I’ve been so grateful for the warm reception people had to the CCCC Chair’s Address. Part of that reception has involved some colleagues asking me to provide a copy of the text of the speech. There are some challenges to doing that so soon after the conference–not the least of which is that the degree to which I write out a text varies greatly from one talk to the next. Every now and then I go completely “off the dome” like I did at a talk at Texas State last year. Sometimes I write out everything and then depart from it. Sometimes I use an outline with some specific passages. Sometimes the text I use has random notes to myself. And in all of these cases I usually improvise at least some depending on my own mood and the energy in the room.
There’s also a challenge in being willing to present a text of a “talk” that was clearly meant to be an aural/oral experience, especially given some of my own work on ways that Black oral traditions can be a foundation for work in Composition. It’s almost like having to provide a text to go with a picture. Of course that simile overstates it a bit; challenges aside, I was happy to spend some time filling in some of the gaps between the text I took to the podium and what came out in the moment.
So that said, here it is…thanks for checking it out!
Long text ahead!
Ain’t No Walls Behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, Freedom
CCCC 2015 Chair’s Address
Tampa, Florida
[Start with GC Riff from Martial Law and PFunk Wants to Get Funked Up]
That verse, from George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic’s 1993 song Martial Law links up at least 3 different generations of Black oral tradition, as it is a version of the folktale titled either Hip Bud or Billy Bud, but it also provides a poet in one of my favorite movies with the opening lines of his poem as he tries to court photographer Nina Mosely. But as another character in the movie says over their own game of pool “Let me break this down so it can forever and perpetually be broke.” Can I do that?
I ask you for permission to do that because my message this morning is not a scholarly one even though it is about our scholarship. And I don’t want to use this moment to pretend to speak for the organization in any way, this organization where I learn far more from the gifts and commitments you bring to it than I can pretend to offer. All I have is my vision of what we do. And that vision, everything I think about who we are, the best of what we do and who we can be comes down to 3 words. Funk. Flight. Freedom. Actually, George Clinton’s protégé says it even better than George did.
The sky is not the limit! Ain’t no walls behind the sky baby, so we just gonna fly on, and reach for the stars if you know what I’m talkin about. That line comes from the lyrics to one of the greatest slow jams I know, from one of the greatest Funk artists alive, Bootsy Collins’s I’d Rather Be With You. Many of you already know that funk and soul music are primary spaces through which I enter this thinking, teaching, and serving work that we do. But beyond the thousands of songs that rotate through my various digital devices vinyl albums, and my friends’ facebook, twitter, soundcloud and spotify posts. It is this one song that has stayed with me. Through all our conference events and conference calls, through all the officers email exchanges and in person exchanges, through all of my walking time, coffeeshop time and library time, I keep coming back to Bootsy. I keep coming back to this song, I’d rather be with you.
Part of that is truly because I would rather be with you—because there is no other academic discipline I would rather be part of than composition. But more than that, I think that this song is the one that wouldn’t let me go in all of my thinking about this moment because of its reminder, no its insistence that there are no limits, that we need to fly on and reach for the stars that renews me in a moment when I so desperately needed renewal. Bootsy’s song brings together the three themes I believe can guide us as we respond to the call to risk and reward that our program chair has chosen for us: Funk, Flight, and Freedom.
In fact, Bootsy Collins and his Parliament/Funkadelic family, made flight and space travel central themes and images in their music. From the mothership as the central metaphor for PFunk’s role in the musical universe and the 20th century chariot that they invoked to swing down and let us ride, to Bootsy’s instruction to his audience that we gonna fly on, past any limits that our day to day lives might impose on us, past any constraints that might wear on us, joined in a long line, to a long tradition of tales of flying Africans in which flight—across oceans home to Africa, and across galaxies to as yet unexplored stars and planets has been an ongoing motif for claiming freedom right here and now.
These ideas—funk, flight, and freedom—speak to the role I believe composition and communication can play in the academy. Our program Chair has talked about CCCC being the “mothership,”. I’ll extend that metaphor past the Starship Enterprise for right now, though. In many ways, I think of composition as the Deep Space Nine of the academy. Because we have the opportunity to be part of the academic journey of almost every student who pursues higher education, hub metaphors for our work are not at all new. But I also believe that because of our training we have a chance to be a hub for intellectual life on campus for other departments and for administrators as well. Because we are a discipline and at the same time cannot be contained by ideas of disciplinarity, we can be a model and connecting point for the hard work of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity we often hear talked about across campus, but rarely lived out. In fact, I often imagine composition programs and departments operating more like interdisciplinary centers than as programs and departments. And I’ve always believed we ought to be a hub for connections between the academy and local communities.
