My brother and I are home for our grandma’s 90th. We sit on the floor, tailbones aching, paging through dusty stacks of family albums. We trace faces through the protective gloss of picture sleeves. We smile. We laugh. But we also complain: why is it so hard to eliminate the material glare of each photo…
Banks’s (2011) work on Digital Griots seeks to project afrofuturistic movements to nudging for non-western and diasporic rhetoric to inclusively have a space in Digital Rhetoric. What the field of Writing and Tech Com needs to know is that there is communal and indigenous knowledge from different national cultures that needs to be embraced to…
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,…
Haas (2018) calls for making digital cultural rhetoric an inclusive space for all bodies and identities. In Case Studies of 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…
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…
During our opening class meeting, August 21, everyone created a list of five sites or platforms associated principally with the phrase “in digital environments.” Time runs out, so we didn’t have much opportunity to talk about the environments, specifically, nor generally, but I returned to them today, Tuesday, with the goal of sorting them and…