There is not a theoretical absence of blackness and the black body (both male and female) because they are used as political frame or experience (blackness) or object of study (the black body) by academics who strive to subvert or chip at the hegemonic force known as the canon (which does occasionally release it’s heavy blows on people who attempt to go against it). No, blackness and the black body are not missing. Black people are missing. But blackness as a theoretical frame and the black body as an object are allowed to exist only to be made invisible as they are over theorized and the frame loses its utility or grounding in the reality of the experience of black people. Blackness becomes opaque as find and replace is applied to the experience and the terminology changes: marginalized, at risk, ghetto, urban, people of color, The Other, the cyborg. This find and replace decenters the centrality of the atlantic slave trade and its role in forming the cultural and business practices of the West as they are today.. If this is called into question, especialy within the academy, it is often met with silence, ghettoized, seperated. To make blackness or the black body visible and center those two things while ignoring or disregarding Black people is to perform a violence in the Fanonian sense. It is to imagine and to frame differently to re-remember History towards a different future where I and my children do not exist.
The absence of black people is painful and obvious, especially as our stories, our history, is used to define relationships with technology. It is a hauntology without a ghost for we (where we is society and culture) deny that ghosts are real. Yet we allow for specters of our continued suffering to hang by black people (though we often say black bodies) to justfy our literal death. I say our because as a Black woman I have skin in the game and I cannot take it off or step away from it. There is something that happens if you have your own skin in the game and you theorize blackness. You feel compelled to re-insert us into the canon, the ether, the world. To affirm our existance, even if it just in the pages of our writing or the images that accompany our work means we have at least one other black person in the room. A familiar. Kin. More often than not the expectation is that we will be able to seperate thoery and blackness. If you, as a black person, plan on fully engaging, you must erase the self. It is not a slow death in the Berlant sense. It is more akin to a slow dying… A slow murder. It is the violence that Fanon recognized always attacking at your core being.
In 2011 I was enrolled in a core course in the second year of my program. We read “A Cyborg Manifesto”. As is often the case, I was the only black person in the room. I read something different than everyone else based on the discussion. All I could think was, “we use words like cyborg because we don’t have the language to talk about the black experience, more specifically the organizing role chattel slavery, signified by the black body, played and continues to play, in culture and society. Instead of joining the discussion I copied the text into a google doc and did a find and replace… “cyborg” should be “black slave”.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18XxbwkFtBFaxFCQLMvEr6uzIDuxLq0Vs9Og3UNsbpFI/edit
For all of the woe is me grad life things that happen to me and every grad student in the world, I can say there is one thing I am 100% grateful for in my department. They allow me to teach and give me enough freedom to ensure that I never have to bring a course into being that I wouldn’t want to take myself. This is important to me. Whenever I am planning a syllabus, I try to plan it around things I will be happy to grade, talk about, read about, write about, discuss, tear apart, and all those other fun things that happen in class. A few years ago I was in probably a classroom situation with Cathy Davidson and we were talking about grading. Something was said that made everything make sense to me. I can’t remember the direct quote, but the takeaway was what I now say when I explain my classes. You can either grade on retention and application or on learning outcomes. If you are grading on the latter, most people should be able to get an A. I do the latter. Rather than explain all of this I thought I would dissect components of a recent syllabus of mine for a Media & Popular Culture 400 level class with Cultural Studies bent.
Basics to help this make a bit more sense. It isn’t a secret that I am a black female, of unknown age, who lets the class know that I am both heterosexual and a mother because I think it is important to acknowledge that we all have unintentional biases. I am not the normal person they see at the front of the classroom so it is something that we confront very close to the beginning. The class was separated in the following sections:
Part 1: Current Media Landscape
Part 2: Gender and Sexuality
Part 3: Race and Racism
Part 4: Theory, Theory, Theory
I places Part 2 and 3 before Part 4 because I consider them to be the excesses of theory in that while theory can help us understand them, everyone in the class has a lived experience that means they confront gender and sexuality, race and racism etc on a daily basis at different levels of awareness. My body at the front of the room makes them more aware of that experience than if I were a cisgender white male… and that is fine. It leads to amazing discussions early in the class.
