In November 2009, I had the privilege of participating in a roundtable at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference with Anna Everett, Deborah Kimmey, Tara McPherson, Lisa Nakamura, and Kara Thompson on the Digital Humanities (DH). The panel was titled “Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Means of Digital Humanities Production.” Convened by Kara Thompson, the idea was to intervene in the prevailing discourses of DH and provide a critique of DH’s productive relations from the perspective of Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and so on. We covered a wide range of topics: labor and racism in games, code studies, activism, violating copyrights as praxis, undergrads at USC designing K-12 curriculum, archiving MMOs, the tyranny of the new in choosing objects of study, and much more. Many of the issues we discussed could be considered standard touchstones of DH but what made the discussion unique was our shared investment in a progressive cultural politics dedicated to interrogating and reworking established structures of power. It also doesn’t hurt that I was the only white dude on the panel.

Significantly, we didn’t just focus on the corporate university but the far more subtle ways technologies reproduce oppressive social relations in everyday life within and without academia. Although left unsaid, our guiding principle seemed to be that, as Carolyn Marvin has argued, technologies do not determine social relationships but enter into already established relations. They can either reinforce or transform them and it’s up to us to do something about it. Without a robust critical apparatus, DH has and will continue to unwittingly remake the world in its old image. (You know, the one that has a whole bunch of white guys sitting around a highly polished oak table comparing business cards.)

I didn’t write about the panel at the time because only now do I understand the significance of that experience to my formation as a scholar. It wasn’t simply that I was able to share an intellectual space with some of my academic idols, but that it articulated my grievances with DH as well as demonstrated to me that I wasn’t alone.

For the past few years I have had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with DH. Since I am primarily trained in Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Media Studies, I cannot help but take issue with what I see is a potentially technofetishistic obsession in DH with technological transformation via the creation and use of various digital tools/platforms/networks, etc. as agents of social change. These efforts are often performed under the guiding ethos of collaboration which often becomes an uncritical stand-in for an empty politics of access and equity. There are exceptions, but it seems, and I realize I am generalizing here, that issues of cultural politics are downplayed or, more commonly, considered a given within DH. There’s a disposition that the battles of race, gender, class and ecology have already been won, their lessons have been learned, and by espousing a rhetoric of equity everything will fall into place.

DH does have its strong suits:  e.g. the ethics of copyright, privacy and open source, but as an intellectual community its positions on race, gender, class, and the environment are undertheorized and underimplemented even if many practitioners think otherwise. My concern is that when everyone in DH finally builds his/her One Collaborative Widget to Rule Them All, the dust will settle around Mordor and it’ll still be mostly a bunch of white academics at relatively wealthy universities talking about open access and probably around a rather nice table with a few unlocked iPads on it.

To prevent this outcome, DH needs to cultivate an equal interest in critique as in creation. Our play needs a politics. Alongside the creative and practical, we need to have an attendant critical effort that has the license to step in and provoke revision, or, better yet, assist with production. And we need an intellectual community that welcomes this interventionist presence and acknowledges its current lack.

These thoughts were circulating in my mind last weekend during the 2010 THATCamp. Designed as unconference that embodies a more active and dialogic alternative to the traditional conference format, THATCamp is a successful and beloved event in DH which has spawned a host of regional and international offshoots. Hopelessly poor, I enviously lurked this year’s conference, as well as last year’s, and read with interest as some of my favorite Twitter acquaintances offered updates about the happenings. But as it wrapped up and I looked at the final schedule and browsed the Hacking Academia collaborative book project, I considered how fundamentally different the ASA roundtable was from THATCamp. Much of what I am interested in was left unsaid or assumed. There just didn’t seem to be work engaging explicitly with my concerns.

I tweeted a question, “Where’s the race/gender/power/ecology?”, to the #thatcamp and #hackacad communities and Dan Cohen, one of the organizers of THATCamp, told me to check the submissions to the Hacking Academia project. Since I had been following the conference closely I had already read the submissions, noticed the dearth of discussion of these issues, and meant the question to rhetorically expose the investments and exclusions of THATCamp. Admittedly, it was a rather lame and unsuccessful attempt at intervening into the dialogue about the conference, but I was still disappointed in the lack of engagement with what I feel is a legitimate issue with THATCamp and DH. My purpose was and is not to troll or be negative; rather, I would like THATCamp and all of DH to expand and clarify what it is we do and to embrace a vigorous politics of inclusion and provocation because, behind my curmudgeonly tone in this post, I like THATCamp and I like DH.

Most importantly, I believe that critique can do things too and it can do things  even better with the innovations of DH.

So let’s expand the focus of DH beyond what we do and how we do it to whom we do it with and whom we do it for. Let’s do what matters and let’s make that our battle cry.

Time to start work on my THATCamp 2011 proposal.

