Dani, Daniel, Fedaling, Jack, Jeanette, Jenn, Lateef, Laura, Nancy, Nick, Princess, Regina, Rory, Sammantha, Stephanie, and Torrie… much love and gratitude to you all for sharing a classroom space with me this semester!

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Race, Publishing & Rhetoric of Rejection

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Tonight is the last class of the semester where students will be talking about their final projects, work we have been moving towards all semester in the writing projects.  Every aspect of this course— the syllabus and the weekly topics— have been pretty much made visible on this website.  And with wordpress, I can see what search terms people are using to land on the website. It takes a while for google to really “see” and list a new website so the first months and weeks of this class/website leave no real footprint to track. But, in these last two months, that has started to change.  And guess what course topic has coincided with what people search for most often?  The picture of Eric B. and Rakim at the right posted under “I Know You Got Soul”!  Thass right!  It seems appropriate that we make a note of this fact in a class on African American Literacies and Education!

I designed and proposed this course to my college more than a year ago now and this group of students are the first to experience it!  To wrap up, I am asking students to enter the fray now as researchers, with their own publication-ready pieces.  These final research projects will be graded and responded to as if they were journal articles. The options are a) a 30-page article in a research journal (print or online); b) a 15-page article in a research journal (print or online) (I ask that students not make the mistake of thinking that just because the articles in these journals are shorter, that they are somehow easier to write or that the expectations for citations, etc are somehow less stringent.  It just means that you say more in less space!); OR c) a multimodal webtext  (the target journal is Kairos and the webtext that was awarded the best webtext of the year).  Students have been working on these topics through the semester and now need to meet the following requirements:

1)    Offer a definition of and brief historical connection to African American literacies

2)    Reference and/or show how they are using Elaine Richardson’s work

3)    Have, at minimum, 30 citations in works cited AND in-text citations

4)    Use MLA or whatever style the target journal wants

5)    Show an original, theoretical position or qualitative/quantitative project

6)   Communicate methods clearly (if using human subjects, the IRB protocol number and all consent forms must be submitted)

But what I want to actually talk about tonight is getting students to really submit their works to a journal.  This means that students will have to go out on a limb and do what graduate students seldom do: let go of fear and insecurity… in other words: allow themselves to risk getting their work rejected.  There is a certain kind of exposure, a raw nakedness, with submitting work for publication when you do not have an “in” with that journal.  But if the work really moves past the bourgeois recitation of the right formulas and popular trends/tropes in the field, then exposing that work and set of ideas is exactly what we need to do.

I have been asked on numerous occasions, how I get articles published. The answer is really simple.  I don’t fret the rejections!  I just find another intellectual home for my work and, let me just say, I have heard ALL manner of foolishness.  When I have used expressions of my family, especially my grandmother from rural Alabama, I have been told that she is too ignorant to reference in academic work (these people only get away with such comments because they are protected by blind review— if I knew who they were, I can promise you that they would never say such a thing to or about a black woman ever again).  I have been OFTEN told that people are not interested in black women’s writing— “why is it even relevant” was the exact question I once received.  I have been frequently told that my work is appropriate for cultural studies, but not for writing studies.  I have been told that I need to explain why I have street literacy.  I have been told that audiences outside of the U.S. will not recognize Black culture/ Black English in my work (as an aside: the searches for Eric B. and Rakim are only written in ENGLISH 50% of the time!)  I have been told that my writing style needs to be more gentle.  These are pretty much exact quotes and not even the 1/2!  I was even told once that I do not know how to write at all (go back and check my earlier statement about blind review). With such rejections, all from comp-rhet sources, I receive a new and worthwhile, intellectual exercise: I get to confront an unyielding whiteness and nepotism in a space where not enough really criticize that.  I am grateful for all of these comments: I get to hear people’s true politics, see who they really are, and I get to find myself a better community to connect with.

So I simply keeps it movin now.  I want my students to know and do the same: if their piece is rejected at first and they really believe the work moves past the banal celebrity culture of academia and its trendy catch-phrases and, instead, confronts racism in the experiences of black folk to stall racism (rather than profit from it), they need to know now not to trip on these rhetorics of rejection and keep it movin intellectually too.  You can’t expect a world which dehumanizes black people to create an academy with a set of most white faculty and bourgeois minority allies that can then turn around and respect black folk.  And you can’t give up because white racism rejects you— it is just acting within the terms of its own logic.

So, maybe the folks landing on this website know something important: we should just take it back to Eric B. and Rakim and “hold the microphone like a grudge”… there IS a world out there willing to hear that:

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Academy & Mass Consumer Culture: Hip Hop

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My lenses on Hip Hop are framed within what many people would label as Old Skool.  To be sure, there is a certain nostalgia for me.  I think back to 1984 when I was 13 years old. When boys tried to step to you, they often took on a set of identities from UTFO: Kangol Kid, the Educated Rapper, or Doctor Ice.   It was corny, annoying, and offensive, even to a 13-year old like me. Here is their infamous song, “Roxanne, Roxanne”:

(a moment of pause, please, for a brotha in a red leather suit, dry jerri curl, white Kangol, and white boots with the pant legs tucked IN!)

