Tag Archives: agency

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: Black Girls’ Memory and (Re)Vision as Agency

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Image of the Sankofa bird whose name in Twi translates to “Go back and get it” in English.

In my quest to deepen my understanding of the significance of Black girls’ memory, I am lingering over the notion of what it is to remember and its possibilities for creation and agency. I presently see it as a process of spiritual reconstitution of the mind, body, soul of self and community in the present for future and forward movement based on elements of the past. In her article, “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers,” Cynthia Dillard argued that (re)membering is an endarkened feminist praxis (Dillard 2016) and is important for Black teachers, researchers, and students to employ. For Dillard, an endarkened feminist epistemology (EFE) articulates an understanding of reality or truth grounded in the historical roots of global Black feminist thought, which is markedly different from that of mainstream and dominant cultural narratives and standpoints (Dillard 2016). The five parts to (re)membering, include: (re)searching, (re)visioning, (re)cognizing, (re)presenting, and (re)claiming (Dillard 2016:411). In her case study of university students traveling abroad from the United States to Ghana, Dillard sought to answer the following questions: 1) what happens when undergraduate and graduate students from the United States have encounters, dialogues, and interactions with African heritage knowledge, culture, and peoples in West Africa (Ghana)? 2) What does Ghana have to teach about African American education and personhood? (Dillard 2016:410-411). One of Dillard’s most significant conclusions is that for Black women, (re)membering can be a means of refuting white supremacist and patriarchal lies taught by dominant culture and education.

I feel hopeful about the potential efficacy of (re)membering for Black women and its potential uses. (Re)membering as a choice and internal process of connecting to and recreating Africa does not depend on external legislation, department meetings, town halls, or so-called allies. This is something that many Black women do intuitively, but there is power in naming and having a language to articulate the process of coming back to oneself and together with others of African descent. Jacqueline’s rebirth and internal liberation is tangible through Dillard’s storytelling.  

Black Girls Are Magic Image taken from Wikimedia Commons website.

(Re)membering and memory are epistemological and ontological. Through Dillard’s case study, I could see and feel the young American Black woman Jacqueline, who Dillard focused on, becoming or (re)coming the subjectivities of mother, auntie, and sister. Jacqueline was able to (re)vision/(re)member herself based on the how the Ghanaian people saw and named her along with her ability to accept, embrace, and take on those identities. According to Dillard, Jacqueline took up those identities during the study abroad experience and carried them forward afterward. Although Dillard and her students were able to physically travel overseas to the continent of Africa in order to (re)search and (re)member their cultural roots as members of the African diaspora, this endarkened feminist praxis does not require physical transit. Black women in the U.S. perform their identities in ways that mark and signal a (re)membering of Africa and other Black diasporic social locations that serve as homeplaces for them. These practices take place both offline and online. On social media spaces, Black women and girls (re)member and reconstitute community and kinship from across different geographic locations. Some examples of this include hashtags like #CarefreeBlackGirl, #BlackGirlMagic, and #DaughtersOf.

GirlTrek’s social media call to participation for Black History Bootcamp

The #DaughtersOf hashtag, started and circulated by co-founders of the international Black women’s organization GirlTrek, is perhaps the most recent and definitely one of the most salient movements and hashtags that encourage Black women and girls to (re)member who they are and who they are descended from. T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison used the hashtag to launch the Daughters Of campaign which they describe on their website as: “a multi-media campaign [that] will examine the immediate and critical importance of self-care and healing for Black women through the lens of their matrilineal traditions.”[1] This examination of Black women through their maternal ancestry, or as Alice Walker might say, their mother’s gardens, is a contemporary example of (re)membering as endarkened feminist inquiry and praxis that is desperately needed in these times in which our general sense of time and truth seem to be in constant flux.

Me on my first day walking as a part of GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp.

While I had been a participant in GirlTrek campaigns in the past, it was GirlTrek’s 21-day walking meditation, Black History Bootcamp, inspired by the Daughters Of campaign that allowed me to more fully (re)member the strength, courage, and wisdom (India Arie been knowing) that I come from and that I can call on to come through in these difficult times of anti-black antagonism and violence and the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the social, political, economic,  and educational implications it will have for Black people in the weeks, months, and years to come. Journalist and scholar Sherri Williams began to recount the incalculable and rising toll of these intersecting crises for Black America in The Crisis last week. When Black women’s ways of being and knowing are consciously connected to those who we are the daughters of, we are able to (re)vision the futures we want and deserve. Perhaps the greatest contribution of transnational endarkened feminist inquiry is (re)membering that we deserve when everything outside of us tries to convince us that we do not. It is time to (re)create from this space. As our futuristic foremother Octavia Butler once wrote: “So Be It! See To It!”

