Missing Blog - Eliot and Banks

The topic of the role of tradition in English studies has been discussed most famously by T.S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For Eliot, tradition is a timeless and simultaneous concept, one that “cannot be inherited” and takes “great labour” to acquire. Poets should, according to Eliot, write with a historical sense not only of their times and contexts, but also that of “the whole of the literature” of the world, essentially. The past is very present for Eliot, especially when considering how new works are evaluated and older works are reshuffled over time. New writing is evaluated based upon the writing that came before, and older works make room for the new only after its value has been proven in a comparison between old works. In some ways, Eliot’s approaches to tradition echo the writings of our current author.

In his introduction, Banks makes a serious, if unorthodox, pass at defining the DJ in an academic setting. He states, for starters, that DJ’s are cannon makers and time binders (3). Further, through a pseudo stream of consciousness mini essay, he states that DJ’s are “standing between tradition and future, holding power to shape how both are seen/heard/felt/known….always knowing that techniques carry stories, arguments, ways of viewing the world, that the techniques arrange the texts, that every text carries even more stories, arguments, epistemologies” (3). That Banks starts out his book with a pretty substantial discussion of the role of tradition in the future of rhetoric is interesting in that it nicely coincides with much of what Eliot had posited years before.  

Banks’ definition of the exemplary DJ and Eliot’s appreciation for tradition overlap in several ways, perhaps most cogently in is his desire to see African American rhetoric repositioned within tradition and the future (5,6). While its obvious that the technology Banks is referring to is vastly different that during Eliot’s time, Banks is still very much riffing off of Eliot’s views of the past and present as concurrent. Banks states that DJs are “always on some new ish technology cut song line break but always understanding the importance of knowing traditions,” “bearers of history, memory, and rememory,” and who are “expected to know the conversation, know the tradition, shape and reshape them” (3,4). Bank’s book and Eliot’s essay also provide an interesting juxtaposition in that Eliot’s essay has been critiqued as being too Euro-centric and limiting because it lacks a non-white, non-male perspective of tradition. It seems possible that Eliot’s essay could be valued much differently now, and thus possibly reshuffled alongside other works, considering that Banks is advocating for a place in the continuum of tradition.

Question:

Where would Bank’s Digital Griots fit in the continuum that Eliot theorizes?