I don’t really remember UTFO at all.  What I remember, growing up all the way west in Ohio, was a 14-year old from Queensbridge projects: Roxanne Shante.  As the story goes, UTFO canceled its appearance on a show promoted by Marley Marl and Mr. Magic, an unthinkable and arrogant thing to do to your friends in the world of Hip Hop especially in those early days.  Legend has it that Roxanne Shante was on her way to the laundry, washing clothes for her mother who was at work and took breaks between cycles to record this song in one take in Marley Marl’s apartment.  As a 13-year old, doing my share of the same daily chores, this was someone who I saw worth emulating.

Every girl I knew could recite these lyrics and it infuriated the boys our age.  To learn lyrics like this took real work too.  For the most part, someone like Roxanne Shante was played for only a few hours on the radio station where I grew up, certainly not all day.  You waited until that hour came and taped the show on a boombox using a cassette tape.  Then you played that cassette tape over and over until the ribbon wore out.  That’s how we all became Roxanne Shante.  We didn’t need to go shopping or get our nails done to become like her, which was a good thing because there wasn’t enough money for food and lights, much less outfits and manicures. We didn’t need a new weave, make-up, or plastic surgery.  Of course, nostalgia can be romantic and, highly inaccurate, but it is also always politically loaded and carries a material effect.  I can’t help but think back on many of my black female college students today who, upon first hearing Roxanne Shante in my classes on Black Women’s Rhetoric, are stunned by how “aggressive” she is and question whether or not this is appropriate for a “lady.” I don’t think I am merely being romantic in suggesting that my female peer group didn’t construct ourselves so wholly within this cult of white womanhood (no one ever fully escapes it) as indicated in these social fantasies of wanting to always be seen as “ladies” who do not directly confront men (or wash clothes for their mommas who are at work vs. staying at home to service their middle class homes/families.)

This is all more than simply nostalgia for me; it is a different relationship to mass consumerism and, thereby, capitalism.  It wasn’t that consumerism was not there; it was.  After all, calling yourself Kangol in the 1980s was as obnoxious in its signs of wealth as talking about the cars/houses/women you own.  And that’s why Roxanne Shante disses him: he goes by the name of a hat; it is a hat and nothing more. The sign is stripped of its meaning. I bring up these issues because many only talk about what always gets simplistically talked about in relation to Hip Hop: mass consumer culture as the sum value of Hip Hop.  Instead , I want us to wonder if/how the academy is as consuming and domesticating as any other capitalist industry.

Hortense Spillers has particularly inspired a new lens on the academy’s mass consumption. My Old Skool disposition might then mean something much more than the rather simplistic issues of a choice in artists and songs.  Instead I am talking here about ideological positions, intellectual trajectories, and black political histories. What Spillers contextualizes as the history of feminism could very well apply to Hip Hop and it is this application that I hope students will take up. In a discussion with Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer Morgan, Spillers says:

I think that the feminism as of the 1980s became curricular objects… all of a sudden, it would seem, the conversation changes, and it is so sudden it is institutionally traumatic…there are women in this country today who legitimately wonder what happened to their movement?  But it went to the university.  To the disciplines. With fund-raising imperatives, and hiring practices; and that’s a different animal from the movement, from the polemics that come out of jail time and confronting the police.  So what feminism has become is a curricular object that, in the living memory of at least one of its generations, has a very different source— a movement component…

We haven’t figured out a way to carry historical memory… the cost of Americanization, of equality, is to forget…

I am not suggesting here that Feminism and Hip Hop are interchangeable, not ever.  What I am interested in is the politics that Spillers offers us of what “curricular objectification” does to even the things that we consider radical and outside of the purview and bounds of the Western academy.  In Spillers’s representation, the academy will sell you and your stuff just as fast as any other auction block.  Mainstream success in the academy comes with as much of a price as mainstream success on MTV, VHI, BET, or Hollywood.  This might be the reason college students who are willing to see themselves as neoliberal subjects are also unwilling to see themselves as Roxanne Shante; she is not mainstream success.

As we look at these issues tonight, I also think back to Heather Andrea William’s book, Self-Taught.  In that book, we saw an entire people committed to the Word, to literacies, to reading and writing, not for material gain, but for the radical humanity that they themselves were defining.  I think  back on those masses of black people after emancipation giving all that they had left— both time and money— to learning to read and write regardless of that fact that it would not provide social access or material gain.  As Williams shows us, their work in creating the very meaning and practice of a free, public education was then taken away from them and co-opted for and by dominant groups.  When I think back to early Hip Hoppers, I see this same history.  There was very little material reason for Roxanne Shante to have spent so much time carving out her verbal skills back then; there was no Bentley promised to her at the end of that Hip Hop rainbow but she was committed to the Word anyway.  If we are at the same place with a new Post-Reconstruction redefining and taking away black communities’ literate commitments and creations, exactly like what happened with newly emancipated slaves’ schooling, we need to be clear about it.  And we need to indict all of the expressions of capitalism when it is culpable, especially the academy.