Dillard, Cynthia B. “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers.” Educational Studies 52.5 (2016): 406-23. Print.

[1] https://www.daughtersof.com/

Sometimes It’s Where You’re from *and* Where You’re At: Bettina Love’s Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak

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Love, Bettina. Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Ed. Shirley R. Steinberg. 399 Vol. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Print. Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education.

hip-hop-s-li-l-sistas-speakBettina Love’s Hip Hop Li’l Sistas Speak shows that Black girls’ bodies are a major landscape of Southern Hip-hop music. In this ethnographic project born out of Love’s dissertation, she explores the lives of six teen-aged Black girls in Atlanta, Georgia (ATL), also known as the Motown of the South, and their relationship to Hip-hop music and culture. One of the most intriguing aspects of Love’s project is her focus on methodology and her positionality as a Black girl researcher from the North, from an earlier Hip-hop generation, who is also lesbian.

Black girls, positionality, agency, and identity

In chapter two: Hip Hop, Context, and Black Girlhood, Love demonstrated how age, geographic location, and sexuality necessarily play important roles in the context of her research as well as her and her research participants’ lives. Continue reading →

Bolter and Grusin – Remediation: Understanding New Media

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Bolter, J. D., and R. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000. Print.

As the title states, this text seeks to help readers understand “new media” by highlighting what is and isn’t new about it by using the theory of remediation. Bolter and Grusin placed new digital media, specifically visual media, within the contexts of older media such as photography, painting, television, etc. to demonstrate how by definition each medium is understood in relation to another.

“Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise  linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about  new media comes from the particular ways in which they  refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves  to answer the  challenges of new media.” (15)

Their central argument was that more aggressive practices of remediation, the representation of one medium in another, is a defining characteristic of the new digital media (45): “Unlike  our other examples  of  hypermediacy,  this  form of  aggressive remediation does create an apparently seamless space.  It  conceals its  relationship  to earlier media in the  name of  transparency;  it promises the user an unmediated experience, whose paradigm again is virtual reality” (56).

The text is divided into three major sections: theory, illustrations, and implications for remediation and new media on American culture’s definition of self. The authors argued that new media, and technologies in general, must be understood in terms of their connection to other media, culture, and our social identities.

“The  World Wide Web is  not  merely  a  software  protocol and text and  data  files. It  is  also  the sum  of  the  uses  to which this  protocol is  now being  put:  for  marketing and advertising,  scholarship,  personal expression,  and  so on. These uses  are as much a part  of  the  technology as the  software  itself  For  this  reason, we  can say  that  media technologies  are agents in our culture without  falling  into  the trap  of technological  determinism.  New digital  media are not external agents that  come to disrupt an unsuspecting  culture. They  emerge from within  cultural contexts,  and  they  refashion  other media,  which are embedded  in the same  or similar contexts.” (19)

Their discussion of remediation opens up space for more nuanced discussions of human and technological agency in new media:

“Computer programs may  ultimately be human products,  in the  sense that  they  embody algorithms devised by human programmers,  but once the  program is  written and loaded,  the  machine can  operate without  human  intervention” (27).

Remediation as a theoretical framework is helpful in understanding this phenomenon because we can see how, in attempts to achieve transparency and immediacy, programmers intentionally seek  to remove the traces  of  their presence  in order to give  these programs the greatest possible autonomy (27).

The authors defined two major concepts in remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy, and explained how the two are simultaneously in tension with one another and interdependent. In short, the two can be understood through the “window/s” metaphor:

“Where immediacy  suggests a  unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of  not  as a  window on to the world, but rather  as ‘windowed’ itself-with windows that open on to other representations or other media” (34).

Examples of hypermediacy in modern art include collages and photo-montages.

Hypermedia  and  transparent media are  opposite manifestations  of the  same desire:  “the desire  to get past  the limits of representation  and  to achieve the real.” Not “real” in a metaphysical sense, but “real” based on the viewers experience; “it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response” (53). This appeal to authenticity of experience is what brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together (71).

The authors argued that this desire for immediacy is neither new nor neutral. One of the most compelling examples of this desire is the image of a draftsman drawing a picture of a nude woman from Albrect Durer, Unterweysung der Messung, Nurenberg, 1538. Bolter and Grusin suggested the image shows the desire for immediacy in viewing the female body with a clinical gaze “to analyze and control, if not possess, its female object” (79). They argued, “The  woodcut  suggests  the  possibility  that  technologies  of transparent  immediacy based on linear perspective, such  as  perspective  painting, photography, and film, or  computer graphics and virtual  reality, may  all be enacting the  so-called  male gaze, excluding  women  from  full  participation  as subjects  and maintaining  them  as objects” (79). At the same time, this example shows how media can be used to deny female desire and subjectivity, the book also offers numerous examples of human bodies are mediated as well as how immediacy and hypermediacy are employed to express new identities and subjectivities in new media.

