What race offers the digital is the continuation of the idea of collecting - the formation
of new material out of old to create critical approaches to cultural events.
Utopian dreams of racial equality give way to the hip hop resignation that
cultural imagery and icons serve new purposes in the digital.
As DJ Spooky maintains: repetition is a digital mantra, the repetition of the
found object, but the object recontextualized, whether in Burroughs' tape recordings to overcome power
TO DISCREDIT OPPONENTS
Take a recorded Wallace speech, cut in stammering coughs sneezes hiccoughs
snarls pain screams fear whimperings apoplectic sputterings slobbering
drooling idiot noises sex and animal sound effects and play it back in
the streets subway stations parks political rallies. (The Electronic Revolution)
or in digital sampling's model for how to be a web writer - how to appropriate.
And this is the real lesson for cultural studies: studying cultural
phenomenon not only to make clear the inequalities in racial relations but
to foster greater learning. How do we deal with, for example,
the questions of appropriation once deemed unacceptable by Amiri Baraka in Blues People,
but today embraced by not only hip hop but the digital world?
It's not just that, as cultural studies teaches,
modes of hegemonic discourse are resisted through recontextualization
by the minority class, but that all
discourse is subject to appropriation whether through resistance or not.
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