Another World, Another Universe: Griots and Their Hypertexts in 80’s and 90’s Ball Culture

In Adam Bank’s book, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, he uses ideas of multimodal rhetoric and rhetors as community leaders to help us understand how DJs occupy a space outlined in West African culture for the “griot,” a role Banks defines as a “master of both words and music who is…

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 Synchronizing Rhetorical Beats Towards Inclusive Practice- DJs as Rhetors

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…

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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…

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Collapsing to Compose, Composing to Collapse: Are Digital Griots Agents of Pluriversality?

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,”…

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