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Power, Dominance & Acquiescence

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I often wish that I could be faster and more critical in how I respond to oppressive circumstances in my everyday life.  I admit that there are times when I am simply dumbstruck when I should be expecting foolishness and should, therefore, be able to respond much more quickly.  Instead, I just sit there stupidly wondering: what is goin on up in here?  I can forgive myself for being slow on the uptake, but I am beginning to question how many times I am not counter-acting/counter-thinking at all.

For some reason, today, my mind goes back to a professional conference that I attended at least three years ago now.  The panel discussion that I attended was designed to be a conversation about various issues related to the labor and organization of prominent college writing programs. It should go without saying, given the trends of this particular conference/ field, that the panel was all-white and predominantly male.  Like I said, I am used to those trends so this alone was not what bothered me.  One of the panelists, a well-regarded white male scholar/administrator (at least by some), who I will here call New Henrickson, rightly problematized the ways in which the teaching of writing in his program was gendered as female labor, a trend that scholars have shown to be dominant when looking at contingent/part-time labor in colleges today, especially when it comes to the teaching of college writing.  Then the scholar went on, in what he thought was a clever quip, to say that he felt like the main character from the HBO series, Big Love, Bill Henrickson (hence, the inspiration for my re-naming here).  The audience chuckled… but my jaw almost dropped to the bottom of my chair.  Did he really just say that? Does he NOT know that he is talking out loud and that, hence, people can HEAR him?  I never said anything to anyone, just sat there, with the violence of this discourse hanging over me.

I have never actually watched Big Love— I just know it was about a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist and Republican senator in Utah and his many wives. Supposedly, there is good social commentary about male dominance and patriarchy in the series but I never sat through it long enough to find out.  The one and only conversation that I have ever had about New Henrickson’s comment at this conference was with another male scholar in the audience. This scholar was perturbed by the comment but mostly because his program was not given an award for its innovation the way that New Henrickson’s program had been.   It wasn’t a conversation that I could really relate to: such an award is not something I would ever covet if it is offered to white men who metaphor-ize themselves as polygamist heads-of-households in relation to the underpaid/under-valued women who do the bulk of the work in the U.S. of teaching college writing.  I am reminded here of Marc Bousquet’s work:

As for gender, the rendering of faculty positions to the extreme of economic irrationality (six courses a year for $15,000, eg)  assigns them disproportionately to women, especially persons–whether male or female–married to professionals and managers. The other, primary wage earner supports the economically irrational partner, a person teaching for what used to be called pin money. This structural feminizing of the job was traditionally associated with converting the positions formerly held by men (such as secretarial positions, once a high-status job) to those held increasingly by women… a “pyramid scheme” especially for women faculty.

Broadly speaking across many disciplines and institution types women still tend to disproportionately hold low-paying, low-status, insecure teaching-only or teaching-intensive jobs while men continue to disproportionately hold high-paying, high-status, secure research-intensive and top administrative positions.

When I look at Bousquet’s work, I begin to think New Henrickson’s quip— with all its attending meanings related to race, capitalism, and gender— may have been a soberly, accurate portrayal of the academy and the field.

So how did I handle this moment?  I stayed quiet and then always steered clear of New Henrickson, his mentees, and all of his homies.  All well and good, maybe, except that this is beginning to feel like selling out.  At what point does silence become the co-signing of hegemony? And at what point do women trade in this silence in order to acquire a kind of professional comfort and ease in their disciplines, even if it means they do so at the expense of their own bodies and minds?  New Henrickson is not of my generation but his misogyny is not done, especially in this world where it is rewarded (the award his program received is an accolade that surely fared him well in the institutional hierarchy in which he can now insert himself at his college campus.)  And while women of color may be reluctant to publicly critique male scholars of color for fear of the violent, black-on-black intra-fratricidal display it will offer to white audiences, women of color are not publicly criticizing New Henrickson either and it’s not always clear where the private critiques of his male comrades of color are.   Racial respect/nonviolence in white spaces is not the sole issue here.

I am not saying that I should have jumped up and slapped this fool in the mouth– either with my hands or with my words. Like I said, I am not quick enough for that anyway.   But it does seem that if I want to claim radical anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-consumerist work, I need to reach a more definitive point where I say something, counter-theorize these very real and very everyday moments of epistemic violence, and/or set up intellectual-political shop elsewhere to really do the work that is needed.  That’s the best plan that I have for the present and future as of right now.  I am working on it!

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