Objectives
Just so people know what they are getting into and what I hope will happen in the class, I have four standard objectives that get modified slightly depending on the course topic. They are generally the following though. And #4 will never go away!
Course Objectives
1. to read scholarly and popular texts critically; 2. to practice constructing and shaping arguments; 3. to find a voice in writing and presenting media; 4. to creatively experiment
Assignments
The class works through 100 points for Participation (in Class & Online), a Media Presentation, a Mid-Semester Check-In (aka a midterm with a less stressful name), and a Final Project.
1.1 In Class Participation |
15 |
1.2 Online Participation |
20 |
2.0 Media Presentation |
15 |
3.0 Mid-Semester Check-In |
15 |
4.0 Final Project* |
35 |
TOTAL |
100 |
1. Participation
1.1 In Class Participation
For a 400 level class I decided to not to do a grade for attendance, but there was an in class participation grade. This meant that while people were not required to be there, it was in their best interest to be as it was the easiest way to earn those points. Points then went up depending on how much the student engaged or help guide the class. Basically this was my way of saying this would be a discussion based class more than a lecture based class.
1.2 Online Participation (posts for points not grades)
Rather than having essays due throughout the course students were required to write blog posts throughout the semester on various weeks. The idea behind how these posts were designed, and why they were grade for points and not necessarily content is because the class blog was a private space where students were allowed to be unsure, share things that might not be a “normal” thing to be shared in a classroom space, or, just a place to have a conversation. The timing of posts and limits on when they can be posted encourages students to plan ahead of time. Because they are due in separate weeks and at different times (in relation to the material the students are talking about), they serve as a tool for me to see how students are understanding and thinking about course material. The posts helped steer class discussion as well. I should not that this is the assignment the students had the hardest time committing to. Those who did all of their posts all ended up with really high grades overall, even on the objectively graded materials. There is a very clear link between grade outcomes on all assignments and completion of the blog posts.
1.2Online Participation: Blog Posts (8 Total, done in separate weeks)
Media Object (2) For these posts you will find a popular media object and provide a brief commentary (150-300 words) linking it to concepts and discussion from the class. These posts should also include 1-2 discussion questions. Due anytime before Nov 22nd.
Reading Reflection/Reaction Posts (3) These posts need to be made BEFORE we discuss a reading in class and show an engagement with the text. The purpose of these posts is to highlight areas you find interesting, or confusing. These can be thought of as thought experiments in 200-400 words. Due no later than 11am the day reading is discussed.
Discussion Reflection/Reaction Posts (3) These are due no later than 1 week after a class discussion. These posts should continue threads from the conversation in class, engaging the conversation in a larger cultural context. These posts can also address questions or concerns brought up in class that did not have an adequate answer, linking it to concepts from readings in 250-450 words. Due no later than 11am one week after a reading is initially discussed in class.
INFORMATION KEEP IN MIND
You will need to make a blog post for 9 of 12 weeks. There will be no make up blog posts, and only 1 post/week will count towards your final grade. Nov. 22 is the last day to post to the blog for credit.
Potential Extra Credit (up to 5%)
If you regularly contribute to the blog over the semester, in the form of engaging comments/discussion on other people’s blog posts primarily, and/or additional posts you can earn extra credit. This requires engagement throughout the semester though. Bursts of activity at the end of the semester will not count towards these points.
Presentations
For this course students were required to put together media objects to share and discuss with the class. In all honesty, they over thought this assignment and had a very hard time sharing. Instead they more often than not tried to teach. I imagine this has a lot to do with not having a sharing presentation modeled well, and that is something I’ll continue to work on in my pedagogy. Because this was one of the competency assignments, a rubric was distributed to explain point distribution.
