“Digital Griots” in the Era of Technoracial Formation

Posted on by

This week in class, we are reading Adam Banks’s Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age.  We’ll spend some time in class digging into the concept “Digital Griots” so that we can really take on this concept.

Prior to making the decision that this is what we would do in class, I had begun reading the last few years of texts in the journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.  When I did a search on the terms, race, black, and African American, on that website/journal, all that consistently came up were reviews, actually, of Banks’s books, both the first book, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground and now his new book, Digital Griots.  That’s all!  I can’t say that I was very surprised, though I do confess that I was very disgusted that, yet once again, the worlds of school, literacies, and textual production were overdetermined as white.  My point is that it becomes quite clear that there is a white void  that Banks is writing into (making it questionable if that journal has the history and political tools to actually offer relevant reviews), so I need to make sure that my class stops, pauses, and tries to really wrap ourselves around this concept of Digital Griots and what the cultural memory and presence of African American deejays offer us in terms of new technological and creative productions.

In relation to Digital Griots, I have also been thinking about an essay by Tara McPherson in the edited collection Debates in the Digital Humanities that a colleague, Sophie Bell, suggested our program read.  McPherson’s essay is called “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation” and is, in my mind, the central piece of the entire collection.  I love her question because I can immediately insert any number of institutions and practices: Why is Abercrombie & Fitch so white?  Why is Wall Street so white?  Why is Hollywood so white?  Why is administration in higher education so white?  The list of possible questions is simply endless but what I like about McPherson is that she offers up some answers.

McPherson convincingly shows me that the gaps and whole-scale omissions in merging race and technological productions is an EFFECT of the designs of technological systems in post-World War II computational culture.  That’s one helluva notion, though this is surely not news for those who study this culture.   Her discussion focuses on the operating system of UNIX, the operating system for digital computers, though her discussion can also be applied to C programming given the focus on modularity.  The work of programmers then was always intimately connected to racial paradigms even if that was never the overt tactic or intention.  The logic of UNIX is, thus, a cultural logic with its:

  • embrace of multiple languages and systems that mirrors the typical mindset of neoliberal multiculturalism (the idea that a seemingly egalitarian field can exist that ignores social, material hierarchies)
  • design of covert systems that mirrors the move away from overt racism (Jim Crow signage, lynching, de jure segregation, etc) as if racism is now gone
  • focus on modularity (that now organizes capital) that mirrors the “containment” of large black, working-class/working-poor populations in city centers through the governmental housing initiatives that divested all energies and monies from de-proletarianized/ravaged black city centers
  • framing of a modular code that mirrors the bureaucratic standardization of divided disciplines and entrepenurial-inflected knowledge in the academy
  • privileging of text that mirrors post-Cold-War methodologies in the humanities that devalue context in favor of a new kind of valuing of text
My simplistic summary notwithstanding, McPherson shows that “technological formations are deeply bound up with our racial formations and that each undergo profound changes at the mid-century” so much so that these are “feedback loops supporting each other.” To use more of her words, there are “technoracial formations” where race is “a ghost in the digital machine.”  So I walk away from McPherson’s discussion ready to take on her suggestions: 1) engage David Golumbia’s work on the cultural logic of computation; 2) look past simple screens, narrative, and images and into machines and labor; 3) critically interrogate race, culture, code, and computational systems (in fact, McPherson argues that if we can learn critical theory, then we can learn code too).

For this week, with Banks’s Digital Griots at center, I am thinking about what it means to bring a consciously-determined black perspective to these discussions that McPherson has triggered for me, with the African American cultural formation of the deejay as signpost and guide.

 

(photos are of DJ Premier)

Related posts:

No related posts.

“It Bees That Way Sometime”

Posted on by 
nina-simone-240px_mediumWhen your guy has got his hat
and made himself hard to find
It doesn't mean you should go crazy
It could be that way sometime

Find yourself another love
Who will treat you good and kind
Return that love he gives to you
It also bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

When you think you've found a love
And you have peace of mind
Somebody else steals his heart
Yes, it also bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

Don't let the problems of this world
Drive you slowly out of your mind
Just smile, look at the problem
And say it bees that way, bees that way sometime

Baby, yes it does...

