I am Jade and I did things...
and I am still doing things.
Inherently interdisciplinary Doctoral Student in Communications Studies. (formerly in French Studies)
Love Digital Media, Performance, identity, archives, diaspora, ethnicity and representations.
Production and creativity make me happy because I like to make things.
Performing the Digital- Vintage Black Beauties
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- Apr 09, 13
I’m currently working on two things for two courses(my Duke 21st century literacies course, and a required course in my home department) that have me asking myself why I am doing what I am doing. These things are also demanding that I explain my reasons. This post is my mini-through experiment as I start thinking through why I’ve made the choices I’ve made.
DISCLAIMER: You are about to read un-edited thoughts. You have been warned.
While I suggest that the medium of both photography and the digital is light, the way light is used between the two is very different. The message of the photographic medium is stoppage while the message of the digital medium is movement. McLuhan maintained that as new media come into being we will see them cannibalize the older media they are enhancing and/or replace. We have seen this with photography. The movement of photography from being experienced on a piece of metal or paper that might be tarnished or fade over time, to a screen made of moving pixels that contain the illusion of an infinite number of both still and moving images becomes a great playground for understanding what the big changes of digital media are. Specifically, the changes on our environment, expectations, and ways of knowing are most fascinating for me. Further, because both photography and digital media are understood for their memory storage capabilities popularly, and epistemologically they are seen as information storage and processing devices that go above the capabilities of humans on their own, the importance of understanding the move from stillness to movement becomes more important. When we begin to think about it in relation to speed, where photography is still and the digital is movement at light speed, we can begin to get a glimpse of the new potentials that are built into the medium as well as the accidents.
Another difference of the digital versus photography brought on by movement is when things move they can turn into different types of waves.* As such, even though at a base level photography and social media are both light, digital can move between moving images and sound, and can be rendered through seamless dots of color and through sound processors that turn the patterns in the light stream into sound. We can push this so far with our current technology that we can take digitized photographs and turn them into soundwaves. I’ve included a tutorial above that shows a program that does this. Someday when I’m not a poor grad student maybe I’ll be able to purchase the program. I would say 3d rendering is new, but I am not sure it is because of stereographs.
*pseudo-scientific I know, but let’s go with it.
Also of interest: How to Turn a Paper Image of a Record Into a Beautiful Music
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/04/how-to-turn-a-paper-image-of-a-record-into-a-beautiful-music/#ixzz2PzDiP7wm - Apr 03, 13
I asked a question yesterday on twitter. It was a serious question with no real responses. “How honest and open are we allowed to be on twitter again? I forgot.”
The pattern I am seeing is that on Social Network Sites there is a limit to how open and honest you should be, and it is based on a slippage. Social Network Sites, especially open ones like twitter, are constructed as spaces that belong to both personal and professional networks. While technically it is possible to have both professional and personal profiles on these sites, just like in real life there is always slippage. We become friends with people we work with, and we refer friends to places where we work. So… managing a Social Network Sites as a personal brand extension just seems like more work than most of us can manage. We still have to police ourselves though.
Even if these spaces are personal because we are broadcasting to so many people, we might not want to share so many personal somewhat private details. It seems that since every interaction on social media has the potential to lead to some type of material gain, we err on the side of making it more professional. As an example, it was tweeted out that I would be joining Microsoft Research over the summer as a Summer Intern. I purposely end my twitter profile description with “mom” so that people know parenting is an okay topic for discussion. That didn’t stop it from feeling like an awkward exchange on twitter. Amongst the congratulations I had a question about organizing family life around this, specifically, what was I going to do with my kids. It was immediately followed by an apology. This made me sad because personally and professionally, these are the types of questions that help us determine what we are capable of doing. Despite the need to deal with family planning, being “academic” online is seen as somehow separate from being a parent, child, aunt, uncle, etc of people who might need you in one capacity or another. I’m not so sure that I would go as far as to call it a failure, but it was disheartening.
Blogs are different than twitter and other social media sites.
I see so many blogs with taglines that have the word “musings” in them. Unless we have a large blog following we know that what we write here is speaking into the air. We know it is a reflection space where we can say things that are too big for social media. We often use them for things that are more immediate.
Wherein I take advantage of the ability to be overly personal on a blog. AKA the backstory.
I asked the question yesterday about what is too much to share on twitter from a hospital room. Wednesday I called my grandmother and an hour later I’d purchased a ticket to her house for 6 days and 5 nights. On day 4 I took her to the hospital for an outpatient exam and then they had to keep her. My grandmother isn’t what you would call “comforting”, so instead of freaking out about the probable diagnosis and prognosis we sat around and talked about the normal stuff we talk about. I was freaking out a bit but couldn’t express this. I wanted to tweet some of the things I couldn’t speak out loud. I see tweets as stream of consciousness/inner thoughts. But it seems like sharing of the types of things I was thinking/feeling would have probably been very weird, maybe even bad. So I didn’t. I can write what happened here though. I think part of it is because the design of blogs and blog rituals assume:
1. Though there is a social component to blogs that is not their primary purpose
2. Most people who read a blog post will not leave a comment
3. What we write on blogs is not as likely to be re-broadcasted
4. If things get out of hand they can be deleted/moderated/hidden
5. The identity of a blog is easier to manage than social media.I wouldn’t go as far as to say the blogs are safe spaces. They do seem like a space where it is safer to be the “you” you are or want to be in a way that is meaningful. Because of the limited audience many of blogs have, we are free to experiment, overshare, and test in these environments in a way that does not have to be super polished. Likewise, if a blog needs to be super professional, it is easy enough to make sure that everything posted falls within the intended purpose of the blog. The advance control over the presentation (in terms of theme, layout, domain, etc) makes me feel that blogs are unlimited structured possibility. They kind of roll into that “create your own adventure” mode. If it isn’t clear yet, that’s my favorite place to play.
So this is my musing on life branding, and life branding failure, and social media, and blogs.
Two Articles I found on the topic of managing social media:
So Much Noise: Are Academics being Over-Branded? – http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2013/03/so-much-noise/
Being Negative in Social Media is Plain Old Bad Social Business – http://socialmediatoday.com/nealschaffer/823681/being-negative-social-media-plain-old-bad-social-business - Mar 27, 13
The UN had a report come out on the global sanitation crisis. It was almost impossible to find the original story but I did. I think the thing that made it so hard to find is that rather than leading with the global santitation crisis, most news outlets apparently didn’t get past the first sentence. Or they did, but that was the lead for the story:
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today launched a call for urgent action to end the crisis of 2.5 billion people without basic sanitation, and to change a situation in which more people worldwide have mobile phones than toilets
So… the Time version of the story, titled “More People Have Cell Phones Than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows“, has a photo from Getty. The image stopped me.