2.0 Media Presentation
Media Object/Cultural Artifact: Theoretical Engagement Presentation, and Discussion Leadership
In groups of 2-3, you will produce a 15-20 minute presentation that relates a popular culture artifact to the concepts examined in the lectures and readings. You might choose to screen a music video, online role-playing game, silent film, news report, or podcast. You might opt to circulate a print artifact or some other physical cultural object around the class, or address some current or past cultural trend through slides or a performance. This activity is designed to help us frame the week! At the beginning of the week your group will be responsible for bringing in a media object such as a television episodes, a series of songs (no fewer than 3, no more than 5), a music video, part of a film, a website, etc. that will help us frame the discussion for the week through a common cultural object.
Following a brief exposition of the artifact or phenomenon in question, you should be prepared to elaborate your perspective critically:
What are some of the forces underlying its production and consumption?
How do class concepts help us to understand its existence and circulation?
Public controversies surrounding the artifact are often useful here, to draw out its position in culture.
Presentation Grading Rubric
Points | Item | Details | Point Breakdown |
8 pts | Follows general guidelines as outlined in the syllabus |
|
|
4 pts | Discussion questions/Leadership |
|
|
3 pts | Creative engagement with Media Object/Cultural Artifact |
|
|
TOTAL |
Midterm (Boo!)
I was teaching an introduction to media history, theory and criticism course, and the students were super stressed out on the day of the midterm. We’d been going over semiotics and I asked if it would be better if I called it something else. We decided to rename it the mid-semester check in. It is a take home assignment with short, medium, and long answers. The students have to answer all the short answers, and one medium and one long answer. I try to come up with questions that allow the students to reflect on their thinking rather than showing a lot of citations.
3.0 Mid-Semester Check-In (Formerly know as “The Midterm”)
This will be a take home assignment designed for me to assess your level of understanding of core concepts in the class. It is a chance for you to show me what you’ve learned, and for me to make sure we are all on the same page, so to speak. You will be provided with a document that has directions and a series of prompts to respond to on DUE DATE.
Here are two of the questions that produced some really wonderful responses.
Mid-Semester Check In Example Prompts
Short Answer (30 pts, 10 pts Each) |
Understanding Media & Popular Culture |
Respond to the following in half a page or less3. In this course “Gender & Sexuality”, and “Race, Racism, and Representation” were discussed as spaces that are beyond our theoretical frames as they are grounded in lived experience and reproduced as stereotypes in popular media. Identify another area of cultural excess and discuss how it is portrayed in media and how this reflects or highlights larger cultural attitudes or norms. |
5. Read the lyrics to the song “I Don’t Need a Reason” by Dizzee Rascal http://rapgenius.com/Dizzee-rascal-i-dont-need-a-reason-lyrics Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g
Explain difference in meaning that can be inferred from the lyrics and the video and place them in a larger cultural context (It is okay to write from a US perspective on this!) and/or the media ecology the song exists in. |
Long Answer (50 pts) |
Respond to one of the prompts below using theories, concepts, and discussions from the course, in a 1.5-3 page essay. |
6. Gender and Sexuality We all consume the same media, yet certain media are targeted towards certain genders. We’ve read and discussed romance novels and sports this semester. If the content of these items stayed the same, Option A: how would targeting males instead of females as the intended audience of romance novels and erotica change our cultural understanding and discussion of these media objects? OR Option B: how would targeting females instead of males as the intended audience of prime time sports change about the ways these sports are culturally discussed, understood, and sold/commodified? |
The long answer was graded on a rubric, but it is a bit long. I might upload it later. Students did well (some of them even said they really enjoyed answering the questions!). They were put in a strange position though that did require some discussion. A lot of them were convinced they didn’t have any biases and/or weren’t influenced by the media they were consuming. They found that when they had to do the switch they were falling into stereotypical thinking and that was surprising for them, but awesome for classroom discussion. The answers to the medium questions were beautiful. I loved seeing the connections my students were making. Just… really lovely. And the short answer was my way of saying “I know we’ve spent a lot of time on gender and race stuff, but there are more things that are treated similarly in media”. There were lots of great responses, like romantic relationships, citizenship, body size and shape, beauty, ability, etc. Which made me glad, because my biggest fear is that students feel locked in by what we have time to cover in the class and don’t feel they have the freedom to think outside the syllabus.
