We decided to use a mind map to try to represent our conversation last week. Our map touches three key points: the back in the day narrative, living memory/rememory, and eblack studies/remix. Each main point is supplemented by a number of examples and analogues. Some examples come from those sections of Digital Griots brought up during Reading Group. Some come from questions and examples brought up during our conversation.
We invite you to click around our map, explore our links (note: they will not open up a new window), and consider the connections we've tried to create here.
To navigate to our mind map, click the link below: https://coggle.it/diagram/53206e227f352281050031a3/58200ad6bff4da177373a4a85c4f0a8c9b6947a8ac614dbe1eb667c9a96c6dad
Throughout his chapter on Mixtape, Banks discusses the role of art and creativity. He says that DJs “are much more than compilers: they are artists expected to innovate through their own artistic vision;” he then compares this “artist” to the editor of “a literary or a scholarly anthology” who is expected “to make some kind of statement in…scholarly conversation” (115). I paused as I read this, because it was the first time I had considered the editor as an artist. Later, Banks asks that we see “the mixtape as art form” (120), and then I wondered, what does it mean to see editing as art form? While I had no trouble seeing the DJ as an artist, I could not as easily wrap my mind around the idea of an editor as an artist. This led me to consider/question how I understand “art” and why the DJ more closely aligns with this understanding than does the editor. The DJ feels more creative to me than the editor, and so I think that is why I more easily see the DJ as artists. However, perhaps this is one of Banks’ goals – to get us to rethink the ways in which we understand creativity/art in composing to encompass a more copyleftist understanding. Specifically, Banks says that “the creative work of the mixtape” can lead us to reconsider “the ethical issues surrounding – and often defining the scope of – writing” (137). Quoting Jonathan Lethem, Banks says that “‘all art’ uses such varied appropriation and…borrowing is central to the creative act” (144 original emphasis). He later calls this “explicit borrowing” (144), which implies a difference between explicit and implicit borrowing. From this perspective, we can see the ways in which borrowing along with an outright acknowledgment of the borrowed material is central to creativity in composing.
ReplyDeleteIn this week’s post, the group created a mind map that really helped me continue to consider creativity/art alongside the identity of an editor and that of a DG. As with previous groups, this group functioned as editors, pulling bits and pieces of our conversation from last week’s reading group and putting it together in a visual display – in essence, creating a mixtape. Much like the editor of a print anthology selects what pieces to include, the group decided what quotes, videos, links, photos to include, where to include them, etc. Looking through this mind map led me to two observations regarding “the creative work of the mixtape” – first, there is great potential for visual composing within the mixtape, and the editor/writer who functions as a DG seems especially able to engage with visual modes. Here, we might see Susan Delagrange’s work Technologies of Wonder (http://ccdigitalpress.org/wonder/) as an example of a DG who uses visual modes as part of the content of her text. Second, there is great potential for audience engagement in the mixtape – a point Banks makes and one that this group’s mind map highlights in their use of unanswered questions such as, “What happens when the last person who remembers dies? It is still living memory?” – questions that provoke the audience to consider their own responses without the added consideration of the composer’s own responses.
So, if I were to boil down my thoughts on the “creative act” that is the mixtape, I would offer three conclusions: 1) The explicit borrowing of material is central to the creativity of the mixtape; 2) There is great potential for the DG to engage in visual composing as central to the content of the mixtape; and 3) The mixtape opens a space for audience participation.
For me, I am still fascinated by this old school vs. new school debate. So, when I went to view this groups' mind map, I was immediately drawn to the Glaude and Sharpton debate. I thought this was a great representation of the discourse surrounding these debates.
ReplyDeleteBanks' "Remix" chapter focuses heavily on this divide and seems--in my estimation--to come down more harshly on the old schoolers. However, I think this back and forth blame game is a little counter-productive; essentially, I believe both sides are wrong.
I 100% agree with Banks' assertion "...that our nostalgia is often a rewriting of history--a remix that often judges the contemporary moment and young people in particular as having fallen short of some imagined golden age" (101). I know I've experienced these utopian narratives when I was a youth and, sad to say, now that I'm in my 30s I tend to find myself reminiscing in ways that probably do not accurately represent my day.