I have Funk on my mind this morning not just because it is a genre of music that I love, but because of the ways Funk artists imagined the world and our place in it. One of the things that I love most about Composition—one of the reasons I’d rather be with you—is because of ways in which our field has arrived at a disciplinary maturity, and yet remains undisciplined, unable to be disciplined. Funk is on my mind because for me it represents us dropping pretense and embracing boldness, wildness, and irreverence. Poet and scholar Tony Bolden cites writers like Jayne Cortez, Sterling Plummp and Talib Kweli as “funky.” Check his description:
“Effusive and amorphous, the funk impulse is a central component of all black music—from antebellum ring shouts and gospels to blues, jazz, funk and hip-hop. Hence, George Clinton’s hyperbole: ‘In the beginning was the funk.’ Characterized by an aesthetic that foregrounds speed, self-reflexivity, asymmetry, dissonance, and repetition, funkativity bespeaks a kinetic epistemology comprised of dynamic principles stored in a virtual archive of cultural memory, replete with (pre)configuring riffs and rhymes, twists and turns, shakes and breaks that are perpetually (re)sampled and (re)mixed in a manner comparable to electricity” play with pace here
Bolden also links Funk to Latina/o culture by referencing Federico Garcia Lorca’s theorizing of the concept of duende. He quotes Lorca this way: “the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of your feet.” I yearn for my own writing to one day reflect THAT kind of electric, kinetic, epistemology. Funk is worthy of sustained scholarly attention because it the sweat and the stank of Funk, the sweet and nasty smell of exertion as we break it on down and shake it on down, that signifies not only honest expression, exertion and integrity, but acumen, celebration, commitment to one’s work, and yes, intellect. This intellectual, creative, and physical work has helped Blackfolk and audiences across race and culture intervene into the nation’s racialized ideologies for Bolden, because those steeped in the Funk are free enough to toss those ideologies aside and refuse to play by the rules of the game.
I’m talking about Funk as a guiding idea for who we are in our thinking, teaching, making and doing because for just a minute, I want us to drop our serious, scholarly, personae and just talk together. I want us move forward knowing that just like the #BlackLivesMatter movement teaches us respectability will not save us in the streets or in the bedroom or in relationships or in politics, or even in a brilliant presidency, it will not save us in the academy either. So just like Viola Davis took off her wig to let the nation know she would not be defined by someone else’s oppressive standards, I want us to take off our own respectability politics for a minute and realize that no matter how much we push our students to dismiss their home languages for some assimilated standardized version, respectability will not save us. I want us to realize that the funkiness of Cs the Day and our Sparkle Ponies is one of the best things about us, and that even if we did not have them, the Chronicle still wouldn’t understand us, and much less save us. I’m beyond grateful that sparkle ponies roam our halls and listen in on our sessions and inspire the connections across people and ideas that open up space for new, imaginative scholarship and make people feel welcome and at home in the process. I want us to realize the respectability of having Fellows like other academic organizations will not save us. I want us to realize that all our citations of high theory will not save us, and neither will trying to show that we are as rigorous and as serious as our English department colleagues save us. And I want us to realize that even the respectability of bigger budgets will not save us. As real as our struggles are, we act like being broke is new. We always been underfunded. We always been figuring it out as we go along. We always been dismissed, disregarded, disrespected. But we served any how. We took care of our students any how. We transformed one discipline and created our own any how. And it was women who did that work. It was people of color who did that work. It was Queer folk who did that work. It was first generation students in New York City and across the country demanding open admissions who did that work. It was people of all backgrounds building and running programs while they taught and theorized.
But sometimes it seems to me that the funk of who we have been throughout our history is dead. Our conferences are sometimes too clean. To paraphrase a poet friend of mine, Thomas Sayers Ellis, all their stanzas and all our conferences and all our conference attendance look alike despite our brochures and our resolutions and our best intentions. As real as the intra departmental and institutional condescension we face can be, our best work happened in periods of struggle. Our best work happened when we dedicated ourselves to the students the rest of the academy didn’t want. Our best work happened when we our courses looked more like handcrafted Zines and broadsides created on mimeographs than huge productions done and supported by huge corporate publishers. Our universities spend all this time and effort at branding, talking about excellence and distinction. But I want us, our courses, our programs and departments to be more than that—I want us to create and work in spaces that look after the students and the teachers and the communities the rest of the academy’s pursuit of “distinction” looks and sneers at. I want colleagues who will show and tell and teach our students like Elaine Richardson and Rhea Lathan taught us last year, The Shame Tree truly is dead.
I want Funk to be our guide not just because the rest of the academy feels too clean and too serene to me, but because intellectual life is funky. It is messy. Trying to build a society worthy of our aims is messy. I want Funk to be our guide because that is the only way we can close the huge gaps that exist between our professed ideals and our practice, the only way we can own our privilege within oppressive spaces. Funk means we are wiling to sweat. Funk means we are willing to deal with messiness and complexity. Funk means we will look unflinchingly at all that pains us, all that is wrong around us and STILL dance our way out of our constrictions.
