to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial soundwalk praxis
i begin with an acknowledgement of the myriad of organizers, scholars, artists, and teachers that have shaped and continue to shape the way that i think and write. Édouard Glissant, Christina Sharpe, Lucille Clifton, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Dionne Brand, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde. it is through their profound reflections on questions of Blackness, place, belonging, earth, and love, that i have found meaning in and context for what follows.
—
in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism. in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.
these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis.
Allie Martin describes “decolonial soundwalk praxis” as a way of listening that disrupts and disturbs dominant western understandings of sound and space, in “Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method” (2019). to me, it also involves cultivating an embodied practice of centering that life which dominant pedagogies deem less than, exploitable, and extractable. in the specific geographies of the bay area, it has meant that my primary orientation while soundwalking has been to listen for the creek that runs through the land—even when the water runs dry, even when all we can see is an intersection.
the creeks i followed were mostly routed underground, culverted to run under parking lots, freeways, shopping malls, grocery stores, and other urban sites of development. the prioritizing of urban development/renewal/gentrification in the bay area over tending to the ecologies of its creeks points to the place that the land is seen to hold in so-called modern society: as a resource available to exploit as desired, as is convenient for the logistics of capitalist expansion and development. to listen in such a way, for the creek and for other forms of life forced underground and to the margins, requires methods perhaps alternative to the traditional soundwalk. we must renegotiate the categories of sound that are implied in western colonial pedagogies. we must reevaluate what constitutes a “creek sound” or a “nature sound” in the first place.
to listen for the creek when it is covered by concrete necessitates that we reach beyond thinking of a creek as something which exists in and of itself, in isolation.
∼∼∼might the sound of a creek be more than just trickling water falling through rocks? can it not be heard still in the place where it meets the ocean?∼∼∼
∼∼∼or in the rustling of the trees who drink from the same groundwater?∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼couldn’t a creek be heard in a voice that speaks of it, as in a prayer, or a promise, or a song?∼∼∼
.
if we understand space as relational, as Nigel Thrift offers in “Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography” (96), then perhaps we can reach an imagining of a creek as finding its life everywhere where water is sacred, running freely through the bodies of those that know it is there.
acknowledging the body as the point of contact between the self and the environment is an important part of a decolonial soundwalk praxis. “place is involved with embodiment” Thrift says (103), and in fact, when we truly acknowledge the body, the very boundary between the body and the environment begins to dissipate, because the body itself is constantly a part of place-making processes. if sound is a dimension through which we can understand place, then, similarly, listening for the life insisting in a place is not separate from listening for the people who are in relationship with it.
in my soundwalks, i leaned into the fact that i was experiencing every place principally through my body, and as i became more comfortable recording, i gave myself more permission to allow my experience to be subjective. what i realized is that my subjectivity, my specific presence to my body’s relationship with the places i was in, was an important orientation to be able to embody a decolonial soundwalk praxis – to be able to hear the sounds that otherwise may have been neglected.
∼∼∼while walking along lobos creek trail, for example, i noticed, growing out of the sand, plants that were familiar to me, that i had relationships with. the house finches were chirping, and my footsteps were clear∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼but the plants i recognized were not – could not be – audible to me until i spoke their names and touched their seed pods.∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼i pulled a few pods off a branch and holding them near the microphone i cracked them open, letting the seeds fall into my hands. i listened to the pods split down the middle and drop the seeds, and in their snapping i heard how much tension they were holding.∼∼∼
.
i felt how much strain it must be to make and carry all those seeds, how much release it must be to crack open and spill out of yourself, and i was grateful to bear witness. i held the seeds in my hand and some time later, i gave them to the creek. in allowing myself the trust to follow my body’s intuitive relationship with the given place, i found sounds that i otherwise would not have heard. ultimately, i found a depth of connection to and intimacy with a place that before listening to in this way, i was a stranger to.
