Wednesday, January 13, 2016

the keyword museum


The Keyword  Museum

The Modern Language Association's project on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments is a space-bending and mind/behavior-altering enterprise.  It will change the future of what is loosely known as the Profession,  the diverse arenas of higher and lower education, and the traditional work of social scientists and , most  importantly, of people in the hard sciences who think in combinations of mathematical symbols and natural languages.  The MLA enterprise, which is open for comment until January 31, 2016, is a 21st century companion to a still important 20th century print-centric tool, namely Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) by Raymond Williams.

Forty years ago, Williams had traced how 155 words function in the English language  domain of cultural transmission.  He did not select "race" for inclusion in his book.  That is odd.  Given the blitzkrieg of "race" in American and European discourses from 1900 to 1976, one might have expected it would not have been ignored by a Cambridge University professor.  But the Western academic world is a strange place where omissions can be rationalized and theorized into non-existence, erased until they return home to roost. As a sidebar, one should note, using "evidence" from Google's Ngram, that after ebb and flow from 1930 to now, the frequency of using "race" has currently returned to its 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s levels.

Adeline Koh (Stockton University) has brought that prodigal child named "race" back to the animal farm.  Under her curatorial guidance, we are beginning to see more clearly just what kind of personification Race has been historically.  We are invited to interrogate the stealthy delinquent as an agent of psychological destruction, a victim of its own "affluenza."  Koh links race and technology.  She admits she has made a "deliberate political choice" in deciding that "any responsible representation of race and technology should offer challenges to and an expansion of how digital pedagogy and digital humanities are defined."  Whether her choice is absurd or correct is open for debate.

One might also be skeptical of Koh's claim that much vital digital work on race is unlikely to receive "the sorts of governmental, federal, and institutional support other less politicized work has,"  primarily because the work is done outside the academic factory.  But it  is probable that a network of surveillance agencies do support digital work on race by using code words that seem remote from the bogus concept of race.  After all, our nation is the greatest nation on Earth, and we the people  are  capable of doing anything.

Among the curated artifacts Koh offers for our review are African Diaspora Ph.D, Ferguson Syllabus, Mapping Police Violence, SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive), #This Tweet Called My Back, Soweto 76, and Invisible Australians: The Real  Face of White Australia.  She provides her own NITLE Race and the Digital Humanities Zetro Bibliography, other related materials, and WORKS CITED for our inspection.  One must ask, of course, where are the curated artifacts pertaining to Whiteness, Hispanic Diaspora, Pacific Island Cultures, and the Hamitic/Semitic Middle East?  If Digital Pedagogy is the future, we need a better keyword mapping of why  so-called White Folk speak freely all races except the one to which they belong.         Jerry W. Ward, Jr.     January 14, 2016

MLA Source:  http://digitalpedagogy/commons.mla.org/keywords

January 13


Topics for Cultural Memory 2016

 

I am remembering January 14, 2016 marks the 100th anniversary for John Oliver Killens (1916-1987).  Frank Garvin Yerby (1916-1991) will also be 100 on September 5, one day before Richard Wright celebrates being 108.  The dead and the living can celebrate a birthday together.

Killens and Yerby chose to follow different paths or ideologies.  That is to be remembered.  Killens chose to confront and question the Establishment, the system.  Yerby chose to take advantage of the Establishment's nostalgia for the past to enlarge his bank account.  Their choices are starting points for cultural remembering.  We can use the common topics of rhetoric (definition, comparison, relationship, circumstances, and testimony) as well as the special topics (deliberative, judicial, ceremonial) as we read or re-read works of the past and make connections.  Those who are younger than we are must always be equal partners in the conversation.  Like the dead and the living, the young and the old must speak to and listen to one another.  Otherwise, we emit hot air and waste time.

We can remember Eugene B. Redmond's Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry was published 40 years ago as we recall the Eugene B. Redmond Club has been in existence for 30 years. This remembering is an apt prelude for giving attention to the East St. Louis Riot of 1917 in the context of what happened in Ferguson and other combat zones.  The urban discord of then has something to teach the urban unrest of now.

Margaret Walker's Jubilee was published 50 years ago.  The idea of Kwanzaa is 51, having been created by Dr. Maulana Karenga in 1965.  Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)  dramatically  uttered the phrase "Black Power" during  James Meredith's "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi in 1966.  These three facts bid us to negotiate (1) history and fiction, (2) African American celebration of seven principles [Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, Imani], and (3) political actions.  We have options for choosing how and what to remember. And we should ask as well why Goodread's list of the top 200 books published in 1966 includes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? but omits Jubilee.

The selection of options can be an investment in re-examination, analysis, and perhaps rededication. We can hope that the young will speak about  the future to the present and the past.  To be sure, the old can contribute insights about  mistakes and suggest (but only suggest) guides for avoiding them. The young should tell us WHAT, WHERE, and HOW.  And we should say to them  WHY and WHO all of us ought never forget.  How we converse about topics of cultural memory in 2016 has the possibility of enlightening and empowering us as we try to build a future that will be slightly different from the one President Barack Obama had the audacity to dream in his January 12 "State of the Union" address.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 13, 2016