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, ENTERINGsomething, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
