Prior to my experiences in the US over the past year, I had never given much thought to my positionality within the Black identity space. I was an avid movie watcher growing up, and I’ve always felt a connection to or alliance with the Black characters in the western films and books I’ve watched and…
DJs are models of rhetorical excellence, canon makers, time binders who link past, present, and future in the groove and mix; and intellectuals continuously interpreting the history and current realities of their communities in real time. Banks uses the DJ’s practices of the mix, remix, and mixtape as tropes for reimagining writing instruction and the…
After returning to our course description and August-September conversations, I have sketched the following questions to prompt and guide our RIDE Blog Carnival #1. An in-progress draft is due in your Google Folder by Monday, October 2; the entry deadline for posting is Monday, October 9. Approximate scope should be 800-1000 words, though this is,…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
I don’t think I have ever thought of the DJ as a rhetor, and here is Banks simply blasting it all over my face; it is indeed amazing, and I am grateful for this reading and would like to own this text. One “mundane fact” I shared in my practicum class is that I used…
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,”…
Face surveillance is the probably most dangerous of the many new technologies that are available to police. It goes without saying how terrifying it can be towards communities of color, especially Black Community. Algorithms can be racist. Apple’s Iphone is a prime example of that. Some facial recognition algorithms misclassified the facial features of at…