I mean, I totally smiled. The photo is beautiful. It perfectly captures how I would imagine what this sanitation crisis, I mean plethora of cell phones, must look like. Here are the keywords Getty has it listed under the photo.
Keywords: Communication, Technology, Horizontal, Outdoors, 30-34 Years, 35-39 Years, Africa, Mobile Phone, Kenya, Indigenous Culture, Animal, Domestic Animals, Mammal, Cattle, Day, One Person, African Tribal Culture, Masai, Color Image, Herder, Large Group Of Animals, One Mid Adult Man Only, One Man Only, Native African Ethnicity, Animal Themes, Westernization, Photography, Science and Technology, Livestock, Using Phone, Developing Countries, Wireless Technology, Adults Only, Warrior, Herbivorous. Lots of stuff about animals and indigenous african culture. A few on technology. Westernization and development make an appearance. Vocational information. Location. And… nothing about why the UN report was actually written.
The UN piece has a slightly different title than the time piece, “Deputy UN chief calls for urgent action to tackle global sanitation crisis“, and a very different image:
Living amid waste. Photo: IRIN/Manoocher Deghati
The phones are a wonderful hook, and they are mentioned one more time later in the piece to give the numbers:
Of the world’s seven billion people, six billion have mobile phones. However, only 4.5 billion have access to toilets or latrines – meaning that 2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, do not have proper sanitation. In addition, 1.1 billion people still defecate in the open.
But the call to action later in the article:
“But the effort succeeded not by building latrines; it succeeded by getting people to recognize and to talk about the problem,” he stated.
Seems like it may be lost. I know that if I didn’t have time and I saw the headline, clicked the article, and saw the beautiful image of the Masai Moran warrior on his cell phone, out with his animals in an uncluttered field, I’d probably think “good for them”, and then move on… but maybe I’m more apathetic than most.
In terms of what this means with regards to how we talk about the digital divide cannot be understated. But… our need to gloss over. The fact that most of the articles that have come out over the past few days do not link directly to the UN piece nor do they lead with the sanitation crisis means that the bigger, messier issue is being glossed over and beautified for western/global north consumption and page views.
Is this a problem? I think yes, but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just me.
- Feb 28, 13
So, I have an idea that is really a request. When we talk of society, we talk as though mutual recognition was a possibility that existed at the time of slavery. I think sure it did, but it didn’t. Exploring this was the purpose of the Letter post. Slavery is a complex system of seeing bodies as cyborgs, which to me, on some level means sexually viable for humanoid reproduction (at the cusp of recognition), yet not fully human. So, it’s about bodies that are resources of reproduction, both in terms of the almost human and labor, especially manual labor.
The thing that I think we all acknowledge but don’t actually interrogate is that slavery is the first real instance of a well oiled mechanical assembly line. That is why the transport of bodies as a labor class lasted for over three hundred years. When we look at the wealth of the west, the wealth that is now apparently in crisis, we are looking at wealth that was built on the backs of black slave labor. The Independent just wrote an article exploring this Britain’s colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition. I tend to believe that society builds on itself. If the western structure for attaining wealth was built on being able to see certain bodies as less than you, as less than human, and relegating those bodies to do the labor that allows you to attain wealth, even as those bodies are forced into positions that, if you saw them as equals would be ethically unsound, I don’t know why we’d think that would change. (How crazy is it that the real wealth in the British instance was contingent on being able to dispose of the bodies!?)
So slavery was abolished in the west. I want to say not exactly. The slave trade, the need for slavery to be so focused on the bodies as technology, each with its own individual value, and skills is gone. But it is so ingrained in our culture, it has become such a point of articulation that slavery doesn’t need to exist as such anymore.
Slavery is a technique. As a result, we have situations like the Emory president speaking of the 3/5ths compromise and not realizing he’s made a horrible mistake… only not really, because in this system we have now, this slavery as technique mode of labor production, there are people who are 3/5ths. They are not in power. But they do the labor that ensures those with access to power and wealth stay in their positions. We have comments like the tweet below that instigated this post:
Slavery as technique. RT @sinboy: “We are ruled by people who think $250k/year means you’re poor, but the minimum wage is too high” – Atrios
— Jade D. (@jadedid) February 28, 2013
We all buy into the idea of “Human Resources” without realizing what we are saying when we speak these words. Hint, if Human Resources was really about serving the people that worked at the company/institution etc, I maintain that it would be called the “Office of Humanity”.
Even more than the things that are happening here at home in the states, we have people working in virtual slave positions around the world. It is the dark side of globalization and global connectivity through media devices. We can buy our cheap goods while the labor that went into creating them and bringing them to us remains invisible. Their labor is our pacifier. We are coddled by our ability to attain more than others. But, that’s part of the technique as well. Those with the bigger planation, or more stuff, are imagined to have more power. So we work to attain more. With that, I guess I should drop the link so we can all look at our slavery footprint.
The thing about understanding slavery as a technique is, techniques are in the background. We don’t have to think about them. They are built into how we move through society. The biggest issue for me is, as long as we get stuck focussing on and speaking about slavery as technology, we won’t be able to move it beyond the black body. As a technique, it is all encompassing. We all have a hand in ensuring the technique remains a part of our societal makeup. And as long as we live in the fancy big house, we seem to ignore all of those people in the global fields who are making sure we get our next fix of cheap goods… And I cannot forget the mostly black and brown people that clean the halls of my own University for lord knows how much money, but only in the middle of the night, when they can’t be seen.
- Feb 13, 13
Department Colloquium is over. I had some nice questions on why I chose to do a letter and some good feedback on some areas to expand/move forward. The act of putting the first first draft online was good. I thought it might be nice to share how it evolved since people were kind enough to read the first iteration and send me feedback.
The Talk
For the past few years anytime I’ve read McLuhan it has been while I am in the process of reading Fanon. As a result, their words swirl together in my head as though they are in conversation. While the most common link take McLuhan and Fanon together because McLuhan samples A Dying Colonialism in War and Peace in the Global Village, I am making another connection today. Arun Saldanha briefly touched on this connection in the 2010 article “Skin, affect, aggregation: Guattarian variations on Fanon”, but I am pushing it further as I move towards developing a way to understand the intersection of race, media, and technology, especially as we trace the evolution of this intersection to its present moment of the Digital.
The piece I am sharing with you today is a thought experiment. It is influenced by D. Soyini Madison’s Performing theory/embodied writing. It’s playing with McLuhan’s method of writing as though making a collage, and it’s answering Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth, to use imagination to create a new now. My new now speaks with the both McLuhan and Fanon through the “Playboy Interview” and the introduction of Black Skins, White Masks.
