"Free to Be . . . Black as Hell": The Black Digital-Cultural Imagination and Undergraduate Teaching

• In Event: Tales of Two Institutions: Social Justice Teaching Confronts Contradictions of “Student Success” in Higher Education

Abstract

Cultural historian, Hortense Spillers (2006), argues that Black culture is critical culture. She further contends that Black culture represents a narrative of antagonism that is inscribed in its very memory (Spillers, 2007). Spillers’s contextualization of the criticality of Black culture demands a theoretical disposition for the role of Black faculty in shaping an alternative Black pedagogical imaginary in higher education. With Black culture shifting the political, linguistic, and aesthetic center of gravity, Black faculty can provide a pedagogical and ideological framework that confronts “racist exclusionary practices and politically represssive measures” (James, 1999, p. 17). Using technocultural discourse analysis (Brock et al., 2010) from a researcher-practitioner perspective (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009), this research presentation attempts to uncover new possibilities for (digital) pedagogies rooted in the criticality of Black culture.

In the 21st century, the intersection of digital identities, Black culture, and higher education is a crucial space to think about the relationships between race, gender, schooling, and social justice (Bailey, 2015). Critically raced and Black-cultured digital pedagogies represent new political purposes that can center racially marginalized students’ technocultural capital in the structure and flow of 21st century learning (Nakumura & White, 2011). Inspired by an undergraduate students’ own description of her digital productions, “Free to Be…Black as Hell,” this research treats undergraduate students’ digital projects as “ipso facto cultural phenomena” (Liu, 2012) related to their deep learning and agency and asks: how do students’ digital projects and processes express their desires and visions for alternative futures for themselves and marginalized communities?

This study represents a purposeful sample of public, digital projects created by Black undergraduate students at a non-selective, urban college. The sample is cross-referenced with other, open-access digital projects that each student in the sample has created. With this set of digital projects, a critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock et al., 2010) asks the following questions:
1. How and where is the student challenging whiteness, heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and/or wealth in their alphabetic texts and visual/ technical designs?
2. How does the student introduce their biography? What markers of race, gender, sexuality, ability do they use?
3. How and where is the student challenging whiteness, heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and/or wealth in their essay structure as well as choice of images, video, sound embedded into their essays?
4. What is the student communicating about race, identity, and inequality in the images, digital organizational strategies, and web-navigational they design for their website?
5. How is the student challenging whiteness, heteronormativity, hegemonic masculinity, and/or wealth in their original visuals and music that they have designed?

As Gallon (2014) argues, Black digital projects must challenge the very core of a humanities/liberal arts education by insistently reminding us that some groups have been categorically excluded from the very rubric of humanity and have, in turn, offered alternative constructions and possibilities to its framing (Everett, 2002; McPherson, 2012). Black culture thus offers different ways of knowing that constantly contests the ways that educational space is (re)produced in dominant culture and empire (McKittrick, 2006).

Author

• Carmen Kynard, John Jay College of Criminal Justice - CUNY