I will be, also be that way sometime
Can also be that way, it also bees that way
Bees that way sometime

This week, we are teaching ourselves the rules/prescriptions/grammars of African American Language (AAL) using Lisa Green’s African American English: A Linguistic Introduction.  So what do these lyrics and song from Nina Simone have to do with that?  Seemingly, everything.

I want to remind us here of Smitherman’s 1977 book, Talkin and Testifyin, and her chapter named after this very same Nina Simone song (chapter two).  Issues such as signifying, semantic inversions, and the blues notes in Simone’s “It bees dat way sometime” made Smitherman move away from coinages like “dialect” and “Black English” to calling this system of speaking/thought a “language.” For this reason, in this class, you will also hear me say AAL/African American Language.

Here is what Smitherman (1977) argues:

Here the language aspect is the use of the verb be to indicate a recurring event or habitual condition, rather than a one-time-only occurrence.  But the total expression— ‘it bees dat way sometime’—also reflects Black [Language] style, for the statement suggests a point of view, a way of looking at life, and a method of adapting to life’s realities. To live by the philosophy of ‘it bees dat way sometime’ is to come to grips with the changes that life bees putting us through, and to accept the changes and bad times as a constant, ever-present reality. (p. 3)

So while tonight’s class is certainly more about learning rules, let’s not forget what these AAL grammars mean and do in the world as a languaging/living/breathing belief system.  Let’s remember Nina Simone and how/why saying and knowing that “it bees that way sometime” is part of an ideological system that, sometimes, is the only thing that can get you through the day.

Related posts:

No related posts.

“Publicly Speak the Truth:” DeShaun’s Literacies

Posted on by

writing-notesTonight we will look at a student essay, using the models of African American literacies and rhetoric that Elaine Richardson provided for us last week, alongside the critique of schooled-literacy-as-white-property in Rebecca Powell’s introduction. We will ask ourselves how DeShaun defines himself as a writer and how/if he subverts the requirements of white-schooled-literacy in his essay.  We will use a worksheet that I designed for freshmen classes in 2005 alongside a copy of DeShaun’s essay (this essay actually took up 3 blue books, unfortunately not reproduced here, masking all of his arrows, erasings, cross-outs, etc): Worksheet w DeShaun’s Essay

Let me introduce DeShaun’s essay.  DeShaun was a freshman in one of my first year writing classes many years ago, on the eve of our entry into our war on Iraq.  In that teaching context, students were required to take a departmental midterm where they were given two essays to read two weeks in advance. At the exam, they were given an exam question that they had to answer in two hours.  For this particular exam, students were assigned: 1) George Orwell’s canonical essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” where he launches the polemic that the colonizer is also dehumanized given what he represents/does to the colonized, and; 2) an essay by Amitav Ghosh where Ghosh connects the impossibility of imposing our will on Iraq to Britain’s failed attempts to do so in colonizing India.   Here are the exam questions (students must choose one)… please read them VERY carefully:

In his essay, George Orwell states that at the time of the events he describes, he “could get nothing into perspective”. Summarize how the experience of shooting the elephant changes the narrator’s perspective about imperial power. Apply this understanding to Amitav Ghosh’s discussion of current events. Be sure to summarize enough of Ghosh’s essay to give the necessary context for your discussion. Drawing on your own knowledge or experience, evaluate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the authors’ views of imperial power.                                                      OR….
 Summarize Amitav Ghosh’s argument about the “new American empire”. Make a connection between Ghosh’s ideas about the current situation and the view of empire presented in Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant”. Be sure to summarize enough of Orwell’s essay to give the necessary context for your discussion. Draw on your knowledge of these and other readings and your views of imperialism to make an argument about the American presence in Iraq and its potential effects on Iraqis and Americans alike.

DeShaun failed the exam with the lowest score in the class but with, ironically, the longest and most developed essay.  The full story and DeShaun’s essay are here along with the results of what happened with him (in an essay called “Writing While Black”); an example of a (5-paragraph) essay that was scored highest is also included.

The most important point here is to imagine a strategy for dealing with this situation.  This ain’t a practice exercise.  It ain’t hypothetical.  It ain’t theoretical. It is all the way liiive.  Everyone in this graduate class is tutoring in some capacity, working in K-12 schools or with youth, or teaching college reading and writing classes.    So here is where all that talk we talk counts.  What’s your response to this situation (as in what will you DO)?