My hope with this piece, tentatively titled “A Letter to Frantz and Marshall”, is that it can eventually move into a larger project that might or might not be a dissertation chapter examining the role of fibre optic cables, light as pure information, and the “net of colonization” to examine how the digital creates a reparative space where we as a society can create explosions that allow us to imagine the body and the human in a new light.
Please note, for the purposes of this piece I will be speaking with both men on a first name basis. Frantz is Frantz Fanon and Marshall is Marshall McLuhan.
=== A Letter to Fanon and McLuhan===
Dear Frantz & Marshall,
I know the two of you never officially met, except for that brief instance where Frantz’s words become yours in War and Peace in the Global Village Marshall. You are meeting now though, in my head, and I am attempting to move that meeting to an external data storage device as words on a virtual page, that will eventually move to ink on paper.
Marshall, you said something along the lines of technology is the extension of the human body in the Medium is the Massage. The entirety of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man also explores this relationship. When I think of this idea in relation to your reflections in “the Playboy Interview”, reflections that lead you to saying black bodies are left outside of technology, I can’t help but smile a little as I remember Fanon’s point in Black Skin, White Masks. The Black man is not fully human. It seems that what you are speaking towards when you speak of the issues of the Black man (and the Indian to a lesser extent) Marshall, are the societal effects of the technologically extension of a Human body that is assumed to be less than Human. This seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a bit of a circle because the black man/person being less than human is directly linked to their inability to be seen as fully connected to and through technology.
Frantz, you said something that I am finding myself seeing true about the Human experience, what and who is human is determined by the negation of the black man. If media technologies are all just an extension of the human body, and that which in fact makes us fully human and connected, returning us to the global village without margins or centers, then it stands to reason that to understand the Human we must also understand the relationship between the black man and technology. It is the relationship defined by a technological lack that will show us the blind spots in our Utopian vision.
If we look at technology as the extension of man, it seems we must begin to see slaves as the foundational technology of not just the United States, but the West as a whole as connected through the Atlantic slave trade. If we understand that these bodies were seen as a lack due to their distance from the technologies of the West we can see that they are not human bodies but are rather a media technology like any other media technology. It becomes easier for Black bodies to be subsumed into a system of commerce. As media technology they served as an extension of the body of their owners, increasing the size, scale and pace of agriculture in a plantation economy as machines in the garden. Their bodies, not their humanity, made them central to the process of taming the frontier and cultivating the new world towards a European vision. Their bodies allowed for time and capital to grow at a new pace, across more space in ways not seen before the Atlantic slave trade became a well-oiled machine, delivering raw technology for hundreds of years. If we extend this beyond the Atlantic slave trade to include the colonization of Africa in the 1800s, Jim Crow in the United States, and Apartheid in South Africa, the timeline is even longer. When we look at the issues of Neo-colonialism, the continued territory, protectorate, or militarily occupied status of many formerly colonized African states, as well as the penal labor system that is currently growing in the United States, we might even say that the black body as part of the industrial machine never ended. It is important to note though that black bodies are no longer the only bodies that make up this labor technoloy. That is, however, a separate conversation.
Both of you think an over extension of the body through technology leads to psychosis. The psychosis is predicated on a loss of self in relation to the body. Technology is to be built upon, extended, evolved and, subsumed. For the black man the extension is based on an over association with the White Man. If we are thinking through this with the parameters Marshall laid out coupled with the history of Black slaves as technology, the extension you are illustrating Frantz shows a moment of technology becoming sentient, believing itself to be too Human.
The difference seems to be, if I understand you both correctly, that the causes and results of the manifestation of the psychosis differs from the White man to the black man. The black man’s psychosis is in the realization that he can never be as human as the white man in his quest for more and more technology even as the white man tells the black man to try and catch up. The rhetoric we continue to hear today around digital divide constructs the black man this way. The white man though, in a need to assert his own humanity and recreate centuries of social structuring is compelled to increase the distance between him and those bodies he imagines as closer to raw technology. The White man overextends himself in this quest, losing sight of his body, becoming post-human. In his post-humanity he removes the capability of seeing the Black man as human, even as he, the white man, longs to go back to an imagined before time, a time where he too was Human. The psychoses of the white man comes from the Black mans closeness to his body. His inability to be extended keeps him closer to the human than the flight away that is occurring in the White post-humanism movement. A second layer of psychosis for the white man comes from watching the Black man work through his own psychosis, a psychosis characterized by a compulsion to emulate the White Man in an attempt to be recognized as Human, without access to the technological tools required to do so. No matter how hard a black man tries to reach the world of the white man, his almost human hands can never touch it.
Attempting to understand this psychosis is why I am writing both of you. I think both of you are hinting towards a level of consciousness that is innate to humanity that the black man has better access to perhaps because he hasn’t extended his body outward through technology as much as the white man (his extension, while outward facing, is more internal). Despite the internal nature of this extension, the message received through technological mediation outside of the body causes misunderstanding that blinds and alienates the Black Man from this other level of consciousness because for the black man to have the realization that he can access it on a total scale would be an annihilation of the current social order.
Marshall, you said,“The cultural aggression of white America against Negroes and Indians is not based on skin color and belief in racial superiority, whatever ideological clothing may be used to rationalize it, but on the white man’s inchoate awareness that the Negro and Indian — as men with deep roots in the resonating echo chamber of the discontinuous, interrelated tribal world — are actually psychically and socially superior to the fragmented, alienated and dissociated man of Western civilization,”
Are you not speaking directly to Frantz and his beliefs that that it is the mistake of the black man to not already realize he is the defining instance of humanness and humanity, for it is he who has access to the zone of non-being. I think, Frantz, you can clarify this for me. You said,
Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that the Black is not a man.
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, and incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell.
Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, dispersed, dazed, and doomed to watch as the truths he has elaborated vanish one by one, he must stop projecting his antinomy into the world” (xii).
While you started with the transcendental consciousness, Marshall, it is where you ended your interview:
“I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.”
Both of you see this movement towards the transcendental starting with the tribal, or black man. And both of you see the inevitable violence the path of technology leads us on if we continue to see certain Humans as wretched and others as technologically superior. As long as superiority is understood by the ability of a group of Humans to master, contain and control the messages of the mediums, and make them obsolete we will never break society of our racially based psychoses. (As an aside, if we see the black slave as pure technology, and technologies as building on top of each other making previous versions obsolete, the black and Indian man never had a chance.) When I read these lines,
“The one inexorable consequence of any identity quest generated by environmental upheaval is tremendous violence. This violence has traditionally been directed at the tribal man who challenged visual-mechanical culture, as with the genocide against the Indian and the institutionalized dehumanization of the Negro”.