My hope for us is that as we worry a little less about being neat and clean, a little less about respectability inside our departments, programs and universities, that as we embrace boldness, complexity and even a little irreverence and messiness that we will be able to take flight into intellectual, pedagogical and programmatic places that we might partially see, but cannot yet fully know. This is a time for exploration, for experimentation. This is a time when we can create and risk. This is a time when we don’t have to have it all figured out just yet.
Flight has been a fairly consistent theme from our former chairs speaking on this occasion. I’m also asking us to take flight across both space and time because for me, flight means embracing and investing in innovation. It means creating spaces for innovation not tied to byzantine processes of administrators’ or faculty senates approval. Being willing to really fly on and reach for the stars, means that we drop at least some of our worries about what’s happening right now and fix our gaze on big challenges and problems and then work backwards.
Because Toni Morrison tells us “if you want to fly, you have to let go of the shit that weighs you down,” let me say this right now. By the power vested in me for the 30 minutes of this chair’s address, I hereby promote the essay to dominant genre emeritus. I thank you for your long and committed service over more than a century. We still love you. We want you to keep an office on campus and in our thinking, teaching, and writing lives. We will continue to throw wonderful parties and give meaningful awards in your name. And yet, we also acknowledge the rise and promotion of many other activities around which writing and communication can be organized. And we realize that if we are going to fly and find new intellectual spaces and futuristic challenges to meet with our students and each other, we have to leave the comfortable ground we have found with you.
For those of you who might be wondering if I’ve lost my mind at this point, let me state my case this way: the essay is a valuable, even powerful technology that has particular affordances in helping us promote communicative ability, dialogue and critical thinking. But we have gotten too comfortable relying on those affordances as our writing and communication universe goes through not only intense change, but an ever increasing tempo of change. I admit, that change gets dizzying. We have been talking about technological changes in communication for more than 30 years thanks to venues like Computers and Composition and many of our technical and professional writing scholars. Jackie Royster challenged us years ago to expand our vision of academic discourses in her classic “Small Boats in a Big Sea.” And we’ve been talking about multimodal, multimedia forms of composing for a long time as well.
This is the time for us to take those calls to yet another level. Think with me, about the literacies, about the understandings that the essay has helped us build with students: ethical source use and connection to scholarly community; the ability to value other voices, including those with whom we disagree; the ability to develop compelling support for an idea; experimentation with different rhythms and organizing strategies in our prose. This is obviously only the beginning, but you get the idea. Keep those abilities in mind and consider what a the authors of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture argue are the literacies we have to develop with our students for right now and for the future:
PLAY like Bootsy said, ain’t nothing good unless you play with it
Performance
Simulation
Appropriation
Multitasking
Distributed Cognition
Collective Intelligence
Judgment
Transmedia Navigation
Networking
Negotiation across diverse communities
But there is more than literacy—more than changing literacies—at stake. As composing becomes more and more enmeshed in digital environments, tools, practices and networks, we need to see this as a crossroads moment. That crossroads, for me is one where we see that we have to embrace technology issues not as part of what we do, but central to what we do. Technology is what we do—or what we need to do not just because literacy is always technologized, not just because of computers AND composition, but because of the big picture technological issues that are always brought to bear on all facets of our lives and work. [examples] So we need to ask different questions about writing with technologies, but also about writing in relationship to big picture technology issues.
What happens to composing when laptop and desktop computers go the way of the typewriter? How will wearable and implantable technologies change our access to information and our ability to share with each other? How will the constant sharing that sometimes makes us uncomfortable on social media go into warp drive when audio and video recording of everything everywhere becomes as commonplace as clicking and sharing a link are now? How will we respond when the dramatic changes in the pace of change exacerbate racial and gender divides that are already staggering?
What I am trying to suggest is that we need to take the next step in our investigations of technology issues far beyond the boxes and wires—that because writing, communication, composing, are always technologized, big picture technology studies needs to become a crucial, a central part of what we do. It is time for some new journals and book series to take as big a leap forward now as Kairos and Technoculture and Computers and Composition did in their beginnings, journals and book series that are dedicated to exploring the messy big picture concerns that structure technologies and our relationships to them. In a cultural moment when we are fascinated by the visual because of Instagram and Vine—perhaps blinded by the image. We need more work in Sound Studies and oral composing and audio archives. We need more critical edge when it comes to technology studies so that we don’t become hoodwinked every time governments and corporations unite to try to sell us utopian visions about the next new gadget that will heal everything that ails us.