It was an intentionally exaggerated but honest and innocent question and one I had been thinking about a lot lately. In the past few months, I had unscientifically noticed there was a a new topic trending each day supported by tweets from predominantly black users. (And let me note here that my trends are geolocated and cover the LA metro area so this may be different, or perhaps not even apply, depending on where you’re living. If so, please leave a comment.)

A few examples of the trends I took note of in the past week or so: #bottomlineis, #1thingaboutme, #whyyouattheclub, #laughatem, #oldassnames, #thingswesaytopolice, #blackmamaquotes

I imagine the reason why my friend sent the message to me privately is the reason why no one has written about  this: we’re worried that making this claim is somehow racially insensitive. However, it’s quite the opposite. Taking note of, and understanding how, black people are using Twitter  as a form of public discourse is important to combating inaccurate narratives about minority participation on the internet.

The Digital Divide and Black Technocultural Production

Allow me to explain. The rhetoric of the digital divide— that is, a gap in access between the haves and have-nots of cyberspace—continues to dominate discussion about minority use of computer and internet technology.  And while this divide does exist (according to Pew, in 2008 56% of whites have broadband access vs. 41% of blacks and 55% of English-speaking Latinos), many have complicated this simplistic narrative of access and exclusion. Thuy Linh N. Tu,  Alondra Nelson, and Alicia Hedlam Hines emphasized in the introduction to their foundational Technicolor collection that we need to think beyond simplistic solutions of access and consider the politics of access, i.e. what kind of access is granted and in whose interest is it being structured?

Also, as Anna Everett has argued, the rhetoric of the digital divide tends to devalue, defame, and discount a robust tradition of black technocultural production. Along with Everett’s critique, many writers (see Ben Williams’ chapter on Detroit techno in Technicolor and Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies) have worked to expose the proud, novel, and influential ways African diasporic cultures have expertly manipulated and innovated digital technologies, particularly music production, but are often forgotten amidst the focus on white dominated modes of production (such as computer programming).

Digital Dozens: Twitter Trends and Signifyin’

The overwhelming participation of black users in the creation and proliferation of Twitter trends is yet another example of the well documented history of black use of technology. But what is especially fascinating about the discourse of Twitter trends is its similarity in tone and content to African American rhetorical traditions, particularly signifyin’. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defines signifyin’ over the course of his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. According to Gates, signifyin’ replaces semantics with rhetorical style stretching and doubling (even tripling, quadrupling, etc.) the meaning of signifiers in an effort to parody, misdirect, and/or encode. Perhaps the most recognizable form it takes is in the irreverent vernacular verbal confrontations called the dozens (e.g. “Yo momma’s so ______, she(‘s) ______!”  duel). The importance of the exchange of the dozens is not in the denotative meaning of the exchange but in the creative manipulation of style within the defined rhetorical tradition. A very similar exchange occurs within the bounds of the Twitter trend topic. The hash tag and phrase that compose the trend provide the framework within which participants can play with style.

Signifyin’ and the dozens are most often associated with street corners, school yards, and barbershops and are defined by a very distinct rhetorical tradition and set of codes and practices that are protected and safe from surveillance and policing by those outside of the discourse community, i.e. women, men, whites, etc. To account for the protected discursive exchanges within these public placesVorris Nunley has expanded the definition of the hush harbor, a secret place for African American slaves to engage in religious practice, to these other spaces defined by the rhetorical traditions of black culture. Within this context, signifyin’ is not simply a play of language but a rhetorical performance that provides access to a politically protected discourse community. Within this community, using this rhetorical tradition, black people have employed the dozens and other modes of signifyin’ as a means of entertainment, communication, and political negotiation. Consider the trend #shutyobrokeassup. While it’s clear this discussion is meant to engage in the humorous one-upmanship of the dozens, the subject is of class interest and the language is distinctly black vernacular. It might be easy to dismiss these tweets as silliness but within the context of class struggle they also serve as a coping mechanism and shared acknowledgment of political inequality, however slight or unconscious that intent may be.

The Not So Hush Harbor

But given those similarities, Twitter seems to be fundamentally transforming the traditional safe physical space of the hush harbor. For one thing, the trend discussion is explicitly public, so much so that it’s a point of pride to get a discussion so popular that it begins to appear on the left hand side of the Twitter main page. In this way, Twitter trends are less a traditional hush harbor and more in line with mass market reconfigurations of black culture wherein other discourse communities have access to the performance but not necessarily the code or lived experience that makes the performance politically or culturally significant. Here I see some alignment between commodified forms of black discourse (for example, blaxploitation film) and queer camp which provides a distinctly different experience to audiences depending on their subjectivities and social identifications.