Final
I am required to have a final. i teach media classes though, and I think one of the better ways to make the theory part of the class make sense is to have students put theory into practice through creative engagement or media making. To encourage experimentation the points for this are placed in to various components, some of which are Pass/Fail for full or no credit. I’ll mark those with a **
4.0 Final Project (35%)
Option 1: Traditional Project (Theory into practice) & Presentation Group work encouraged. Requirements to be determined by instructor and student. |
Option 2: Traditional or Experimental Paper (Theoretical exploration) & Presentation 10-12pp, double spaced, times new roman, 12pt font. Must be done individually. |
*Important Dates (and % of final grade):
Oct .14: Final Project Proposal Due (10%)**
Nov. 11: Final Project Workshop (5%)**
Dec. 04: Final Project Object Due (15%)
Dec. 06: Final Project Presentation (5%)**
Most of the project was points/no points to limit the stress. As long as students followed the directions (most of which were negotiated and agreed upon in class) for the assignments, they received the points. By taking out the qualitative measure, and reminding students that they were encouraged to experiment, students were able to propose things they hadn’t done before. It is always awesome to see the work of a first time DIY film maker or webmaker. Seriously. It makes it worth it. I’m ahead of myself though. Once I received the proposal and knew the type of projects students were thinking about doing, the ways they were considering executing them, and how they thought they were seeing them in relation to class content, I was able to make sure as we went through the theory section of the class I did my best to make it relevant to the topics proposed. I created a Final Project Guidelines (PDF) document. And distributed it to the students. The requirements were discussed in a class session after the first workshop before this was created and distributed.
Workshop days are days where students get to talk to their audience members. One of the most important things for me with the final is that they know they have to present it to the class, and so they should get feedback to see how the class, their biggest audience is reacting and what input they might have. I usually create worksheets for them to fill out for these to turn in at the end of class so I can see where they are. The worksheets let me know if there are any red flags or project issues that are individual are universal that need to be addressed. The biggest universal issue is usually project scope.
The last part, the presentation, is what we do during the time slot our final is slated for. What I think is awesome about how this all comes together is, the diversity of the students and what they are interested in means that in the 2-3 hours we meet, have baked goods and soda together and listen to everyone talk about what hey worked on/thought about for 4-6 weeks we end up with this really kick ass course review because people are interested in different things and make different connections and tend to bring them together in some really amazing and innovate ways.
——————–
So that’s that. A lot of the points are based on showing up and attempting the assignment. Grade breakdowns seem to indicate that students will end up with a grade I would have given them had I been grading on retention/knowledge acquisition based on their in class participation/attendance patterns, familiarity with the course literature, and effort put in to what they put out. I just shared bits of 1 class, but I’ve taught 8 classes now with this format I think. Inevitably every semester I have 1 disgruntled student that is used to doing minimal effort, no attendance and passing with an exam and a paper who ends up with a C or a D that tried to get points for the credit no credit assignment. Hardline though so it doesn’t happen. For that one student though, there are maybe 2 who apologize to me for not doing the work and getting a bad grade. They want me to know that it isn’t a reflection on me or my teaching and they can do better/be better students. So far I’ve had 4 of those students take another class with me. They all went up at least a letter grade. I’m proud of them.
I have a book. It has been in my possession for a few weeks now. It is called The Secret Museum of Anthropology. It was a private printing from the American Anthropological Association created in 1935 from a series of pirated photos. It included illustrations as well, to make it more science-y I am guessing. The photo above is the cover, the copy, and the drawing that I’ve been intrigued by since receiving the book. I… like it? No. Yes? It is provocative. That is a better word I think.
So, today, since I woke up an hour early due to daylight savings time, I decided to finally work through the illustration and the book by drawing, photographing, printing, cutting, and pasting. The result is a triptych (three 16x20inch panels) of the book and the breasts featured in the book. I did this because my way of working through problems is to play with them/tear them apart, recreate them, meditate on them, and then figure out what the hell is going on in my head around it (Yay to weird methodological approaches!).
