PWR 194AJB: Anansi in the Machine: Black Oral Traditions and Digital Cultures

a spider, waiting for you on the world wide web,
wants you to pick cotton in cyberspace
wants you to wear a bowtie of yellow police tape
wants you to snort the white wines of chalk on asphalt
through a digeridoo

-- Kamau Daaood, Art Blakey's D-sticks

If Black life online does involve having to wade through various traps set to ensnare and harm Black people, how do our traditions equip us to do so? How do people avoid the webs set to ensnare them, and perhaps spin a few of their own? What happens when the spiders on the web aren’t just those Daaood warns us about, but they also include Anansi’s children? What happens when we understand that Black oral traditions are not simply relics of past eras passed down to help us through present circumstances, but alive and thriving in the right now? How might we understand Black digital cultures in relation to these living and thriving oral traditions?

This course will examine Black engagements with digital culture as sites for community building, social action and individual and collective identity formation, with a focus on how Black oral traditions are still alive and inform our digital lives. By studying phenomena like #BlackTwitter, memes, GIFs, Vine, TikTok, selfie culture, blogging and more, we will explore how Black technology use addresses questions like identity performance and expression, the importance of Black joy in an era of continual trauma, advocacy and activism, hyper visibility and invisibility of Black lives, Black feminisms, misogynoir and Black women/femme leadership in social movements, the roles and influence of Black Queer cultures online, and social activism and movements in online spaces. What does it mean to be human when more and more of our lives are connected to digital technologies and to large data sets? How do Black people resist interlocking forms of oppression when many day to day social functions are being turned over to algorithms that may reify already-existing patterns of exclusion? How are Black people around the world negotiating what it means to be Black—and in relation to each other—in this moment? How does technology use influence these efforts? How does Black innovation of technologies occur through use, design and/or resistance? How are people working out connections and tensions in the multiple facets and layers of Black identities within (and at times beyond) ideas of Black community?From folktales to proverbs and aphorisms, humor, roasts and insult traditions; from oratory to orature; from sermons to songs, to spoken word poetry, we'll explore how oral traditions, print and digital cultures are all related. From broad intra-community conversations and advocacy campaigns to specific apps, platforms and rhetorical practices, we will work from the serious to the silly, from individuals to collectives, from activism to everyday life, and from distinct Black cultures to diasporic connections and exchange.

Assignments and activities will include a storytelling festival updating folktales for current contexts, an oral history on some aspect of digital culture, and a mini-archive related to intersections of oral traditions in digital environments. Graduate students will have additional readings and will create a literacy module, pedagogy reflection, or community-based project) complete an annotated bibliography with their archive. All students will also have an opportunity to connect with a community engaged project with StreetCode Academy in East Palo Alto and "UnBar University" in Cleveland.

This course also counts toward the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics offered through the Program in Writing and Rhetoric