the work of giving attention to the sounds that go unheard is necessarily an embodied exercise. it demands relationship and it demands entanglement. it demands crawling inside a mossy culvert to hear the creek talk.
curious to hear how the creek sounded differently in the tunnel, i went off the trail at piedmont park to climb inside the section where the culvert begins. with the dripping, there was a nuance to its rhythm distinct from its sounds outside of the tunnel. i was able to hear, but only by coming inside and joining the creek. we sat there together, in the dark, for a while.
it also meant sawing down a 20-foot-tall agave in order to save the seeds after the 30-something-year-old plant finally bloomed—with bright yellow flowers on branches shaped like coral—and then began to dry out and lean precariously. to keep the other plants safe, and to release some pressure from the agave, we cut its stalk and from it saved its branches, seed pods, and seeds. the pods are now hanging around the garden at the Land of Disturbance and Defiance as art.
i am principally interested in sound because i am interested in love, and when i imagine a decolonial soundwalk praxis, intimacy is surely at the center. this perspective offers a way of learning place from the position of a being who is co-creating it – not as a scientist but as a steward. a decolonial soundwalk praxis complicates traditional soundwalking’s aversion to the body. we cannot exist separate from the sonic space around us anymore than we can exist separately from the ecologies woven into our lives. to touch is to alter, and so the work here is to lean into the inevitability of connection, the impossibility of objectivity. a decolonial soundwalk praxis rejects the extraction of sound as data, pushing us instead to open our bodies/hearts/minds to receive the sounds of a place as the place is receiving us. how might we use sound to remove ourselves from the perspective of the observer? and what kind of responsibility to place does this open up? if we are a part of the places we are in and listening to, then surely we owe them reciprocity, love, conversation, patience; we must listen as we would a relative, a lover, or a friend.
i chose to record my final soundwalk at the garden on walnut and virginia street in berkeley, california, because it is a place that i know well and love dearly and i hoped to center that. the north side of the garden runs alongside strawberry creek.
rather than imposing a plan/route through the garden upon arriving, i allowed my relationship with the land to guide my movement through it. in my final mix, i layered pieces from this soundwalk together with selected excerpts from a meeting i attended with two fellow members of A.G.A.V.E., or Aspiring Gardeners Affirming Vibrant Ecologies (also Aspiring Gardeners Against Violent Extraction).in which we were trying to synthesize a manifesto using notes from previous conversations, itself a process of collective and layered creation. i chose to include portions of our conversation centered around ideas of relationship and care grounded in land, and i chose sounds from the walk that i feel hold in them intimacy and history:
∼∼∼the crows, who we feed every day and who plant seeds for us∼∼∼
∼∼∼the lock, which only those who know the land can open∼∼∼
∼∼∼and the marigolds, which we grow every year and which we harvest for offerings∼∼∼
.
these sounds are proof of relationship. small sounds that are easy enough to forget to hear, but that are important to remember – and so i try, as i would for an invisible creek.
if a decolonial soundwalk praxis is anything, it is that love is listening, and so, my promise to invisible creeks (and all quiet[ed] sounds) everywhere is to lean a little closer,
and feel your whisper on my neck,
and to listen well,
and to take notes,
and to remember,
and to conspire.
—
Featured Image: “California Pepper Tree” by Flickr user baird, CC BY-SA 2.0
—
ameia camielle smith (they/she) is an aspiring gardener, dancer, and writer based in the san francisco bay area (Ohlone land). they are of mixed Afro-Indian ancestry and are greatly shaped by the seeds/shells/lives that exist at the intersection of these diasporas. ameia’s work is anchored in cultural ecologies and Black feminist geographies, and they are most inspired by stories of survival and collaboration between people and plants.
ameia received their B.A in geography from the university of california berkeley in may 2024. they are currently traveling through the southern united states where they are exploring maroon swamp geographies, tracing the steps of Zora Neale Hurston, and listening to the swampy cicada sounds of their childhood in north-central florida.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Flâneuse>La caminanta–Amanda Gutierrez
Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: Soundscapes of Canada and the Politics of Self-Recognition–Mitchell Akiyama
Soundwalking on the Edges: Sound, Safety and Privilege in São Paulo, Brazil—Paola Cossermelli Messina
El Caracol: A Stroll through Space and Time in Mexico City–Anthony Rasmussen
Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa
EPISODE 53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”
EPISODE 47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah–Marcella Ernest
.