[those are some crooked photos!] I think I might keep it in this order. I think what was so intriguing to me about the photograph is the ability to reduce even breasts to types, when, if you actually put the illustration next to the breasts in the book, it… doesn’t work. The reduction is actually, hilarious. And the actual breasts in the book are overwhelming. So, that is where I am. The problem is, and will always be, the reduction of women of color from specific groups being reduced to a squiggly line, a line that can be erased and erases at the same time.
I need to finish cleaning up the drawings. I am debating adding the numbers. I will be sharing the triptych with a class in 1.5 weeks, so I need to get everything finalized. I think I’m almost there.
I am trying very hard to be open-minded with things, especially as I approach them through course-work, in classes with other people who are personally invested in the work of the people we are reading. I understand that you can “like the person”, and think she was “just lovely”, and “wonderful” and, “doing important work” when you met her at that conference. And I am glad you can find her work “beautiful”. It makes me uncomfortable. Not because of the topic, but because of how it was positioned. It is a pattern I’ve seen before, and I know where it almost always leads to. This was the experience I had when reading Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge by Petra Kuppers. I was having a hard time with the Flaneur/Turtle conversation that the book starts with, and then, in the intro on page we start with the discomfort, for me:
“In relation to disability, the main themes that are aligned with specific differences are tragedy, loss, and dependency. Like people stereotyped by structural meanings of gender and race, disabled people use cultural interventions in order to subvert and query these meanings, and disability culture emerges as counterculture. The chapters of this book chart some of the forms that these disruptions of conventionalized meanings take. One problem with the allocation of ‘disability’ to a person is the cloudiness and uncertainty that surrounds the team. At most points in the recent history of Western civilization, the term ‘woman’ was relatively unproblematic: a deep consensus ruled this definition, pushing complicated cases to the margins, even though the definition has been challenged as less than natural many times, and continues to be a focus of analysis today.
In relation to this, the term ‘black’ shows more diffuse hold on specific forms of biology, complicated by the term’s historic changes, from ‘nigger’ to ‘black’ to ‘African American’, ‘Caribbean’, etc., from specific subcultures defined by diasporic experiences, myths of ‘homeland’ or religious affiliation. Like ‘woman’, or ‘gay’, or ‘black’, the term ‘disabled’ holds a history of both oppression and pride: after a long historic period of predominant negativity, disabled people have re-claimed their differences as a source of communality and cohesion in the face of oppression. Civil rights groups and forms of culture have founded themselves on the difference policed by the term” (6).
W.T.F. No. Really. Is this necessary? I feel like there is some ongoing game where people try to sneak the n-word in to see if anyone notices. Additionally, this books seems to premised on things I just am not okay with. I think we’ve gone from the myth of the black population of the world as the noble savage to the myth of the noble martyr. Further, how the hell are you going to name ever oppressed group in the world that has a defamatory slur attached to them, but limit yourself to using the n-word? So no, this does not get a pass for me. Sorry. All she did was let me know that she is probably racist.
You see, this is what happens. I am attempting to keep an open mind, just reading a book, I get to page 6 of the introduction and then, BAM! blackness… I am wary but on board out then BOOM! n-bomb for no reason. While I can keep reading, when I come across this as the case exemplar of oppression in society, I sort of write off the writer right away. The reason is simple, the conflation does not work, and, excuse my language, but that is a really fucked up place to start. It lets me know everything I need to know about an author. There is an assumption that at some point ever black person in the world was an n-word and then, somehow that magically stopped being the case, only not really, because she says that it is part of “black”. No. Sorry, but no. That is not part of my blackness. Some non-black people might think of me in that way. Hell, some black people might too. But those people don’t define my world. But part of this myth of the noble martyr, we are all so proud to invoke our nigger status to move through the world apparently… even by acknowledge our blackness we are reminding people of that. See, that didn’t feel too good, did it? I’d been so nice and taken the word out, and then BOOM!
