Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your own research with writing studies, decolonial studies, and visual studies, so we can gain sense of your expertise.
My first book, Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing, directs attention to how the modern/colonial world system compromises our understanding and practice of “writing,” and offers pluriversal possibilities beyond the logics of subservience, domination, and control. While several sources influence my early intervention, I’ll briefly mention two. Elaine Richardson and Ronald Jackson’s Understanding African American Rhetoric advances epistemologies that link early Egyptian-Kemetic practices to the African diaspora in North America, thereby disrupting the hegemony of Western European Enlightenment thinking that obscures the living experiences and intellectual contributions of the immense global plurality. Victor Villanueva’s “On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism” is likewise significant, as it provides Western rhetoric and writing specialists their first glimpse of dialectical exchanges between Mexica philosopher-rhetoricians and Franciscans in the late 15th century, at a crucial historical moment as monotheistic/alphabetic literacy was so quickly and brutally imposed upon a multiplicity of Indigenous inscription systems and world views. Black feminist, Indigenous, and Latinx mentors helped and informed my approach toward analyzing pictographic and ideographic practices that emerged in part across the Valley of México, long before the Archons of ancient Greece had access to the Phoenician alphabet. Today, the field of Rhetoric and Composition / Writing Studies (RCWS) understands these recordkeeping practices as semasiographic systems—equally suitable and highly complex inscription systems of recorded marks that signify thought, ideas, and imagery rather than visible speech (Mestiz@ Scripts, 69).
Since the publication of Mestiz@ Scripts in 2008, I continue looking to and thinking from the nonuniversal intellectual legacies of Chicanx, Mexican, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples across the Americas in order to inform two interlocking inquiries: a) how do technologies of writing—broadly defined—assist us as tools for disentangling from the modern/colonial world system, and b) how can praxical engagements with anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-predatory resistance bring an end to the field’s complicity in the harmful logics of management, control, and obedience? The work of queer Indigenous Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa continues to hold transformative rhetorical potential, yet scholars still struggle with inherited patterns of thinking/researching/writing/designing/teaching that emerged in Western Europe under early global capitalism (see Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions). Scholars in writing studies and DVS alike must work toward detaching and delinking themselves from self-baptized silos of centralized power.
In terms of Doing Digital Visual Studies, what do you find most exciting and exigent about this book project and DVS on the whole, especially in relation to your own area of research?
I am inspired by the move of DVS to encourage experimentation, to move beyond conventional methods and practices, and to take risks in the creation and co-creation of resistant projects. I appreciate the experimentation at work in this collection, and wish I had this degree of support as a graduate student. My concerns about the unilinear development of knowledge under capitalism moving from 18th century Enlightenment visions of ancient Greece to modern Anglo-centric North America were not received well while in graduate school. Though along the way, I did encounter a few voices of support.
In the years leading up to the publication of Mestiz@ Scripts, a few people asked if I had considered composing a digital “hybrid” text, so that my argument about colonial entanglements between alphabetic and semasiographic practices would necessarily weave between the Western Roman alphabet, pictographs, logograms, and iconography. Scholars acquainted with Mestiz@ Scripts are familiar with my analysis of The Codex Espangliensis, a syncretic admixture informed by the Amoxtli, or codices. Why not analyze codices through the creation of a digital codex? As an emerging scholar on the job market, I had no intention of taking on such an ambitious task. I was in early stages of learning about and learning to create Chicanx codices within Mexican Amoxtli traditions, which are directly informed by the four major writing systems of Mesoamerica: Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya. This required not merely studying influential texts but entering into intentional relation with the writers and creators themselves. Consulting directly with Delilah Montoya on Chicana codex art, with Davíd Carrasco on Mesoamerican anthropology and cosmovision, and with Guillermo Gómez-Peña on Mexican performance took time. I had also begun making my own amatl (tree bark paper) and creating my own codices under the instruction and mentorship of Mexican curandera Verónica Iglesias. Yet significant portions of this work were never leading to a scholarly publication, and were to remain within a small community of other artists and writers. I was caught in the tensions of what the profession expected of me—to credentialize and leverage—with where my body and spirit were leading, to re-root myself in the “soil and soul” (Anzaldúa, 68) of Mexican and Chicanx living legacies.
Scholars attempting to manage such ambitious projects nonetheless need support structures. Existing institutions, from departmental units to popular conferences, traditionally offer little support for the activities I describe above. The steady streams of blank perplexity, indifference, or outright antagonism that still circulate in professional spaces must be reconsidered. Of equal importance, scholars in DVS who are attentive to rhetorical complexity will want to revisit their own materialist, visual, and cultural anchors. In “The Hegel of Coyoacán,” Linda Martín Alcoff reminds us that prominent theories of liberation developed from basically five countries in the Western quadrant of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries (61). Shifting our geopolitics of knowledge production on a global scale must likewise correlate with a rigorous unsettling of the unipolarity of our own institutional affiliations and intellectual investments within national, regional, and local spaces.
Where do you think that digital visual studies needs to go in the future and what does it need to do better now? How are your important interventions into rhet/comp/writing studies and your other scholarship relevant and exigent for DVS?
Taking up coloniality as a central analytic will be helpful for DVS, as attempts to look beyond print culture are still entangled in the architectures and designs of the modern/colonial world system. This detail is important, as many contributors to DVS are commonly trained in traditional Western humanities with foundations traced to alphabetic script. The study of print culture, if imagined outside a Eurocentric/Anglocentric enterprise, might consider the steps necessary to understand block printing in 7th century China or the early linear scripts of the Phoenician alphabet. Yet geopolitical shifts themselves remain mired in Western epistemologies. This presents somewhat of a foundational impasse. Generally speaking, technologies of writing emerge across the planet within geographies that are today considered colonial peripheries, yet specialists largely conceptualize writing from the perspectives and experiences of the Global North Atlantic. So how do we collectively more forward? And how can the field of DVS foster productive spaces for precarious scholars pursuing diverse projects that do not comply nor seek compliance with dominant and dominating structures of power?