Share this:
SO! Reads: Todd Craig’s “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies
or, Last Summer a DJ Saved My Life
“Hip Hop does work that a lot of other things don’t do” Young Guru (viii).
The way that we imagine English Studies, specifically Composition and Rhetoric (Comp/Rhet), today needs a radical shift. Specifically, we need new techniques for Writing Studies pedagogy to reach students in a more meaningful and contemporary fashion. Todd Craig’s “K for the Way:” DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies (Utah State University Press, 2023) both documents the need for this shift and enacts it. Craig’s work enables us to recognize the pedagogical impact on writing that Hip Hop has had over the last 50 years—specifically how the DJ/deejay as twenty-first century new media reader and writer teaches students not just to think about sound, but to compose with it, too.
An Associate Professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center, Craig has little desire to shake the foundations of English Studies, but instead do what Hip Hop has always done—make a way where there is none. The point is to (re)imagine new ways of doing old things; in this case, of teaching and reaching students who arrive in First-Year Writing courses. “K for the Way” does more than demonstrate the ways in which the DJ is a twenty-first century pedagogical savant; it also teaches readers, using DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy, about the culture that makes them possible.
This summer, a DJ really did save my life: as someone who feels consistently overwhelmed by the vast nature of scholarly discourse, “K for the Way” gave me a chance to breathe, to identify with something that has been a part of me for the better part of my life, and to see myself in a conversation about a topic I am more than passionate about. For Craig, community, history, and culture are the core of his mission as a scholar, educator, and DJ.
Craig defines several new terms that bridge the worlds of Hip Hop and Composition and Rhetoric. First, we have DJ Rhetoric, which can be understood as the modes, methodologies, and discursive elements of the DJ. For Craig, it “encompasses the quality of oral, written, and sonic language that displays and expresses sociocultural, historical, and musical meanings, attitudes, and sentiments” (23). Next, there is DJ Literacy, which is the “sonic and auditory practices of reading, writing, critically thinking, speaking, and communicating through and with the rhetoric of Hip Hop DJ culture” (23). These two definitions, operating in conjunction, situate the DJ as a kind of griot, a figure that Adam Banks invokes as a carrier of tradition, stories, and histories in Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) (2011). The mission of the griot is to carry stories and translate them to various audiences while adhering to the rhetorical conventions and modes of whichever audience they find themselves before; similarly, the DJ is responsible for “communicating the pulse and the evolution of a culture that once sat as ‘underground’ but now has dramatically evolved to ‘mainstream’” (25). These definitions serve as guides for the reader as they are tethered to all of the concepts and (re)imagining happening throughout the book.
Craig is intimately close to the work he is doing. He lives and breathes Hip Hop; and what should a book about the Hip Hop DJ be if not written by someone who embodies the role, culture, and practice of DJing? Craig uses a a research methodology known as hiphopography in which Hip Hop ways of being are central to studying it. Coined by James G. Spady, this term is defined as “a shared discourse with equanimity, not the usual hierarchical distancing techniques usually found in published and non-published (visual-TV) interviewers with rappers” (27). Craig states that hiphopography “allowed me to engage a variety of Hip Hop DJs while also maintaining my own shared values and sentiments around my love of Hip Hop culture and DJ practices” (28). Hiphopography constructs a conversational, intimate space—touched by history, culture, and music—wherein the interviewer and interviewee can engage and produce meaningful data. This methodology—and Craig’s many interviews with DJs about their craft—becomes part of the text’s core as we begin to see how Craig’s two-pronged argument connects DJ Rhetoric and DJ Literacy to bring both life throughout the book.