I am not sure who I am reading until I remind myself that Marshall, you were more interested in the Indian. Had it been you Frantz, I think you would have said Arab. Marshall, You spoke of the real possibility of the negro being exterminated through, something that I think can be softly confirmed if we look at statistics showing various ways people are moved from society, through imprisonment, literacy, or lack of access to the tools and technologies needed to be fully Human. As though you saw this on the horizon as well, Frantz, you had already written a response, a call, and a reminder:
I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions. He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me. In a fierce struggle I am willing to feel the shudder of death, the irreversible extinction, but also the possibility of impossibility (193).
Where do we go from here though?
I am thinking the three of us can push this a little bit further. If we acknowledge that the black body represents pure technology, and technology is simply a way that we extend our own human bodies, and the medium that we use for this extension has its own message, then I think we can say the medium that represents humanity is the black man. Just as the light is pure information, to understand how we have come to define the human, especially as we try to understand the human through media technology, we must first understand the relation of humanity and humanness to the black body, the body that I think became a cyborg long ago.
The next step for me is to expand this conversation and explore it through the role of black women, looking specifically at society’s current cause of psychosis and division, Digital Media.
Sincerely,Jade
References:
Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. Grove press, 1994.
Fanon, Frantz. The wretched of the earth. Grove Press, 2005.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Madison, D. Soyini. “Performing theory/embodied writing.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1999): 107-124.
Marx, Leo. The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.
McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore. The medium is the massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT press, 1994.
McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. War and peace in the global village. McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, eds. Race after the Internet. Routledge, 2012.
Norden, Eric. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan.” Playboy Magazine(1969).
Saldanha, Arun. “Skin, affect, aggregation: Guattarian variations on Fanon.”Environment and planning. A 42, no. 10 (2010): 2410.
- Jan 21, 13
Any feedback, questions, comments are not expected (hi lonely blog), but would be greatly appreciated, as I still have more than a week before I need to submit and a little less than month before I present.
I was invited to speak at a small graduate student colloquium to discuss my work. The topic is defining the Human. I was asked to speak of this in terms of how I am defining the Human through media. There will be one other speaker speaking from a Media perspective and two others speaking of the Human through Rhetoric.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, and then, re-reading McLuhan amidst the forever reading I’m doing of Fanon it hit me. I decided to write my thoughts out as a letter to both of them, as a performative exercise, using primarily the following two texts.
Playboy Interview:
http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/
Fanon French Introduction:
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/fanon_franz/peau_noire_masques_blancs/peau_noire_masques_blancs_intro.htmlI assume a base knowledge of “The Medium is the Message“, and Fanon’s general arguments regarding the Human and the Black Man. This is something I’ve explored previously in a graduate seminar. You can find those thoughts here: http://jadedid.com/ancyhu/
The Letter-First Draft
Dear Frantz & Marshall,
Frantz, I’d like to start with you. You started Black Skin, White Masks, with “L’explosion n’aura pas lieu aujourd’hui. Il est trop tot…
ou trop tard” (5).“Don’t expect to see any explosion today. It’s too early… or too late” (xi).
It happened today. I exploded and built myself anew, just like you said I would. But Marshall, I couldn’t have done it without you. I know the two of you never officially met, however, you downloaded your consciousness into words on the page. I then proceeded to upload your data into my own data storage facility, and I am downloading it here now.
Marshall, I think you said something along the lines of technology is the extension of the human in the Medium is the Massage, and black bodies are left outside of technology in the Playboy Interview. Frantz, you said the black man is not fully human in Black Skin, White Masks. I think that the black man/person being less than human is directly linked to their inability to be seen as connected to technology. What I mean to say is that, if it is true that what is human is determined by the negation of the black man, where man here means universal human body, Frantz, and media technologies are all just an extension of the human body, as you say Marshall, then it stands to reason that to understand the Human we must also understand the relationship between the black man and technology. In fact, if we look at technology as the extension of man, it seems we must begin to see slaves as the foundational technology of the west (especially the United States). If we do this, we begin to see how their bodies, and their humanness, were subsumed into a system of commerce so easily, like any other media technology. Rather than being human in and of themselves, as bodies of technology they increased the size, scale and pace of agriculture because they were the machines in the garden, that enabled the taming of the frontier as they extended the body of their mostly white slaveholders allow for work, holdings, time and capital to grow at a new pace and across more space. What tickles me about this is that both of you think an over extension of the body leads to psychosis. There is no difference between the two of you on this. The psychosis for both of you is predicated of on a loss of self in relation to the embodied body.
The difference instead seems to be, if I am understanding you both correctly, that the causes and results of the manifestation of the psychosis differs from the white man to the black man. The black man’s psychosis is in the realization that he can never catch up to the white man in his quest for more and more technology even as the white man tells him that is what he needs to do. Even the rhetoric of the digital divide places him in this manner! The white man, as he increasingly goes out of his way to increase the distance between him and those bodies that are more rawly technological, ends up overextending himself to the point of losing sight of the actual body. In doing so he continues to remove the capability of seeing the Black man as human, even as he, the white man, longs to go back to an imagined before time where there was simply the Human. The anger from the side of the white man, then is that the black man is so much closer to a simpler less extended, less technologically mediated life. A second layer of anger comes from the imperative that all the media force the black man to adapt as though it were a compulsion. If we take a step towards media content we see that the aspirational messages aimed at the black man that come from places of political power (outside entertainment power) always tell the black man to do better, and reach higher, and achieve more. The way to do this? Try to be better than other black people, be like us and reach for the world of the white man.
Obviously, this is a little bit crazy. Even if you aren’t black, I am sure you can understand how the contradicting messages from media content to media technology might lead to a psychosis brought on by no matter how hard a black person tries to reach the world of the white man, it can never be touched by his almost human hands.
But, this is why I am writing both of you. I think both of you are hinting towards is a level of consciousness that is innate to humanity that the black man has better access to, but the message of mediation is that he is to be blinded to it and removed from it because to have the realization on a total scale would be an annihilation of the current social order.
Marshall, you said,
“The cultural aggression of white America against Negroes and Indians is not based on skin color and belief in racial superiority, whatever ideological clothing may be used to rationalize it, but on the white man’s inchoate awareness that the Negro and Indian — as men with deep roots in the resonating echo chamber of the discontinuous, interrelated tribal world — are actually psychically and socially superior to the fragmented, alienated and dissociated man of Western civilization,”
Are you not speaking directly to Frantz? It is the mistake of the black man to not already realize he is the defining instances of humanness and humanity, for it is he who has access to the zone of non-being.