That being said, I do believe old schoolers have a point at times. When we think of the Civil Rights Movement, frequently we hear of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Park. Many of the younger generation can tell you of all of their accomplishments. However, other contributors (as I have mentioned in AA Literacies class Amiri Baraka and Huey Newton for example) to the cause have almost been forgotten.
This is where I found Banks' "Remix" chapter to be rather enlightening. As Glaude was contending in the video from the mind map, I do believe it is especially counterproductive to beat up on the younger generation for what they do not know. Nothing will be accomplished through constant criticism. Banks provides the perfect solution:
"In other words, the key to addressing these tensions and the model creating the kinds of unities that can link print, oral, and digital texts, that can reconnect African Americans on both sides of the generational chasm in the search for fulfilling futures, is the DJ, the digital griot." (103)
As a result, this is the fairest critique of the old school--that they blame the younger generation for not knowing when, it can be claimed, it is at least partially their responsibility to fulfill the griot function and make sure that the younger generation does know. This is why I like Banks' ideas about creating texts in collaboration. As he mentions, "The tensions between these two groups foster sharp debates and, even worse, silence as young people and elders often talk about each other and about that chasm but rarely to each other" (86). Collaboration could foster a dialogue which might help ease some of these tensions. Banks' class he mentions in the "Mix" chapter seems like a great pedagogy to accomplish such work. However, both generations need to be willing to listen and collaborate--you cannot just turn this into a battle between right vs. wrong, old vs. new school, the good guys and the bad guys. Such thinking will only further the divide.
I always like to see treatments of the fourth and fifth canons, so I was excited to see Banks extend his rhetoric into the fourth in this chapter. And as I said to Bruce and Michael Neal when we were at CCCC, I think this is the strongest chapter in the book so far. I love the idea of "back in the day" as a trope "...for resistance, reform, and renewal..." in order to affirm black humanity, forge a collective memory, develop cultural commonplaces, and move toward a collective agenda for the future (100). The "back in the day" trope, in other words, has little, if anything, to do with what the past actually was--and at any rate, so many different generations use it, there's little hope of a perfect, common version of the past.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, "back in the day" is an instantiation of the particularly African-American view of time advanced in Smitherman and Daniel (1976) in "How I Got Over: Communication Dynamics in the Black Community." For Smitherman and Daniel, the black conception of time is not purely Western/linear nor Eastern/circular, but spiral--“at each return, something remains behind, and something new is added” (32).
And this view of time is not only about reconciling the present to the past, but also the present and past to the imagined future. Intrigued by the discussion of Afrofuturism in this chapter (90), I tracked down Alondra Nelson's (2002) special edition of Social Text. Afrofuturism, in her view, activates this past/present dialogue, but also extends it into how the future can be imagined from a black perspective, troubling the idea of a raceless, classless, utopian society through technology. Instead, an Afrofuturistic scenario enacts the spiral view of time by continually bringing the past into dialogue with the values of the present, and extending the conversation into an imagined, raced future.
I dig what Jacob, et al did here; It’s fairly mimetic; it echoes the title of the chapter. But I think we can also consider how maps function as snapshots of time. Ancient maps can seem, to our eyes, quite fanciful, even imagined. They are not objective. They often seem personal, as they were often drawn by explorers. (I’m thinking “here be dragons,” etc). Later, of course, maps became scientific, projected, aiming at objectivity. But spatial humanities invites us to consider how our current/future ways of mapping—like geocaching, or crowdsourced maps, etc—actually reflect a more personal—and yet also communal—and less “objective” way of viewing the world. There is something here about the dialogue between past and present, to make way for the future.
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ReplyDeleteSomething I particularly liked about this week's group post is that they found a way to reorganize the central topics and discussions from the last meeting into pathways that feed into and out from others. The simplest way to think of an hour long class meeting is to organize it linearly. However, the group did a really nice job of finding connections and reorganizing the concepts in such a way that can help make new knowledge of what we discussed. The group really demonstrates the agency they have over their abilities to include, exclude, and recombine knowledge, which are affordances of the mixtape that Banks points out.
ReplyDeleteIn Banks's discussion of mixtape, I found the agency mixtape affords to everyday people (that is, people who are not part of the empowered elite minority who make decisions for the majority) to be a really empowering aspect. Banks says that the original mixtape allowed for "vernacular cannon formation" (116), which gave people, who don't normally have a say in what's to be included or excluded, a new voice and sense of agency. Banks explains:
"So in the hands of everyday people, the mixtape was an act of vernacular canon formation, deeply personal yet also a part of public conversation, as other young people talked about their favorite songs, new releases they thought others didn't know yet, their staunchly defended positions about who were the best artists, singers, and MCs, and their own idiosyncratic ways of choosing and arranging the tracks" (116).
