Digital rhetoric is a negotiation of information—and its historical, social, economic, and political contexts and influences—to affect change of survivance (survival and resistance) in the network spaces. Despite the space being dominated by specific dominant cultures, scholars, both indigenous and internalized, of digital cultural rhetorics have responded with research methodologies and inclusive rhetorical paths of models that can help embrace underrepresented and/or underserved communities of digital practice. According to Haas, Digital cultural rhetorics scholarship is typically situated in specific cultures with diverse rhetorical skills, communities of practice, technological expertise, and capacity for social change. Haas (2018) calls for making digital cultural rhetoric an inclusive space for all bodies and identities. By bodies and identities, I am keenly concerned about unrepresented communities whose knowledge and epistemological works are rooted in indigenous and cultural contexts. In examining cases of indigenous communities in Digital Practice, I noticed that Digital Cultural Rhetoric need not be situated in specific cultures if we want to achieve social change. Instead, the field needs to expand to value communities of practice (global south states) and cultural and rhetorical practices of minoritized cultures. Haas’ Digital Cultural Rhetoric helps to understand why it matters to embrace methodologies and digital practices from underrepresented communities to recognize the pluralized rhetoric of cultures.
Agboka et al. (2021), language justice, access, and power are at the heart of ever-expanding, increasingly globalized work that needs to include working systems against injustice through intercultural and internationalized knowledges of BIPOC. This scholarly assertion implies that we need to do anti-nothing by giving attention to Indigenous cultures as tools.
I have employed Sankofanarration as a tool of reflexivity to embrace social justice and inclusivity, Rhetoric in Digital Environments should extend to areas of pedagogy. To make that a reality about Digital Rhetoric is to create spaces for non-western and diasporic rhetoric in our writing curriculum. I have championed Korankye’s (2023) Sankofanarration as a decolonial methodology and a tool we can use to reclaim the lost indigenous voices and identities in digital spaces. Sankofanarration, as a conflation of two words: Sankofa and narration, is not just a movement of going back to means ‘go back and take’ or embracing internationalized knowledge, but it is a way of dismantling anti-indigenous knowledges that are lost or forgotten. It is a mash-up tool for promoting indigenous knowledges and oral rhetorical practices of BIPOCs in digital rhetorics. If we want to do anti-nothing, then we need to give attention to Indigenous cultures. If Digital Rhetoric is a site to integrate local stories, and tools and recognize BIPOC scholars from marginalized cultures, we need to pay attention to the work of scholars from minoritized cultures. Our space has been Eurocentric western dominated.
It’s also important that we give fair citation procedures some thought. “The demographics of published RCWS researchers fail to accurately reflect the culturally diverse participation that constitutes the profession (although racial/ethnic diversity among professionals in the field remains very limited),” as stated by Lockett et al. (2021) in discussing the politics of citational practices against BIPOC scholars. Ruiz (2021) claims that from 1950 to 1993, academics who were white men were frequently mentioned in works on composition and rhetoric. In order to redefine digital rhetoric, we must recognize BIPOC and non-Western and diasporic scholars’ epistemological endeavors, which must be reclaimed in culturally maintained citational practices.
In our pedagogical practices, Digital rhetorics should be space to foreground our social justice frameworks. Following Adam banks’ concept of Digital griot, Teachers and practitioners as DJs and employ DJing as a pedagogical tool. If we consider writing and digital rhetorical works as DJing, we will find a place to value the indigenous surviving technologies (Adinkra symbols). Brown’s rhetorical velocity reminds me that multimodality is not monolithic and writing for recycling or reuse is an important dromological method we can apply in present, past, and future digital rhetorical works. We have not paid much attention to African American Rhetorics and Anglo-West African Rhetorics in our digital rhetorical works. If we have a pedagogy of deep listening that Hayles offers in her work “Deep and Hyper attention” then we engage ourselves to the others (marginalized cultures) without reservation” (p.73).
As teacher-scholars and practitioners in the sphere of Digital Rhetoric, we all have a role to play in the rhetorical survivance of our indigenous epistemologies. In Ghanaian-Ewe rhetoric, there is a proverbial saying about a broom that “if when you remove one, it breaks; when put together, they do not break.” This suggests that in unity of all knowledges, lies in strength. #Deep/rhetorical/ listening and deep attention to old indigenous epistemologies.
[Hayles, 2007; Han, 2022; Odell, 2020; Ratcliffe, 2005; Haas, 2018; Ruiz, et. al, 2021; Agboka, et. al 2021; Korankye, 2023; Locket, et. al 202; Banks, 2010; Brown, 2009]