A
Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Teaching Points and Passages
From chapter 6 - a rhetoric of design
The final sections of this chapter (123-30) offer a valuable discussion of quilting practices of slaves and their uses in the Underground Railroad as strategic ways of communicating with technologies readily available and invisible to the white slave owners. Banks uses this discussion to provide an African American “rhetoric of design.” He concludes that African American quilting practices offer lessons about “how tools might be used toward liberatory ends [that] can be designed and built into the artifacts themselves, and that the most important technologies and uses to explore are often the everyday” (126). The rhetoric of design he ends this chapter on (129-30) not only would be productive for analyzing African American cultural practices and artifacts but any cultural practice or artifact in which the goal in analysis is to understand how technologies can and are manipulated, critiqued, resisted, and even consciously ignored.
While Banks does not offer his rhetoric of design as a classroom heuristic for analyzing artifacts, it seems adaptable for such purposes. Below I offer a paraphrasing of Banks’s conclusions in the form of a possible heuristic for students:
- How does the artifact/practice “move beyond the word,” offering ways to struggle and resist?
- How does the artifact/practice “chart or maintain” particular “visual patterns and practices, ideas and materials”? What “crooked lines” does it use?
- How does the artifact/practice maintain “underground spaces” that interrupt larger patterns of exclusion or discourses? How does it engage lay people with “redesigning the textual, physical, and virtual spaces” instead of “submitting to experts”?
- How does the artifact/practice encode or embed “the technical communication, the instructions, the documentation, into the artifacts and spaces themselves”?
- How does the artifact/practice use “every means available in design,” particularly the “discarded technologies” and the “everyday”?
- How does the artifact/practice assume intellectual and physical freedom, even when that freedom seems hindered?
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