Ah, I realize you, Frantz, must clarify this for me. You said,
Dussé-je encourir le ressentiment de mes frères de couleur, je dirai que le Noir n’est pas un homme.
Il y a une zone de non-être, une région extraordinairement stérile et aride, une rampe essentiellement dépouillée, d’où un authentique surgissement peut prendre naissance. Dans la majorité des cas, le Noir n’a pas le bénéfice de réaliser cette descente aux véritables Enfers.L’homme n’est pas seulement possibilité de reprise, de négation. S’il est vrai que la conscience est activité de transcendance, nous devons savoir aussi que cette transcendance est hantée par le problème de l’amour et de la compréhension. L’homme est un OUI vibrant aux harmonies cosmiques. Arraché, dispersé, confondu, condamné à voir se dissoudre les unes après les autres les vérités par lui élaborées, il doit cesser de projeter dans le monde une antinomie qui lui est coexistante (6).
Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that the Black is not a man.
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, and incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell.Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, dispersed, dazed, and doomed to watch as the truths he has elaborated vanish one by one, he must stop projecting his antinomy into the world” (xii).
While Frantz, you started with the Transcendental consciousness, Marshall, it is where you ended, your interview,
“I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.”
Both of you see this movement towards the transcendental starting with the tribal, or black man. And both of you see the inevitable violence the path of technology leads us on if we continue to see certain as wretched and others as technologically superior, not as their ability to see themselves as technology, but because they are able to master, contain and control the messages of those mediums, and make them obsolete. (As an aside, if we see the black slave as pure technology, and technologies as building on top of each other making previous versions obsolete, the black man and the indian never had a chance.) When I read this line,
The one inexorable consequence of any identity quest generated by environmental upheaval is tremendous violence. This violence has traditionally been directed at the tribal man who challenged visual-mechanical culture, as with the genocide against the Indian and the institutionalized dehumanization of the Negro.I wasn’t sure who I was reading until I reminded myself that Marshall, you were more interested in indians. Had it been you Frantz, I think you would have said Arab. Marshall, You spoke then, of the possibility of the negro being exterminated. As though you saw this on the horizon as well Frantz, you had already written a response:
Je demande qu’on me considère à partir de mon Désir. Je ne suis pas seulement ici-maintenant, enfermé dans la choséité. Je suis pour ailleurs et pour autre chose. Je réclame qu’on tienne compte de mon activité négatrice en tant que je poursuis autre chose que la vie ; en tant que je lutte pour la naissance d’un monde humain, c’est-à-dire d’un monde de reconnaissances réciproques.
Celui qui hésite à me reconnaître s’oppose à moi. Dans une lutte farouche, j’accepte de ressentir l’ébranlement de la mort, la dissolution irréversible, mais aussi la possibilité de l’impossibilité (177).I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions. He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me. In a fierce struggle I am willing to feel the shudder of death, the irreversible extinction, but also the possibility of impossibility (193).
Now, here I am thinking the three of us can push this a little bit further. If we acknowledge that the black body represents pure technology, as the slave, and technology is simply a way that we extend our own human bodies, and the medium that we use for this extension has its own message, then I think we can say the medium that represents humanity is the black man. Just as the lightbulb is pure information, to understand how we have come to define the human, especially as we try to understand the human through media technology, we must first understand the relation of humanity to the black body, the body that I think became a cyborg long ago.
I think the next step for me is to expand this conversation and explore it through the role of black women specifically, looking specifically at societies current causes of psychosis, Digital Media.
Sincerely,
Jade
- Jan 16, 13
I am in a McLuhan-esque mood, which I imagine has something to do with the fact that I am auditing a class on Media History & Theory and week 1 is McLuhan week. I’m also teaching a course on introduction one Media History, Theory, & Criticism and the end of the first week of readings is “The Medium is the Message”. This makes me insanely happy. I am looking forward to speaking about it because I saw the trailer for the Pirate Bay movie (above) and it sort of changed my life, or the way I was thinking about life. Then I went to the #Duke21C class yesterday and Cathy Davidson said something that changed my life, or the way I was thinking about life again. She reminded us that most of our students have never been alive in a world without the internet/world wide web. Whoooooooooosh!
So. I am old, relatively, in that I lived in an ancient world. I understand that it is the result of the last information age and the amount of things that changed with it. I am thankful to have gone through it, and to have the frame of reference that allows me to speak to my students about a time when everyone had to use a calling card or make a collect call at some point. And use a pay phone. And not have social media in the way we think of social media today [side note, when I asked them to rank the most important forms of media from 1-2, most of them had only 1. The Internet, 2. Social Media. In the past news always came out on top.]
I think that, for the people of my generation, the transitional generation (home internet really took off when I was in middle school, so I had the landline version of a social network before I had my award winning geocities site in the 90s), the adjustment of seeing the computer as more than an extension of our hands took a lot of time. We have memories of a life outside of the screen. I am making a guess here, but I am feeling like the thing that made the TPBAFK trailer so “whoa” for me was that they said that the stuff that happens in the computer is real life, so they say they know each other AFK (Away from Keyboard) instead of IRL (In Real Life). They already know each other IRL through the screen! This means, and really this explains so much, that the screen, especially for say, my students who have always had these kind of screens, is no longer a window to an imaginary world. Screens are, instead, just an extension of the whole body/world. Things that happen there are real! It seems we haven’t readily acknowledged this culturally completely just yet.
I mean, I joke about the idea of relationships being “facebook official”, even as I watch relationships develop, evolve, and devolve through facebook status updates. I come across editorial stories from other people weekly that speak about the brother or sister who found out their brother or sister was pregnant or had a baby through a mass social media post, mass texting or a blog post instead of calling on the telephone and how confusing/upsetting the situation was for the receiver of the news. I think it is funny though, that most of us, even those of us old enough to remember a time before the internet, upon receiving good news often post it somewhere rather than individually emailing and calling. It is simply more efficient, and it is where most of our interactions with friends, family, and colleagues are happening anyway. It might not be physical, but it is our world. I think that is where we are with the screens. We are not IRL and online anymore. We’re either At Keyboard or away from keyboard… but even then, we usually have a keyboard in our pockets at this point.
And a lot of times, even when we are in the same room, something that happened in #Duke21C yesterday, we are still At Keyboard, having conversations in the backchannels of our worlds with the people in the room as well as those in the open world of the web.
- Dec 30, 12
LAST POST OF THE YEAR!!!
I am doing that reading thing that I do. I finally accepted that I am okay engaging with Psycho-analysis. I just can’t work with Lacan. It doesn’t work for my thinking. I’ve read a few things that have allowed this to be okay. Currently I am reading Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space. It has been fantastic for me. It let me know that my thinking was on the write track and gave me many tools, quotes, and citations to explain why so much of the theoretical canon does not work for my project. So, as I speak into the abyss of the digital, I really want to say think you to Kelly Oliver for writing this book.