Twitter facilitates a large scale, distributed, and exponentially more populated arena in which to signify but at the cost of greater surveillance and, it seems, less discussion between participants. But, just as in queer camp, the codes which provide a barrier of access work to maintain the appropriate discursive boundaries within which to communicate. Without the walls of the barbershop, rhetoric becomes even more important as a proof of authenticity.

Thus, Twitter, as new configuration of the barbershop, is a prime example of how black people are not invisible on the internet but are emblematic of the tightrope of privacy we all walk in taking our sociality to the net.

UPDATE (8/14/2010): This topic has caught fire recently due to a post by Farhad Manjoo on Slate called “How Black People Use Twitter.” See that post as well as a response by Lynne d Johnson.

Game studies has done a good job of figuring out what exactly constitutes a game and creating methodologies to interpret games but I don’t think we’ve done a good job of focusing on pedagogy. And let me be clear, by pedagogy I do not mean the educational potentialities of game technologies – those of course have been well documented by James Paul Gee, Constance Steinkuehler, Yasmin B. Kafai and many others. What I mean is how do we as game studies scholars teach students how to read and interpret the games themselves, along with the surrounding discourses and paratextual industries that accompany games? Ed Chang has written an excellent article offering one answer to this question theorizing textual analysis of gameplay or, to use the term he creates,  how to “close play” in a similar vein as close reading. I would like to offer another possibility using an example of how I teach game analysis, more specifically the analysis of gamic race, using the famous Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft (WOW) machinima.

In my classes, I do not have the curricular freedom or the technical capability to have students play a game like World of Warcraft (my classes are standardized introductory composition). However, most students are aware of the game and a short in-class demonstration of gameplay and further explanation usually affords them a basic understanding of how it works. With that background I then explain how a lot can be gained interpretively from looking at how game texts are appropriated, discussed, and remixed by the players. This builds on another lesson I often teach that I have blogged about previously that makes the point games must be analyzed not just in terms of what they represent visually, but also acknowledging the game technologies that are implicated in that representation (this is connected to Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s platform studies series at MIT). Therefore, by looking at the Leeroy Jenkins video and the surrounding player and media discourses students then get a more complete picture of all the different levels of meaning at work and available for analysis in a game.

Drawing on much of my argument put forth in “Blackless Fantasy” published in Games and Culture earlier this year, I then give them an overview of character creation systems in MMORPGs and the seemingly progressive push towards more options for visualization in order to facilitate more diversity. Students usually respond favorably to these changes and view them as the right thing to do given their familiarity with the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Once that is established I point out that even with these options available MMORPGs are predominantly whitewashed environments where blackness is viewed as abnormal and when black or brown avatars are present in MMORPG space they are often lampooned as incongruent with fantasy or sci-fi convention. (But that does not mean blackness is not of central importance to the game itself since high fantasy is obsessed with racial others.) My goal in discussing character creation is to expose the inherent problems of liberal multiculturalism since it understands social equity to be achieved through visibility and not deeper structural changes.

This is a fitting transition into the Leeroy Jenkins video which is representative of how blackness is understood within the context of the world by the players. I show the video with only a short explanation of its narrative purpose in order to illicit a more natural reaction to the humor of the video thus making the exposure of its racial logics more impactful.

After the viewing, we discuss the semiotics at work in the video and how Leeroy, a rare black avatar in WOW, is coded as black. Students often take note of the voice used by the player of Leeroy (a stereotypical 70s blaxploitation voice), the signification of the name as, once again, fitting with blaxploitation, but they often do not take note of the role played by Leeroy within the dynamic of the group.

The bumbling fool that is trying to fit into the predominantly white MMO space but ultimately screws it up for everyone is an example of the Zip Coon minstrel archetype. Demonstrating this to the students shows how these representations have a historical lineage and have undergone many permutations.

In order to counter common reactions to this reading by viewers—reactions that may be circling the classroom—I then have the class look at a Wikipedia discussion that questions the potentially racist content of the video. Please note, this discussion has since been deleted from Wikipedia.

Original Comment:

Am I mistaken, or is this whole character a giant racial stereotype? HELLO?! –yuletide

First Reply:

I’m confused. He’s a character in a game. He doesn’t have a race. I’m white and I love chicken. I would lord my possession of good chicken over anyone I met. I would especially use it to deflect or downplay blame. Maybe the person who is racist is you. Megan 02:24, 20 March 2006

Second Reply:

Maybe it is, why would that be so remarkable? The video is nothing but a bit of comedy after all. 132.162.213.109 05:00, 13 March 2006

Third Reply:

I think you’re mistaken. Why’s it a stereotype? Because of the chicken comment? Even if it is, so what? Surely in some countries people are still free to say what they want, whether or not some folks will be offended by it. Sukiari 22:03, 14 March 2006

The discussion is representative of the common responses to claims of racial insensitivity within and without videogame culture and therefore it educates students as to the contours of the surrounding discourses. It is also productive in that it shows the importance of these issues and usefulness of the critical methodology.

