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

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 community” (Banks 24). What is the multimodal praxis behind such remixing/revisioning? How might words, bodies, sights, and sounds be conjured in ways that overwrite Western logics of time and space, a frame that flattens its own historiographic agenda of distorting and dis(re)membering? In collapsing such frames of meaning-making, how does the griot’s use of “flow, layering, and rupture” become central to self-affirmation, recovery, resistance, and revisioning futures (30)? How are sonic movements linked to embodiment—the act of being and becoming—such that individuals and communities maintain rootedness in the past while revisioning futures otherwise?

The Douen of Caribbean rhetoric has similar spectral force: its purpose is to digitize rhetorical genealogies, crafting “an ethos that can flourish outside and beyond the perimeter of a province that is either surveilled or vacated by a master of some kind” (Browne 48). When thinking of the Douen alongside the DJ as digital griot, I imagine “flow” as spirit—the moving outwards and through without being seen (yet with the agency to appear); “layering” as sedimented—an embodied and embodying way of being with others, including our own ancestors, as well as encountering the other across time and space; and “rupture” as a necessary break from an unyielding cultural logics—a disjuncture from which futures otherwise might become. (271) [JZ-07]

[Banks, 2011; Browne, 2021]