One of my warmest memories is a pattern: me in the passenger’s seat of my grandpa’s (Bobo’s) dusty, wood-paneled station wagon, Bobo behind the wheel, sun glinting off his square framed glasses, telling me a story (probably something comedically jarring, like that time he complimented a villager’s cat in rural Burma, mistakenly using a word…
I figured I would respond to question one, which is also connected to question three on the “blog carnival” prompt, as I intend to revisit some of the responses I have made in the past few weeks in my nineties to answer the question, “What are digital rhetorics now?” and “What, as rhetoric and writing…
In a post-globalization world, when the horizon of cultural mixing is rapidly expanding and we are renegotiating our understanding of values, perceptions, and habits—Byung-chul Han sees this cultural shifting through a lens of optimism and names it Hyperculture. The definition of culture is varied and anthropologists, sociologists, or literary critics explain the term from different…
When I think about the resistance of material things—those tactile objects giving shape and texture to physical reality—I think about how I bought a home in the forest on a small plot of land, where I put things into the earth so that it yields things in return. I think of how the invasive creep…
– In Computer and Composition, technofeminism has emerged to critique the historical domination of male figures in the domain of digital spaces, technology and culture, which were inherently biased against women. The hegemonic designs and definitions of technology often limit women as eternal outsiders in that very realm and perpetuate harmful stereotypes as technologically challenged/inferior…
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…
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…
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,”…
Folsom reminds us of the inherent excess haunting both database and narrative: each requires a perpetual eclipsing of an out-thereness; a map of infinite possibilities that can only be illuminated one at a time, emerging from thresholds like phantoms. If databases provide bits and pieces rendered visible by a series of choices; narratives are the…
Han’s example of a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt is not necessarily eager to experience a foreign culture, rather suggests that they have no existing cultural roots to identify another culture as a foreign one. If we just look at this class, it consists of people representing such vast cultural diversity. However, visually we all…