DJ

In my ignorance & before reading the excerpt from Digital Griots, I had to look up the term griot.  In my online search, I came across a trailer for a movie titled Griot (a documentary about the collaborative efforts of two musicians from different cultures that met and found strong similarities in the music that each was creating), which included this text:  "a mind full of knowledge a word full of solution."  This simple phrase stuck with me as I read Banks’ intro and first few chapters.

Banks described the DJ as a modern manifestation of griot–storyteller, of an oral tradition, holding the community’s trust and telling stories that can be seen as “survival technologies” that demonstrate the resistance of a community to being coded out of a dominant society (22).  He described the DJ/griot as a “time binder” per Tom Hale in Griots and Griottes (23). He likened the practice of the DJ/griot to the practice of a digital, multimodal literacy:  "arranging, layering, sampling, and remixing . . ., keeping the culture, telling their stories and ours, binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain community” (24), but also using verbal play in way that reflected the values of the community and helped to shape the moral character of their listeners (24, quoting Gilbert Williams’ work). It is a powerful theoretical, metaphorical reframing of literacy that does indeed seem to have potential as we develop notions of digital literacy, particularly for people that are marginalized in our real spaces and now in our cyberspaces.

It seems that the digital world bears the burdens of our real world prejudices as actors there import their biases, racisms, homophobias, misogyny into these new spaces, but Banks' book really reinforced for me both the value of reflecting and thinking critically about our behavior and the great potential for a digital literacy to affect how those spaces are ultimately built.  This hasn’t happened yet; it is happening now.  I think this is in part something that fascinated me about Banks’ emphasis on the quality of the griot that is nonlinear, unbound by time.  Such a metaphor as this allows us to simultaneously consider traditional binaries such as resistance/oppression, self/community and tradition/future.  Thinking back to the words that struck me in the movie trailer, it seems to me that this is how words full of solution become actual solutions to inequality, denial of access, denial of recognition and self.  As Banks more eloquently states it:

helps us to imagine both social resistance and affirmation, helps us to link divergent and sometimes competing narratives without flattening their differences, and helps us to keep cultures and technologies linked (30).

So, while thinking about what it means to be a modern day griot, to “imagine these Hip Hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation: create sustaining narratives, accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them” (27), I began to wonder what are some examples of these practices is being used.  Further, how can we use this in terms of pedagogy?