I’ve been thinking about how the deeply sited nature of diaspora translates into digital spaces that collapse time, space, and embodiment—elements whose intersection manifest as “site,” a concept Han suggests is the antithesis of hyperculture. But I’ve also been thinking about who might guide us through “de-distanced” landscapes, enacting Walter Mignolo’s decolonial concept of “pluriversality,” a way of rhetorically being, thinking, and creating worlds from borders. Such enactment requires “delinking” from sites of colonial power and “transing” across sites of difference (Cushman et al. 3).
Whose voices have the agility to enact physical realities from an immaterial sedimentation of (hi)stories and counter(hi)stories? Who can elicit archives from negative space–those yielded from the shadows of either/or tropes and the tidy ontological boundaries patrolled by colonizing powers? Who can story-into-being in a way that is at once singular and always already collective? Who can transpose memories from sites and make thresholds from borders? Who can—and must—compose shape-shifting sanctuaries from perpetual collapse: the implosion enacted by hyperculture (Han)? Is this the rooted-yet-restless de/re/siting work of one who remixes and revisions: Banks’ “digital griot”? (184) [JZ-06]
Collapsing to Compose, Composing to Collapse: Are Digital Griots Agents of Pluriversality?