One of the things that I am loving is she does such a wonderful deep engagement with Fanon. When I took my Fanon course, and wrote my paper, it was all about getting out of the net of colonization that he speaks about and creating new worlds by taking what exists and imagining it differently.
So when I got to this part on page 42?
If the true revolution is one of imagination, it requires not only the creation of positive values for those abjected by dominant culture but also the revaluation of values such that the very structure of valuation is opened up for transformation. It requires throwing off not only Marx’s imaginary chains but also chains that bind the imaginary and thereby restrict psychic space.
There was a audible yes said and then some frantic typing.
But what does this have to do with Digital Media?
I’ve been thinking through my project and imagination in terms of Performance Studies. That seems like a natural fit. When I read this, it hit me that it is just as valid in terms of engagement with Media Studies as well. The Digital is a realm that allows us to actively engage in imagination towards world making. By being able to pick and choose what we see, what we share, what we put together, we create worlds that encapsulate both alienation and community/communal-ness, while at the same time, directly engaging what Western epistemology has deemed the ultimate form of meaning making (and world making), the Archive. The role of the curator has been expanded. Rather than having a lead curator, there are always multiple curators, putting things together and taking things apart in ways that were not possible before. The level at which this happens goes out of the past realms of possibility (in terms of pace, size, and scale). That isn’t to say new media of the past didn’t change things in similar ways (see the electronic age happened). The Digital is different though. The element of imagination is built into the scripts. While other forms of media engage imagination, I’m thinking especially video games, the biggest difference I see in previous media is that script has a set ending. While technically digital media runs on scripted programs, the script tends to be open ended. It is really a space where the user is asked to imagine the possibilities and make what they will/want. When we couple digital media with social media, we are asked to imagine the possibilities in a way that changes the world we live in, not just the world on the screen, with people we have the possibility of speaking with instead of just speaking to or about. Depending on how we use these tools, the ability to imagine different types of social engagement and create the networks that enable those engagements with the click of a send/post button and the proper hashtag or keyword in miliseconds seems pretty revolutionary to me. And that is awesome.
- Dec 19, 12
I came across a book. I’ve since played with the book, looked through it, learned about it, and digitally cut bits and pieces of it up and put them back together again as collages. I realized in speaking to others about this book, that if this book was digitized in its entirety, if in the digital format it could still be recognized as a book, or, as individual photographs, it would lose too much. We would lose too much.
The book is The Secret Museum of Anthropology (The Secret Museum). It was a privately printed book created by the American Anthropological Association in the 1930s. It is authorless and not officially recorded (the inside cover says “privately printed”). There are no marks on it indicating it was ever catalogued. It never received wide circulation, something that is built into its design as a privately published book. Despite being in an area with a plethora of Universities, there is no library around here that has it. But I do. I was able to purchase a used copy online. I know had I found this book in a library, my thoughts on it might be a little bit different. I did not though. Acquiring the book was unique experience in and of itself that helped me frame where my thoughts are headed. Thumbing through the book changed some of my thoughts on digitization.
The book is a collection of photographs that were pirated from a German book titled Das weib bei den naturvolkern : eine kulturgeschichte der primitiven frau (Primitiven frau), published in 1928. The rough translation from Google Translate is “The female in aboriginal peoples: a cultural history of the primitive woman”. Primitiven frau was digitized and is available through the Internet Archive project. The feeling of the two books, even as they contain the same photographs is completely different. The Secret Museum is a carefully edited version of the Primitiven frau, with the photographs chosen for their erotic nature. This editorial liberty limits the ability to look at the book as though it is an anthropological work rather than a pornographic one. That doesn’t mean whoever was responsible for putting this private collection together didn’t try to play as though it were real scientific anthropology. The part of the book I present/perform is the part that does just that. Part of the interactive installation piece I created is a video which can be seen below. It features a series of simple line drawings from the middle of The Secret Museum that attempt to catalog and number different types of breasts found in the photographs of the women whose photographs grace the pages of the book:
When I first received The Secret Museum, the image of the “different types of female breasts and nipple formations” made me laugh, not because it was funny, but because it made me say “of course”. The display of these breasts was the sole purpose of this book. Once I confirmed the source of the photographs, Ferdinand Freiherr von Reitzenstein, and looked up his books only to find that Primitiven frau, the book that contained these photographs originally was digitized, I was shocked. I saw flesh and bones and words instead of just flesh and crude drawings of flesh. In fact, there are more pages of words in Primitiven frau than there are of photographs and x-rays. The drawing included in The Secret Museum, appears on page 61 of Primitiven frau in a section that is 17 pages of analysis where breasts are discussed.
Entwicklung und Grundformen der weiblichen Brust (Development and basic forms of the female breast.), Primitiven frau, p. 61
Instead of seeing this drawing as a numbered series that reduces the women in the book to only the drawings themselves, they exist in a larger context. While the context is problematic, at best, we are able to see the intent of Ferdinand Freiherr von Reitzenstein. Rather than simply creating a book of pornographic imagery, he did attempt to create an anthropological work on “primitive women”. Furthermore, though they are few, in addition to the photographs of nude and partially nude women Primitiven frau contains drawings of jewelry and women participating various acts, and other cultural items, such as songs with music and lyrics. There is even a photograph with fully clothed women. Additionally, the book contains an index. The Secret Museum renders the women anonymous in a way that they can never be confronted as though they existed. The index in Primitiven frau prevents this from happening, because at the very least, we know where the women we are seeing existed. Despite the problematic nature of the book, it has a wealth of information to offer us, even as we look to day in the post-post colonial age.
If The Secret Museum were to be digitized, we would lose the covertness of its creation. For me, that is the most important thing the book has to offer. The seediness of its production and purpose would be lost if the book was publicly and freely accessible. The act of having to search for the book, and find a “deal” on it, or having the book presented with the caveat that it is rare and was never published for a wide audience, the ability to touch and feel the book, to smell and see the pages and random ink colors, creates a performative experience with the book that digitization does not have. Making the book digital would erase so much of what this book does. It would allow us to lose the idea that the original audience that this book was designed for will remain forever hidden. Further, the ability to see the physical product against the digital version of what it was pirated from, on a screen where we can see page upon page of text, creates an interesting conversation around what happens when we lose text. I think seeing the physical book coupled with the digital text truly illustrates some of the issues digitization causes for certain artifacts.