While the students never analyze the game itself, by analyzing a machinima that mediates the game, students are shown how the politics of representation in videogames extend far beyond the character selections available to players and whether they adhere to or subvert dominant stereotypes.

I also like to conclude by pointing out how Blizzard, the game company behind WOW, has  dealt with the potentially offensive content of the video by nullifying race while embracing the marketing potential of Leeroy Jenkins.

Those of us presenting on my panel were tasked with offering our thoughts in a micro-presentation format that translated into a provocative but often frustrating six minutes and forty seconds per speaker. Unfortunately, I had prepared a longer talk and had to trim my content down to three minutes since I was co-presenting.

Therefore, I went ahead and recorded the full length version of my talk.

Link to video.

You can also view the presentation itself here.

As Roland Barthes argues in Mythologies, the power of myth is in its erasure of contradiction in history through the manufacture of a coherent and often nationalistic narrative that escapes past violence, inequity, prejudice, strife, struggle, and so on. Goewey connects this to the contradictions inherent in the SUV’s identification, through advertising and marketing, as the choice of rugged individualists, people interested in exploration, nature, etc. while simultaneously participating, through this identification and choice of vehicle, in the destruction of the natural world they claim to love. (What’s even more fascinating is how people turn to SUVs for security in a threatening world that is becoming more threatening via the carbon emissions created by the very vehicles they seek refuge in.)

Furthermore, Goewey points out how these vehicles are often given names connected to Native American culture or the wild west, e.g. Cherokee and Wrangler. Thus the manifest destiny virtue of America expansionism used to sell cars appropriates and neutralizes the figure of the Native American as part of, and complicit in, the ideology that lead to their destruction. Native Americans are divorced from their history as the victims of racist violence and, through the depoliticized speech of myth, semiotically connected with American frontierism.

This peculiar twist of signification that Native Americans have undergone in the popular culture imaginary now facilitates a perceived affinity between conservatives and the image of the Native American to the point where it wouldn’t be surprising to see someone with a Chief Joseph tattoo putting a Bush/Cheney sign on his/her lawn.

Which brings us back to how odd this license plate is given it was on an Iraq War veteran’s truck alongside a bumper sticker that said “Veterans are not terrorists.” Well, perhaps not now, but…

The license plate fascinated me because, on the one hand, I found it appalling that a bloody conflict between Native Americans and the U.S. Army would be something a state would want to identify itself with and, in some sense, fashion as an emblem of pride (I mean that is what license plates are about – state pride), and secondly, because I was trying to figure out what exactly the person driving the truck was thinking was worth celebrating about the battle (as futile an exercise as this might be). I find it hard to believe that he identified with Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and their victory over General Custer since his other bumper sticker is representative of a complete failure to recognize the parallels between the Iraq invasion and the conflict between the U.S. army and the Iraqi “insurgents.” Furthermore, the license plate is from the Custer Battlefield Museum which, given its name, is playing favorites.

This can only lead to the conclusion that, in keeping with Goewey’s analysis, troubling political events like the Battle of Little Big Horn have been completely revised and now simply represent some perverse form of historical frontier action adventure. For the patrons of the Custer Battlfield Museum, purchasing that license plate has no potentially troublesome political connotations; rather, the license plate merely celebrates some kind of rip roarin’, gun slingin’, hootin’ and hollerin’ American past where genocide is, if even acknowledged, nothing more than unfortunate byproduct of an expansionist/capitalist project that had to be done.  A necessary evil.

I have used MMORPG character creation tools as one example of how race is quantified and mapped into a set of options that presents the illusion of choice while adhering to a identifiable set of logics about racial difference. I have also had the students read David Leonard’s “Virtual Gangstas, Coming to a Suburban House Near You: Demonization, Commodification, and Policing Blackness” in order to understand how Grand Theft Auto can be interpreted as a metaphor for the necessity of policing race. I also tend to extend these discussions of Grand Theft Auto to analyze its satirical content and how it presents a critical view of racial antagnoism in American city by exposing the spatialization, hiearchicalization, and inequity of space.

However, it has been challenging to demonstrate, given the difficulty of bringing game consoles into the classroom, how racial representation is coded into the game world via easily identifiable population algorithms which fill the streets with what are considered the appropriate denizens of each sector of the gamespace. This recorded gameplay video of a member of 4 Player Podcast on Justin.tv solved my problems. In the video, the player enters an internet cafe in Grand Theft Auto 4 and encounters a glitch that causes the cafe to be filled with what he calls “heavy set black men.” The point of the video is not to expose some kind of hidden racism but to show students how the game’s technical architecture is a crucial component in understanding how race is manifested in the gameworld. The appearance of heavyset black men in a certain area of the game is not an entirely random effect but a programmed operation with both a technical and cultural logic at play that should be interrogated.