Stay tuned for a letter I wrote to writing center tutors who stunningly failed to imagine DeShaun as their equal…

Related posts:

No related posts.

Tricking New Literacies

Posted on by

In class this week, we are discussing Toward a Literacy of a Promise: Joining the African American Struggle.  We’ll pause and (re)look at pages 6-10—  two subsections called: 1) “School Literacy and the Discourses of Power”; 2) “Schooled Literacy and Traditional Forms of Literacy Instruction.”  Powell has taken theories of New Literacies Studies (NLS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and really made that her own, in her own words/frames of reference, and politics of location.  We need to do the same… here is my version…

In simplest terms, in CDA and NLS, we think of schools as expecting and maintaining certain styles of speaking, writing, and being and thereby recycling power.  There are “prescriptive norms and values” for how you must write, speak, respond, ask questions, look, sit, think, act, walk, feel, question— how loud you do it, when, where, and how.  (We call these norms and values Discourses— with a capital “D”!) What researchers related to NLS and CDA are suggesting is that Anglo, upper middle class students represent Discourses that schools match (see Shirley Brice Heath’s 1983 canonical Ways with Words for a linguistic ethnography of just how much school matched white kids’ homes and ran counter to the philosophies and goals of black homes).  What happens then is that the language and ways of being that have real currency, impact, and effect in the home communities of students of color have no visible value or place in school.  What is important about Powell’s work is that she is NOT suggesting that we teach whitened-school practices to non-white students more effectively or efficiently (which is essentially what most teaching models consciously or unconsciously do).  She is suggesting a rupture of those whitened school-practices that get communicated through textbooks, standardized tests, prepackaged learning objectives, curriculum kits, classroom techniques, etc.  Literacy gets packaged as a set of neutral, static objectives that can be measured and “scientifically” managed and then students must conform to the materials, an altogether different thing than becoming conscious or literate, so that they can be (using Gee’s words):  “apprenticed in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.”

Tricking-VideoLet me bring it home, quite literally.  In my first semester at my current college, I had a first-year writing course that I taught with the theme of NLS.  My idea was that young people of color themselves could chime in on these very conversations and (re)claim how they are literate in ways over and beyond “schooled literacy” in politically necessary ways.  I was not disappointed.  Before midterms even fell down on my first semester at my new campus, Jason taught me about a set of literate practices that I had never heard of before… tricking.  Jason was a trickster!  Now as an oldhead, this was new to me and so this is how I described it upon first seeing it: super-high energy, multiracial youth across the world blending acrobatics with martial arts and a dose of some kind of new crack cuz this stuff was just CRAZZZY!   So how was this NLS for Jason?  Well, to get to tricking, there was a lot of textual sharing that happened first (this was 2008— tricking is more prevalent and popular now.)  What I knew was that Jason spent hours of his time uploading his own videos of his tricking and looking at videos from other tricksters across the world who would comment back to one another with suggestions; when there was no common language, they would use their bodies for the form of their commentary.  In fact, Jason’s video collage and research project for the class examined how tricking embodied what Maisha Fisher calls a “participatory literacy community” where literacy is shaped solely through high levels of participation.

Since Jason’s lesson, I have been following Brandon McCuien (I am still not very knowledgeable about this world though), who I see young people on the internet calling a Black Superhero and/or the Real Neo.

Here is his short, gone-viral collage:

Here he is in public spaces:

Now I don’t mean to sensationalize here but this couldn’t capture more brilliantly something that seems so totally opposite in form, purpose, and dynamic from what school feels like and does:

  • a reinvention of gymnastics (and maybe martial arts too)
  • moving your learning directly into embodied action
  • maintaining connections with other youth across the globe
  • inventing global communication networks where the viewers/youth design a sophisticated “assessment” vocabulary for who’s good and who’s not
  • taking over public spaces— literally flipping them
  • and, if all that ain’t enough: deciding who the hell your own black hero is!

I can dig it.  The point of a theory and practice of African American Literacies, NLS, or CDA would be to see the energy, audience awareness, and skill that someone like McCuien so obviously has and see to it that schooling recognizes it also.  Now many might say: but yeah, they need to learn how to write essays.  I won’t argue for or against that but what I say is this: if we can’t engage all this brilliance with our essay-based teaching requirements, then it is not the students who are lacking, it is us.

 

Related posts:

No related posts.