And to do all of this, we need some new friends. It’s time for us to travel across campus, across programs, and into more strategic relationship building by doing more with affiliate faculty and cross disciplinary courses and certificates. We need deeper connections with the disciplines that get lumped into area studies. We need to build deep and long term relationships with university libraries and iSchools that go beyond the first year comp trip to the library to learn about source use. And we need to keep working hard on that 4th C in our title: we have to do long term work build more on our relationships with communication programs, schools and departments. Many of our members attend RSA and NCA, but how can we take those individual relationships that exist and use them to deepen our programmatic and organizational connections? What can we do to build long term relationships with Hispanic Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges and HBCUs? We need greater connection and collaboration across programs and organizations because even the most brilliant faculty, even the largest writing and rhetoric programs, even the best organizations like CCCC, cannot do this futuristic work alone.
However, to invoke flight—even imagined flight—at a time like this might seem fraudulent. We are not free to fly when one of our own, my sister Dr. Ersula Ore was assaulted and thrown to the street because a police officer didn’t like the way she responded to him. And on our own campuses we are not free to take flight when the exploitation of highly skilled teachers and scholars labeled as contingent, labeled as adjunct, minimized with a “part-time” tag is allowed to flourish. It may be that we will never see this society become brave enough to move beyond sexism, homophobia, racism and economic exploitation. [TNC tweet here]. But I am still here to ask us to think about freedom as crucial to our work.
I’m asking us to think about freedom in this unfree world [mention Hippies w Haircuts song] because the only freedom we will see, the only freedom we will get is the freedom we take. And the only way we get free is to walk with and learn from those who are out here working to get free. One thing this means is we have to focus less on the rhetorical “exemplars,” focus less on “successful” movements. Freedom work is funky rather than refined. It is becoming rather than overcome. It is in process rather than proclaimed. [Shout out Syracuse and Ms. Beulah, focus on agency].
A major obstacle we have to free ourselves from is the set of handcuffs the same old theory and the same old theorists and the same old scholarship place on us. [Harvey Weinstein Vulture interview…go hard on whiteness of our scholarship]
All their stanzas look alike—and too much of our theorizing and scholarship do too. As important as people like De Certeau and Jameson and many others can be to our work, there is just as much theoretical richness to be gleaned from Anna Julia Cooper, from Minnie Bruce Pratt, from Vine Deloria, from the Young Lords in New York and Dreamers and Dream Defenders and the Crunk Feminist Collective and from local people and organizations whose names we don’t yet know. The moment when we will be free or represent freedom as an organization, as a group of scholars will be not just when the demographics of our conferences and our faculties look like the demographics of our society, but when our works cited lists do too.
I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom because the only way to gain the freedom we so desperately need as a society and as a discipline is through the very problems that threaten seem so intractable.
[Set up Cannon, Living the Life of Jubilee here]
She says:
“And in these modern times, what do we do, what do we say, when the powers and principalities, when the spiritual wickedness in high places, say to us go get your sons, go get your daughters, go get your neices, go get your nephews, go get your grandchildren, go get your great grandchildren, go get your sisters and brothers, and hand them over to us.”
“Yes, church, what are we saying, what are we doing, when the bureaucrats and the drug dealers, what are we saying, what are we doing, when the global capitalists and the gang bangers, what are we saying when the cold-hearted, mean spirited power brokers and the misogynistic, bible thumping homophobes demand the souls of the people in our families, the people in our churches, the people in our communities? When the people who don’t mean any good to us demand the souls of our sisters and brothers anywhere in the world?”
But it’s what comes next that is so powerful to me. Rather than proclaim Jubilee as some single moment when those who are enslaved are free or people are relieved of their debts, she challenges her people to long term work: instead of a powerful moment of celebration of freedom gained, she challenges them to live the life of Jubilee Justice. Rather than some single moment, Jubilee becomes a life long commitment to the work of seeking justice. Being able to reach higher ground, or to fly on, and reach for the stars demands service in the valleys where we live and struggle. And when we see it this way, our service mission, to our students, to our campuses and to our communities becomes the very thing that gives us the freedom to fly.
Take close out or keep it tight depending on time…
Let us make this space that we create here together for these few days be one where we proclaim ain’t no walls behind the sky baby.
Let us embrace the funk that keeps us from being completely disciplined by academic silos and conventions.
And let us fly on, reaching for stars we cannot yet map, see, or scan.
Let us be committed to creating free spaces for ourselves, and to standing with and learning from those who are engaged in freedom struggle.
Let us use that freedom we take for those who do not have our protections or our privileges, inside and outside the academy.
Let us use it to become a hub for intellectual life and critical dialogue both on campus, and off. And let us use it to serve our students, to serve the local communities in which we live, love, work and play, and to serve our broader society, which needs our attention to discourse and our ability to enter messy public conversations maybe more now than at any point in our recent memory. Thank you.
Looking For A Digital Funk 