It isn’t that I don’t want people to see The Secret Museum. To the contrary, the more people who can experience the book, the better we can understand, especially in the academy, whose bodies our disciplines were built upon and to what ends. It’s just that I want people to do more than see the book. I want them to experience the book. When looking through the screen at a digital version of a book, or a photo, I find it is too easy to forget that we are seeing something real that existed in a larger context that affected and affects different people differently. To lose the bodies first through a photograph and then through the digitization of a book we lose too much. The material experience of a book that can be taken out of a little bag, the method I choose to unveil the book in my installation performance, takes away the ability to show and remember how easily books like this were, and continue to be, hidden. I fear that in this digital culture of openness and access we forget that even today, there is so much that remains out of reach.
I would like to stress that I do not think the limits of digitization are a bad thing. In fact, I think they are wonderful things that open up new possibilities. The Digital’s tendency to reduce the experience of certain things is the space where I like to play. It is the space that is inherently made of breaks and new paths, breaks and paths that I am exploring in my own dissertation work. Because this is the space of my work though, I think it is important to realize and remember that there are places where digitization cannot translate, where the losses created by access and openess are too great.
- Dec 04, 12
One of my many joys in life is having conversations with my grandmother. They end up going all over the place. I realized a while ago I want to keep them. As she says in the conversation below, she is in a particular “stage of life”. Apparently google voice has an embed function. I thought I’d try it. Though, really, calls should be edited. Something this one is not. Also, I’m not sure how I feel knowing that google voice calls can be shared and embedded this easily. begin Makes me feel really secure about my pricacy .
Anyway, a conversation with my grandmother. Topics include bike rides, bike related injuries, great grandparents, school, retirement and general family bantering.
Cast: Jeanne (my mother), Lucille (My Aunt), Donovan (My Son, youngest), Babs (My Cousin, Grandmother’s Niece), Papa (Grandfather, Grandmother’s Husband), Kristal (My Sister), Tristan (My Son, eldest)
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Posts
- Feb 17, 13
Mid-century: The Gold Digger Baby Dolls, pictured in 1942; the costumes spread within decades into the city’s respectable African-American neighborhoods. The tradition is enjoying a modern resurgence
- Feb 08, 13
Image Folder 34: Elizabeth White Brown: Dance Department: Scan 1 Citation [Identification of item], in the North Carolina Central University Faculty and Staff Photograph Records, 1910-2005, University Archives, Records and History Center in the James E. Shepard Memorial Library, North Carolina Central University.
- Feb 07, 13
Image Folder 18: Valeria B.Berry: Counselor and First Resident Directress in Chidley Hall Dormitory for Men: Scan 8, in the North Carolina Central University Faculty and Staff Photograph Records, 1910-2005, University Archives, Records and History Center in the James E. Shepard Memorial Library, North Carolina Central University.
- Feb 03, 13
A country divided: Stunning photographs capture the lives of ordinary Americans during segregation in the Jim Crow south
- Feb 02, 13
Augusta Savage with one of her sculptures, ca. 1938. From the collection of the Archives of American Art
- Jan 21, 13
People on street corner watching marchers
Selma To Montgomery Civil Rights March, March 24-26, 1965 - Jan 15, 13
Danses de femmes Mandara
c1947, Cameroun/Cameroon
- Jan 14, 13
Marché de Lomé. Vendeuse de pâte à beignet
c1945-1950
- Jan 07, 13
Photograph of Zora Smoking taken by Robert Cook, or Stetson Kennedy. Cross City, Florida. 1939.
- Jan 07, 13
Photograph of Zora Neale Hurston (center) and friends, taken outside her home in Fort Pierce, FL ca 1959
- Jan 06, 13
Alf Khumalo, South Africa goes on trial. Police and crowd outside court. The whole world was watching when the three major sabotage trials started in Pretoria, Cape Town and Maritzburg. Outside the palace of Justice during the Rivonia Trial, 1963. Courtesy of Baileys African History Archive. © Baileys African History Archive.
- Dec 30, 12
Camilla Williams photo taken by Carl Van Vechten, photographer.
Date 31 May 1946
- Dec 20, 12
Vues d’Afrique : [Vues du Bénin (villes, paysages et habitants)]
c1930
- Dec 12, 12
Haïti : le vieux priseur : [photographie de presse] / Agence Mondial
c. 1932
- Dec 10, 12
Young women and girls, some holding suitcases and folded blankets, standing on stairs in between buildings. Teenie Harris, photographer. Courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA.
c. 1940-1945
- Dec 10, 12
Mrs. Flossie Johnson and her family, standing in front of their house in Reidsville, North Carolina, 1939
At the time the photograph was taken, Mrs. Johnson was 34 years old and separated from her husband. Living with her were her seven children, her brother and his wife. The family lived raised most of their food and earned income by sewing drawstrings into cotton tobacco bags.
Carleton Stutz and Peter A. Maxfield, photographers
Source: Mrs. Flossie Johnson, Reidsville, N.C. In Tobacco Bag Stringing Operations in North Carolina and Virginia, 1939. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Dec 09, 12
Oliver Tambo at SOMAFCO Oliver Tambo (front left), Steve Dlamini, Mohamed Tikly (back) and Miss Nkobi (front right) with medical staff at ANC-Holland Solidarity Hospital at SOMAFCO.
Tanzania
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Tweets
- 4 year old learned a new joke format: Q. Why did the chicken come to the picnic? A. To be eaten! (followed by hilarious laughter).
- RT @adamgolub: How did students ever study for final exams before Ryan Gosling was here to motivate them?
- At "home" making a big batch of eggs and tomatoes for lunch for today and tomorrow. Really missing my electric wok.
- RT @Mediabistro: Why Google Will Crush Nielsen http://t.co/J0xKfuZsQd (via @mondaynote) cc @nancybaym
- RT @zephoria: At 1PM EST, I'll be doing a live chat as part of @dmlresearchhub w/ librarians. Instructions to join are here: http://t.co/DC…
- Jojo just came on spotify. I'm not changing it.
- @multisensorymel Fanon is outside of canon.
- @multisensorymel there has been a misunderstanding. Never said they were not real. I have a family with a history of severe mental illness.
- @multisensorymel a diagnosis is culturally produced even if the experience is biologically based no?
- @multisensorymel I agree, but in McLuhan specifically, I never read it as metaphor. Same with Fanon, but he was a psychoanalyst.
- @multisensorymel I've never read it as metaphor.
- @multisensorymel is there a source? he speaks about psychosis and psychic issues in the same book and a break down of mind/body connection
- @multisensorymel Schizophrenia was still somewhat new when he was writing too in terms of ability for idea to circulate.
- @multisensorymel Don't know if it was a trope. Thinking moments of over diagnosis due to changing media climate ie ADHD in the US right now.
