September 18, 2023 – Rhetoric in Digital Environments

Rhythms Made to Rupture and Bodies Made to Break/Dance: What Happens When a DJ and a Douen Walk Into a (Crowded) Void?

Jenna Zan1 year ago1 year ago03 mins

The DJ as digital griot re/de/sutures fragments of cultures whose totality has been elided by—and eludes—Western ontologies, perpetually connecting black rhetorical traditions with the technologies and possibilities of multimedia writing. Digital griots’ use of “arranging, layering, sampling, and remixing are inventions . . . binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain…

Reclaiming Ghanaian Rhetorical Tradition in DCR

Gideon Kwawukumey1 year ago1 year ago01 mins

Culture and rhetoric are inextricably intertwined because most of our African cultures, particularly Ghanaian cultures, are rhetorical. Haas (2008) looks at cultural rhetoric as a study of “everyday rhetoric and writing practices of specific cultural groups” and the historical, socio-cultural political context that shape those practices. Going forward, I hope to see a Digital Cultural…

Redefining Writing-DJing as Multimodal Storytelling

Gideon Kwawukumey1 year ago1 year ago01 mins

Banks (2011) argues that a DJ is a multimodal storyteller, which is a manifestation of a griot—a traditional storyteller. I can draw comparisons between DJ techniques and preachers, comic creators, poets, and storytellers, not to mention how DJs juggle many topics. What Banks wants to understand is that just as DJing involves, scratch, remixing, weaving,…

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Where’s My Goddamn SONG?”: Digital Griots in FX’s Pose–09/18/2023

Julia Unger1 year ago1 year ago04 mins

After reading Banks’ pieces from Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age I was interested in exploring Banks’ analysis of the DJ as a community figure. In terms of examples of this figure, it is funny to me to hear the DJ referred to as someone who “helps” the MC, amongst others (Scratch,…