In this view, the mixtape represents this tool that people in the audience could use to challenge the authorities who control taste and decide what is good music and what isn't. The mixtape worked from the bottom up. Instead of music executives looking at audiences and deciding this is what this community is going to listen to and buy into, the community decides what is popular and what is going to be circulated.
Banks goes on to explain how the technology of mixtape can be used as a tool for activism, as it gives power to the oppressed to develop agendas that serve the broader society (117). I was thinking about how this aspect of power could relate to how our class griots reorganize information and circulate it. Honestly, I don't think any group has intended to do anything particularly political or radical through their multimedia storytelling. However, the act of retelling history, even if it is just our class discussion, is political in itself because we don't really know how these narratives will affect the future and what consequences may come of them.
In reviewing the map created by this week’s griots, I was drawn back to the ideas of memory, remix and the “back in the day” narrative. The way that Banks defines these concepts and puts them in conversation with each other clarifies for me the place that remix might hold in academic writing.
ReplyDeleteBanks defines the “back in the day” narrative as “a genre of reflections and stories that refer to an important time in the past that lies within living memory” (93). He writes that “the everyday griots who use [the back in the day narrative] engage in a remix of rememory, identifying specific values that can help preserve the community in times of social rupture” (87). The “back in the day” narrative, then functions as a kind of a through line or a bridge between the old and the new, ensuring that the important events and values of the past make their way to the present. Perhaps more importantly, they preserve elements that bind and structure a community. The manner in which the narrative is constructed also implies that the griot has the power to select what gets included in the narrative and, by extension, what is valued, as the events left out of the narrative – and thus deemed less important- can be forgotten over time.
The “back in the day” narrative, then, connects the community to its past by remixing and re-remembering, as well as by placing value on, certain events and ideas. Banks defines remix as the “reuse of an original text, as a repurposing of that text, or sometimes as any recombination of elements from many sources in the creation of a new text of any kind” (88). Banks additionally defines remix as “a thorough revision of a song or text that could stand alone on its own as a separate text, even as it was rooted in an identifiable original” (89).
The “back in the day” narrative, then, is a new, present text that allows its audience to exist in the present and in the events and values that narrative remixes. This narrative sounds like what a lot of academic texts actually do, even those that don’t typically take the form of a remix (although there seems to be a bit of ambiguity about what a textual remix might actually look like or what kinds of texts would qualify as textual remixes, some of which may be due to uncertainty about what the term “use” actually entails). For example, we might consider histories as forms of “back in the day” remixes. This semester, in both comp theory and African American literacies, we have read several histories that retell events and create arguments from or out of those events, arguments that have implications for what the community should value or how its future should be shaped.
The remix and the “back in the day” narrative also shed light on some of the recovery work that happens in composition studies. As Bruce pointed out, many voices were obscured after the civil rights movement, and the remix or the “back in the day” narrative perhaps represents a way to reclaim some of those voices by challenging what previous griots may have deemed unimportant.
First, this map is very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI was most drawn to the claim at the beginning of the eBlack/Remix section of the map: "Banks' version of the 'back in the day' narrative isn't about nostalgia or judgement of the current moment." I think that along these same lines, I like the way Jenn discusses the back in the day narrative as a through line or a bridge. To me this makes a lot of sense, and speaks to the idea that it is not a judgement of the current moment but a way of sharing and interacting with multiple narratives that have brought 'us' to the particular moment.
But I would like to know how we account for the use of this phrase where it is meant as a judgment call? Or, is it still this through line? Here I'm thinking about a conversation I overheard on the plane last night where they were discussion "kids nowadays versus back in the day." The tone was judgmental at the very least, even if ti could be argued that it was actually functioning as this other sort of narrative that invites participants to exist between both spaces: past and present in terms of the values they were discussing
I also like this idea of the remix or the 'back in the day' narrative as a means to reclaim. I'm also wondering if we could see the back in the day narrative as an approach to the curation of history? It is definitely a version of history, as we have established a sort of remix.