- "Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy" - Marshall McLuhan
- RT @german_sierra: @jadedid @nathanjurgenson In fact, claiming to be above capitalism is the most successful discourse of contemporary capi…
- RT @zachprague: @jadedid The best: succeeding in capitalism, disparaging it, and spreading money to spur its expansion. The ultimate endors…
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Photos
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Posts
- What would happen if the world only had 100 people?
Today, there are 7 billion people on the planet. But what if the world were 100 people? How would they be distributed according to gender, age, geography or religion? How many do you think would be literate? If you guessed 83 out of 100 people, you would be right.
Check out this infographic by Knowledge Visualization System to learn more.
Are you surprised by any of the stats? Tell us in the comments. I sort of want to write a dissertation chapter around this song.
Prodigy - Wind It Up (by peteomighty)
Joséphine Baker: The 1st Black Superstar (by JosephineBakerTube)
Adding this to my need to watch list.
- My Project through #upgoerfive
All women are beautiful. The world does not always let you know this though. I love sharing old pictures of black women in new places and new ways so we can see that black women have always been beautiful just like all women are. It is even more important too see that black women were always beautiful because when we see pictures of how things used to be, they are usually called “bad” or “not good”. No person or time was ever only bad or good. Things and people and life have always been more than how we imagine them or what we learn in school. Because we can see pictures now that we could not see in the past, and because we see, and take, and, make, and share more pictures now than ever before, we can see old pictures in new ways because the way we play with pictures has changed.
Photograph of Zora Neale Hurston (center) and friends, taken outside her home in Fort Pierce, FL ca 1959
Happy Zora Day!
We should all accept that this is the result of a search that went terribly wrong… and as a result I felt a need to share it because it cannot be unfound.
SAOSIN - Show Me Yo Booty Hole Lyrics (by lexislulu)
!!!!!! I know one of the boys :D
SUBWAY DOUCHERY : Stay Fierce, My Friends
You sick of getting bullied at your school? Sick of feeling different for the music, movies, and clothes you like? Sick of feeling alone in a crowd because you think there’s something wrong with you? Well, young person, time to leave whatever shitball town you live in and move to…. NEW YORK CITY! This is a picture from one of our subways. And although it’s super festive and fun, at any point after sundown, no one would really be all that surprised to walk onto a train and see this.
Look what we got! Sexy black girl who’s as fierce and flexible as Beyonce during a blizzard? YURRP! Two phenomenally fashionable guys kissing, one of which is as fierce and flexible as Beyonce during a Nor’easter? MmmMhmmm! A dude in horn rimmed glasses and a group of other people as fierce and flexible as Beyonce in… wait, is this simile even making sense? WHO CARES! Move to the big city, stay away from drugs (trust me!), and become whatever it is you wanna become. And after a couple of months, your ass is gonna look great in jeans because you walk a lot.
*** Picture straight up lifted from Subway Douchery’s personal dashboard from MaybeHorrorShow.tumblr.com and the picture originated from Qpoc.tumblr.com! Enjoy & Keep on Douchin’ ***
**** Follow the guy that does this because he loves you @TheTomSibley and watch Domestic Partners ****
- Detoxing
I’ve been in a so/so space mentally due to 1 big thing and a series of smaller annoyances, mishaps, and ?failures?. It is taking a toll on my body, so this weekend, I am writing it out so I am attempting to stay accountable, I am giving my digestive track a rest. I’ll be almost detoxing. I’ll tuck into an all natural protein shake or two or maybe a yogurt, but otherwise, I’m juicing & teaing & tisaning it up.
Full wig series in black and white. Justin said I look dead in the eyes in 1 of the photos LOL Green wigs are the best.
Book looks.
Litographs are unabridged books transformed into new forms.
Born from a simple love of reading, the creator’s Kickstarter project will convert any texts available in the public domain into photographs or designs of the backer’s choosing. These T-shirts are his first four designs — the fifth design is up to you.
I want.
- I'm Surprised By How "Black" Assassin's Creed Liberation Feels
History often seems lightyears away, doesn’t it? Even game franchises like Civilization—where you zip from ancient Rome to space flight in the span of hours—put a layer of abstraction over the experience that make it feel distant. The Assassin’s Creed games use history exceedingly well, but none of them have felt as personal as Assassin’s Creed Liberation does. As a black man and parent of a bi-racial daughter, this game hits home for me. But what really surprised me is how this portable Assassin’s Creed game comments on racial dynamics in a specific moment in time. You can feel history moving through the game.
The final, brilliant word on passive voice.
“She was killed [by zombies.]” <—- passive
“Zombies killed [by zombies] her.” <—- active
(Found from FYCD.)
Aunt Memory Adams was born into slavery. When she was 24 years old she was taken to Tallahassee and sold to Mr. Argyle for $800. Aunt Memory attended the 1893 World Fair, and sold enough photos of herself to pay for expenses.
ca. 1900
Photographer unknown
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
Slavery shouldn’t distort the story of black people in Britain
Black History Month should address the fact that many assume Africans in 16th- and 17th-century England were slaves, as Miranda Kaufmann writes in this article for London’s Guardian.
When I tell people I study Africans in Renaissance Britain, they often reply: “Oh, you mean slaves?” Despite the fact that Black History Month – currently being celebrated – is now in its 25th year, and that it’s more than 60 years since the Windrush brought the first postwar Caribbean migrants, it’s clear that many wrong assumptions about the black presence in Britain are still made.
It seems the emphasis on the horrors of slavery, including the commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act’s bicentenary in 2007, can leave many, especially the young, with a very bleak image of black history. The assumption that Africans in 16th- and 17th-century England must have been slaves is not only wrong, but dangerous.
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Info
- Lab Research Assistant at Digital Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HillHigher Education | Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina Area, USSummary
Doctoral student interested in the creation, construction engagement and performance of identity by minority and marginalized populations in digitally mediated spaces.
Specialties: interactive and multicultural marketing interactive project management, website management, program and product management, online production, digital media productionExperience- Dec 2012 - PresentLab Research Assistant / Digital Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Aug 2011 - PresentTeaching Assistant / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Assist in both Media History, Theory & Criticism and Communication, Gender, & Culture Courses in the Department of Communication Studies
- 2010 - PresentDoctoral Student / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Doctoral Student in Communication Studies researching digital media and identity construction.
- 2010 - PresentScholar / HASTAC
Education-
2010 - 2015University of North Carolina at Chapel HillPh.D. in Communication Studies
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2004 - 2005New York UniversityM.A. in French Studies
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2000 - 2004University of Hawaii at ManoaB.A. in French
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1996 - 2000Rocklin