If one understands the DJ as a twenty-first century rhetorician and compositionist and considers the ways in which the DJ is a cultural meaning-maker, sponsor, and master sampler, then one can clearly see the connections between the DJ, DJ culture, and Writing Studies in the contemporary moment. In the first part of his argument supporting the significance of DJ Rhetoric and Literacy in writing pedagogy Craig asserts that, “it is essential that the academy at large works to strengthen students’ undergraduate experiences by reinforcing their racial, ethnic, and cultural ties” (14). This perspective provides the foundation for the second part of his argument that “the DJ (and thus, Hip Hop DJ culture) is the epicenter of Hip Hop culture’s creation” (23). Taken together, these dynamic arguments make the claim that the DJ offers a powerful model of a new media reader, writer, and critic. Today, our students come to writing classrooms with a “vast array of cultural capital. . .in their philosophical and cultural backpacks” (107). If we, as writing teachers, want to honor that cultural capital and build with it, we should follow Craig’s lead and look toward the DJ for some pointers on how to expand students’ access to a language that represents them.
Readers will also see a developing research agenda in “K for the Way” that thinks toward changing the culture beyond the present, while acknowledging the groundwork laid for the current moment and building genealogically upon that foundation, just as DJs do with sampling. Craig best exemplifies this when he writes, “in order to fully engage in a conversation—whether intellectual, pedestrian or otherwise—that discusses what DJ Rhetoric might look like, one has to think about the cultural and textual lineage of sponsors and mentors” (51). This notion of textual lineage is borrowed from Alfred W. Tatum who explains the term as “Similar to lineages in genealogical studies” and continues to note that textual lineage is “made up of texts (both literary and nonliterary) that are instrumental in one’s human development because of the meaning and significance one has garnered from them” (Tatum, qtd. in Craig, 51). Craig builds upon Tatum’s idea by introducing sonic lineage, which follows the same logic as Tatum’s term, but through sound (51). What becomes apparent, is that the DJ, as a cultural sponsor, can deploy sonic lineage as a way of communicating history and culture to members within and outside of the Hip Hop community and, more specifically, DJ culture.
Chapter three, especially, works at the interdisciplinary junction of Sound Studies, Writing Studies, and Hip Hop studies to convey a clear critique of the dominant discourse surrounding plagiarism. Craig is unsatisfied with the black-and-white conception of plagiarism as it presents itself in the academy. As a result, he moves to inquire “how we as practitioners [of teaching composition] approach citation methods and strategies within a twenty-first century landscape” (75). Craig promptly turns us toward the DJ’s conceptualization of sampling as a citation practice. Sampling in Hip Hop, as defined by Andrew Bartlett, “is not collaboration in any familiar sense of the term. It is a high-tech and highly selective archiving, bringing into dialogue by virtue of even the most slight representation” (77). The highly selective archiving, a.k.a crate diggin’, builds upon the idea of sonic lineage.
For the DJ, the process of diggin’ through crates to find that right sound, that one joint that going to get the party jumpin’, is a key element in the practice of “text constructing” (79). The Hip Hop sample functions alongside an understanding, offered by Alasdair Pennycook, of “transgressive-versus-nontransgressive intertextuality,” which, for an academic audience, complicates the idea of plagiarism.. The DJ becomes a figure through which we can understand intertextuality, sampling becomes the practice through which we can see parallels to citation through text construction, and the mix is where we begin, with the help of Pennycook, to complicate notions of plagiarism. In this chapter, readers are able to understand through sound.