Ultimately, Bolter and Grusin contended that because all media are understood in relation to other media, the only thing brand new about new media are the unique ways that we employ them in particular contexts now, and this will continue to be the case with any other new media: “The true novelty would be a new medium that did not refer for its meaning to other meaning at all. For our culture, such mediation without remediation seems to be impossible” (271).

Power Carter – “She Would’ve Still Made That Face Expression”: The Use of Multiple Literacies by Two African American Young Women

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Power Carter, Stephanie. “”She Would’ve Still made that Face Expression”: The use of Multiple Literacies by Two African American Women.” Theory into Practice 45.4 (2006): 352-8. Print.

In this article Stephanie Power Carter advocates for a multiple literacies approach in education. She argues that teachers who use a more traditional (autonomous) literacy approach are more likely to view underrepresented students as “powerless, failing, struggling, and/ or having low literacy abilities,” whereas teachers using multiple literacy approach were more likely to interrogate power relations, understand students of color’s use of multiple socio-cultural frame and create spaces of agency within the classroom. While Carter Power does not present any evidence to prove that the use of a multiple literacies approach could achieve these outcomes, she does present enough evidence to show the detrimental outcomes for Black girls in her study when an autonomous literacy approach was used.

Power Carter uses two examples of classroom interactions between two African American students in a High School British literature class. Through Power Carter’s examples we can see that Pam and Natonya use nonverbal communication such as “eye squinting” and eye contact in their British literature classroom to combat its hostile and oppressive environment, and to support one another. Power Carter argues that because the teacher is focused on autonomous literacy, reading and writing in particular ways that typically favor Eurocentric, male, upper-class ways of knowing, she is unaware of the multiple literacies that the girls use, misunderstands them as “passive”, uninterested in learning and succeeding, and at times disruptive. These Black girls are stripped of their power inthis scenario:

“A traditional view of literacy also fails to take into consideration that Pam and Natonya are not powerless, sitting and waiting passively. They are acting, interacting, and reacting to their environment in ways that protect them and affirm their cultural ways of knowing and meaning making.” (356)

Power Carter points out that these epistemological differences have serious consequences for underrepresented students, such as Pam and Natonya. The negative perceptions of Black girls’ literacies, such as speaking with increased volume and passion, results in othering and can foster inequitable treatment and low expectations for Black girls (353). These nondemocratic and colonial pedagogical practices leave students like Pam and Natonya more vulnerable than other students and more susceptible to failure:

“When educators do not take into consideration the multiple literacies that ultimately influence how students make meaning of the world around them and are part of their everyday lives and experiences, we run the risk of dismissing their academic potential and relegating them to a dismal future that labels them as struglling, low performing, and unmotivated… it is important that educators value alternative interpretations within the classroom context and include multiple perspectives and multiple voices in curriculum planning.” (357)

Power Carter’s study elucidates the ways in which the use of multiple literacies of students and a multiple literacies approach on the part of teachers is rhetorical.

Gorzelsky – Working Boundaries: From Student Resistance to Student Agency

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Gorzelsky, Gwen. “Working Boundaries: From Student Resistance to Student Agency.” College Composition and Communication. 61.1 (2009): 64-84. Print.

In this article Gwen Gorzelsky shares her ethnographic study of an intermediate composition class successfully engaging in critical pedagogy. Situating her study in the research of Durst, Trainor, and Wallace and Ewald, Gorzelsky explores the line between privileging Composition Studies’ goals of critical pedagogy and students’ pragmatic needs.

Gorzelsky studies the pedagogy of Justin Vidovic and his respect of students’ boundaries along with the use of traditional classroom techniques such as Initial Response Evaluation. She suggests that the combination of these traditional and critical teaching strategies creates a “classroom ethos that strongly supports their agency – their ownership of their developing ideas and texts” (66). Gorzelshy concludes that those in Composition Studies should not “sharply prioritize” either critical pedagogy and it’s goals or students’ pragmatic goals:

I suggest that our professional responsibility is to enhance the greater good of those systems and their potential readiness for change, rather than to pursue isolated goals, whether our own or students’. In taking this approach, we forego critical pedagogy’s emphasis on revolution, which is inevitably linear and focused on a single goal, in favor of the kind of change that ripples throughout systems while keeping them in the balance needed to support life and growth (82).