Maybe my expectations are too high. No. No. Sorry. To take on that position, of being the “n of the world” as John Lennon & Yoko Ono so…. unfortunately put, is a really horrible way to see yourself or imagine your position. In addition to being racist, it makes me feel really sad for you and how you are imagining yourself. But thank you so much for letting me know. You feeling that way lets me know how you feel about me. As such, I reserve the right to not engage with you or your scholarship because I will never be a whole person for you. I will never associate myself with a word that has no redeeming value for me and is not how I see myself, the people I come from, or the people like me. While I do understand the movement of the word through society, I choose to align myself somewhere else, where I am not defined as the Other or by the (Relative) other. Instead, I celebrate that I am alive in a time where I can engage in world making, and make a world where that place you try to pin my beginning point ends up being the end of our relationship.
I will not drink your kool-aid. I do not believe in comparing wounds, nor do I believe in competing in the oppression olympics. That is a game that erases not just me, but also you, because when you do that, you don’t allow a place for intersectionality. You don’t allow a place for people to just live their lives. And while I do appreciate the people who tried to save this book, and came down on me for my critique of it and attempted to show me how wrong I was with this film that she choreographed and directed? Yea… just look at the framing.
If I think that History & the Digital in a Post September 11th World, mean that history is no longer history as such due to the proliferation of new handheld media devices and social media and the pace and type of information exchange, it stands to reason that I’d also believe this has huge ramifications for the future of the Academy. Surprise! I totally do. I spent the first year of my PhD program trying to figure out how I imagined my work and my teaching in this new future. This was part of what I played with as a participant of Future Class, and experience I documented with an online field journal. And then I had to clamp down and work on my primary PhD project, teaching, etc, expanding how I was thinking through these things along the way.
And then, #Twittergate 2012: The etiquette (and ethic) of live-tweeting a conference or lecture happened. Tressie McMillan-Cottom wrote up one of her fabulous blog posts on it. And I was left with my question. What does all this say about the future of Academe?
Final say is this: if someone tweets you and attributes your ideas to you? It’s a citation not theft. #twittergate
— Jade (@jadedid) October 1, 2012
The two biggest changes that I feel we need to come to terms with in academe are the following:
- the changes in information access (the towers have been digitized and are slowly falling down)
- Ciatationality/Iterability (oh humanism, how you haunt me)
The ways people access our academic work, and the things they choose to cite are different now than they used to be. This means that citations are no longer just things that happen in papers. They happen in and from blog posts and social media. They are formatted to fit the medium where they appear. If you are giving a talk at a conference or a lecture, and someone tweets something from you, having disclosed their location (at your talk, usually done once with tweets following), and given an conference or lecture an appropriate #hashtag, I have a very hard time seeing how this is not a citation for the twitter age. The ability for others to then retweet (RT) or modifytweet (MT) with the username of the original tweeter just becomes the iterability of the ideas you are sharing.
The thing about this digital and the current situation that the Academy finds itself in is we no longer have years and years to make our arguments, formulate our ideas, practice them with a select group of people, write them out, have them edited and reviewed and modified and then sent to the public. Things have changed, especially in terms of how people interact with information. A majority of the people I interact with (mainly my students) do more reading on their smartphone and computer screens than they do from books. Just like with Journalism and History, they are used to being able to have a question, google it, and have it instantaneously. As a result, things get old really fast, especially if the interactive practice of questions and response, or response and modification aren’t built in to the format. If we are not up for real time feedback on our work, being questioned, or having people outside the room know our thoughts and ideas when this dialogue (and the writing sharing of it) is at least 50% of our job? I don’t want to sound fatalistic, but… I’m scared we are going to keep failing, especially in areas like the Humanities.
The ability of the greater public to latch on to our work and feed it is what, I think, makes the humanities and social sciences such a fun place to play. But we have to be willing to let go of some control and let ideas do that thing that ideas do: grow. Twitter is a great tool for that. And I still maintain that, if you are giving a talk that people find important, interesting, problematic, or challenging enough to tweet, that means your work is doing what it should supposed to do. Generating more thoughts, ideas and questions. Or maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t want to have the final say in the work I am doing. Instead, I truly do want to see it grow.