What kind of decolonial vision for digital visual studies might you offer for readers who may or may not have thought about doing this work from a decolonial praxis? What methodological commitments might we adopt and what advice can you offer as others enact DVS in ways that enact, perhaps, epistemic disobedience?
Scholars and activists across several fields have long responded to the violence of colonizing impulses. In the introductory chapter of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise, Romeo García and I focus our overview on the last two decades worth of publications that directly take up themes of decoloniality in the study and practice of rhetoric, writing, and literacy. As Leigh Patel and others have argued, coloniality does not correspond to an event, but to ongoing systems of oppressive power that dehumanize (see No Study Without Struggle). The full volume of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise does not propose certainty, but hopes, visions, and possibilities for overcoming our colonial entanglements. And in addition to the valuable contributing chapters in the edited collection, I would furthermore point to the work of Ellen Cushman and Scott Lyons. Connective threads running through their bodies of scholarship reveal the importance of approaching intellectual inquiry and social transformation through accountability. That is, Cushman and Lyons are accountable to the production of knowledge, and to the processes of meaning making. It is precisely this accountability that prompts epistemic disobedience, or what Gloria Anzaldúa calls a “massive uprooting” (80) from dominant narratives of assimilation and compliance. Insubordination is not merely unsettling but dangerous, as scholars face immediate material consequences for not performing reverence to the gatekeepers of centralized and centralizing power. What would it look like if more DVS scholars engaged in such epistemic disobedience?
As just one model, I have put such disobedience to practice with several engagements, including an ongoing grant project lead by my colleague Patrisia Gonzales here at the University of Arizona. Our project, “The Pop-Up Botanica: Enduring Indigenous Knowledges,” explores contemporary Indigenous meaning making through physical and virtual exhibits on Mesoamerican medicinal practices. While “Mesoamerica” is an invention of Western anthropology, the term has come to be adopted among Mexican and Chicanx writers as a fluid and adaptive connector of cultural complexities in constant states of adaptation and change (Mestiz@ Scripts, 34). The grant project weaves the use of oral tradition, storytelling, botanical items from material culture, and semasiographic inscriptions of the codices as medicine conveyed through immersive technologies. Participating students at the university will work with traditional healers and instructors with an expertise in Indigenous medicine and digital technologies to create a virtual pop-up botanica, or herbal store, as part of a physical traveling exhibit with virtual components including podcasts, brief lectures, and 360-degree video technologies with VR headsets. In the process of building the exhibits, we are collaborating with Pascua Yaqui and Chicanx elders and traditional healers who provide indispensable guidance and direction. Thus, we are working with and learning from Mexican botanica material culture including pre-Conquest symbols in present-day environments. In addition to the exhibits, we are developing curricular materials that focus on methodologies for understanding and applying Indigenous principles of respect, responsibility and relationship when interacting with healing knowledge and practice.
You have worked on so many important projects to help recover Mesoamerican and Mestiz@ enactments of rhetoric—from quipus to codices—that have helped to deepen our understanding of rhetoric, culture, identity, coloniality, and power. What other projects might you suggest for scholars invested in DVS to take up and why are these so important?
I believe trends in both DVS and the digital humanities are still overlooking the possible connections between ancient semasiographic sign systems and 21st-century graphical user interfaces. Modern scholarship in is still attached to the representation of logo-syllabic speech, even in digital environments. Consequently, there are surprisingly few technologies designed specifically to help storytellers compose with non-alphabetic images, the pervasive interface idiom dominating popular computing for the past two decades. The Amoxtli, the codices, offer an intriguing model for addressing this missed opportunity.
I would furthermore recommend the recent edited collection, Afterlives of Indigenous Archives. The interdisciplinary publication gathers a range of stakeholders, storytellers, librarians, and curators in the process of producing digital projects by and for Indigenous communities. Contributors work toward a post-Eurocentric digital imaginary and consider methodologies of refusing the teleological justifications of Eurocentrism that remain embedded in Western archives and institutions. As a corrective, Indigenous knowledge and agency are brought to the center of archival and digital activity. Such efforts speak directly to rhetoric, the knowing agent, culture, and navigations though colonial power.
Returning to my earlier comment on rethinking the geopolitics of print culture, DVS scholars might contribute efforts to further unsettle the very concept of writing if we consider the number of voices now leading the call to envision beyond graphic inscription practices entirely to embrace necessarily broad and inclusive practices of literacy. A rigorous challenge to be sure, as colonial dichotomies of writing/art, annotation/illustration, and parochial distinctions between the image and the alphabet continue to haunt the dominant narratives of thinking, writing, and teaching. Decolonizing the visual is of course not a matter of the ocular realm of blood vessels or physical acts of sight. Such a project instead requires us to extricate our discernment, interpretation, and invention from inherited patterns of coloniality. I welcome DVS to embrace decolonial, pluriversal methods that frame the conditions of subservience and domination as barriers for necessary and long overdue change.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. “The Hegel of Coyoacán.” Decolonizing Ethics: The Critical Theory of Enrique Dussel, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta, Penn State University Press, 2021, pp. 42–89.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed., aunt lute books, 2012.
Baca, Damán. Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
García, Romeo and Damián Baca, eds. Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions. National Council of Teachers of English, 2019.
Patel, Leigh. No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education. Beacon Press, 2021.
Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry, eds. Afterlives of Indigenous Archives: Essays in Honor of the Occam Circle. Dartmouth College Press, 2019.
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