Subsequently, Craig explores the concept of revision as it relates to the DJ’s ability to engage with an emcee on the point of “remix as revision” (107). Building from on Nancy Sommers’ article, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Craig lifts and examines four strategies of revision through the lens of the Hip Hop DJ: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering (Sommers, qtd. in Craig, 107). These practices not only identify the Hip Hop DJ as a master of revision but also center the DJ, in the context of the writing classroom, as a key figure for understanding editorial practice. As teachers of writing—and especially for those of us who are deeply connected to Hip Hop culture—we have traditional scholars, such as Sommers, but we also have the DJ as cultural scholar, which offer new models with communicating and practicing the craft of writing in the twenty-first century.
Chapter Five, which is co-written by Craig and Carmen Kynard, centers on six women DJs: DJs Spinderella, Pam the Funkstress, Kuttin Kandi, Shorty Wop, Reborn, and Natasha Diggs to work toward developing a “Hip Hop Feminist Deejay Methodology” that positions women in Hip Hop culture as a key source of key knowledge production–as meaning-makers, theoreticians, storytellers–and as tastemakers in twenty-first century discourse about education, technologies, race, and gender. This chapter is also apt representation of hiphopography at work, as both Craig and Kynard ground their position in the interviews of these six women deejays, “deliberately situating their stories first… as opposed to the usual academic expectation that a tedious delineation of methods and an extant literature review come before a discussion of the actual subjects” (123).
In part, this chapter focuses on the affordances and limitations—political, social, and economic—present in DJ culture, and the effects it has on these women DJs to make it do what it does. For example, the introduction of the digital software Serato has simultaneously made access to music easier, and complicated access to the cultural archive that made the music possible in the first place. Natasha Diggs, states, “While she values the ability to access mp3 files so readily, she argues a deejay’s research and craft suffer, because many times the mp3 files do not include information about an artist’s name, history, or band” (129). Pam the Funkstress ties this sentiment up nicely when she argues, “There’s nothing like vinyl” (129).
The final chapter is fashioned like a Hip-Hop outro, with Craig leaving with a few parting ideas. Most important among them is his vision of “Comp 3.0,” a version of Comp/Rhet wherein “we have to push the scope of writing and rhetoric—with or without the field’s permission or acknowledgement” (171). For scholars of composition and rhetoric and writing teachers who ground part of their understanding of the field in Black Studies, Hip Hop, and the DJ, we gotta make it do what it do, regardless of who says what! Comp 3.0 does not seek approval or recognition from the powers that be; instead, it focuses on the new ways of thinking and writing, and of teaching, that we are able to conjure—with history, culture, and practice propelling us—when we invoke that which got us to the academy in the first place.
What is at stake, for those of us who engage Black Studies, Sonic Studies, Comp/Rhet, and Hip Hop Studies as critical points of departure for the teaching of writing, is that our presence—our being, methods, and our teaching—is crucial for developing a genealogy of scholars and world citizens who are aware of the myriad possibilities present in the twenty-first century.
—
Featured Image: Cover Art for “K for the Way”: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies by Cathey White
—
DeVaughn (Dev) Harris is a PhD student studying composition and rhetoric in NYC. His academic interests are mainly in writing studies and pedagogy, but those are often supported by other sub-interests in music, creative writing, African American studies, and philosophy. When not reading or writing, Dev enjoys making music wherever and however possible. He has published music before under the collective AbstraktFlowz.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project—Todd Craig
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening--Airek Beauchamp
The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom- Carter Mathes
Contra La Pared: Reggaetón and Dissonance in Naarm, Melbourne–Lucreccia Quintanilla
Ill Communication: Hip Hop and Sound Studies–Jennifer Stoever
SO! Amplifies: Regina Bradley’s Outkasted Conversations
A Listening Mind: Sound Learning in a Literature Classroom–Nicole Brittingham Furlonge
Share this:
Current Top Posts
April 2021
January 2020
November 2019
October 2019
August 2019
April 2014
November 2017
March 2015
December 2017
October 2015
Sounding Out! 
Recent Comments