Along this line of thinking, I see Banks' claim "the real theoretical possibilities of the remix lie in all three of Navas's versions--the remix as dub version, the paradox of independent yet dependent texts" (90). The histories that we know and understand "stand alone" but cannot be fully understood in isolation. the reclaiming, though, I am not sure if this is the word I want, through the back in the day narrative creates these seemingly independent but actually dependent texts. And, even more interesting, it makes supposedly independent histories dependent, which works to reshape our entire understanding of an existing history.
I have latched onto and been thinking about the ways in which the DG is or isn't part of the community and how the DG might shape the community. As Christine mentioned a few weeks ago, there is a certain distance the DG needs to have. In our particular scenario, the DG needs this distance to not only track the directions of conversion (when it was my turn to be DG, I wasn't able to add to the conversation because I was so busy taking notes) and also to decide what is most important for the community to focus on. In the scenario of DJ, he/she isn't part of the community dancing on the floor; instead, he/she is distanced (typically actually positioned above them, which might be an interesting thing to explore as well) so that he/she can analyze the mood and shift that mood as needed.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, the DG has to be part of the community because he/she needs to understand how it works, to have knowledge of its past, and so on. Even more than that, the DG has incredible power to shape the community and what the community considers knowledge. Like Aimee writes, "However, the group did a really nice job of finding connections and reorganizing the concepts in such a way that can help make new knowledge of what we discussed. The group really demonstrates the agency they have over their abilities to include, exclude, and recombine knowledge." There seems to be this interesting back and forth between the community and the DG. The community seems to give the DG material and suggest dictate options for directions (in our scenario, the community dictates the lines of conversation from which the DG can draw; in the DJ scenario, the community reacts to music in particular ways that partially dictate what the DJ will play/do next). But, the DG chooses among those available directions and adds on to them (with other questions or other examples, for example). Then, the community riffs off the DG's contributions, and the cycle continues.
So, the DG seems to be both in and out of the community. What we might ask from this is what this means for power dynamics. Is there equal power between DG and community? Does one have more power than the other? Does the power shifts as each member and DG work toward shaping the community and its knowledge?
One thing I find interesting is that in this particular Digital Griot text, we're borrowing the metaphor of "roadmap," yet the roads themselves don't seem to connect or intersect, something I see as being something of a missed connection (literally and figuratively). I'll also add that I wasn't familiar with this technology/platform, so thanks, this week's group, for giving me yet another platform for knowledge creation/mapping! That said, I find this map very interesting, and find remix as a concept interesting, if I'm not perhaps a bit overloaded by it lately having read this text and Palmeri's so recently. I like that the notion of remix is so flexible, and in particular found myself immediately going off into my own sectors of interest and scholarship and remembering that there are indeed examples of "remix" both literally and figuratively in the sphere of gaming. Take something like Nintendo's own new series, NES Remix (http://nesremix.nintendo.com/), where old games are "remixed" by altering visual cues or mechanics or goals to weave together a series of smaller gameplay experiences (like, say, the level where you need to move from right-to-left as Luigi in the first NES Remix, which is being expanded into the included Super Luigi Bros. for NES Remix 2 in April which remixes the entirety of the first Super Mario Bros. title by moving from right-to-left).
ReplyDeleteI love the way(s) that Jennifer has interpreted Remix here and would like to echo her assertion that "the 'back in the day' narrative, then, connects the community to its past by remixing and re-remembering, as well as by placing value on, certain events and ideas," and that "the 'back in the day' narrative, then, is a new, present text that allows its audience to exist in the present and in the events and values that narrative remixes." In music, games, and composition, remix is a great opportunity to do the kinds of reclaiming work other folks like Bruce above note. When it comes to something like NES Remix, there's a reclaiming and restating of classic titles like the original Super Mario Bros. and an attempt to do something new and different, yet it also draws attention to the importance of the relatively distant past. Remix is an important way to revisit and refresh the important elements of history and the past, and it does so in a host of contexts, and one that becomes increasingly important and relevant in the face of new technologies and ways of sharing and creating texts. All that said, I have a few smaller questions that have been buzzing around in my head; To what extent can classic ideas, notions, and texts be preserved using remix? Furthermore, to what extent do the ideas themselves transcend the practice of remix, and can a remixed idea or concept maintain its original impact?