It seems like yesterday, but it was long ago.
This is another story.
I’m what people call a hybrid scholar. This is a thing that many people and departments claim to celebrate and to admire and all that, but the truth is that being a hybrid scholar is trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, as Taylor Swift once whined. They knew I was trouble when I walked in.
In my old job talk, I offered up these two images to try to explain what I do:
This is where I tried to make my work fit. I was a Professional Writing scholar (probably the wrong place for me, in hindsight– I don’t belong in an English department), a Cultural/Race rhetorician, a digital rhetorician, and a game studies scholar. I focus on writing, identity formation and artistic creation. It’s perfectly logical to me, and it would be to anyone who looked at what I do and where I’ve been, but it’s a hard sell.
So I tried to make it more specific by showing people this:
This is still loosely the map of what I’m doing right about now. I combined these four concepts together to build a lens for considering race in games. The four pieces have apparently really frustrated some people who have heard me give this talk, and at least once I’ve been told quite emphatically that this isn’t how “we do race.” Sorry to the people saying that to me, but you don’t get to decide how I “do” race any more than I get to tell you how to white. As notoriously white professional wrestler the Cowboy James Storm says, “Sorry about your damn luck.”
But here’s the logic to what I put together. I love Nakamura’s Identity Tourism concept because as a metaphor it rings true and also rings hollow in the most fascinating of ways. But moreover, she isolated the first sort of bedrock truth of race work: we can pretend all we want that digital space and anonymity removes gender, race and class bias, but it does not. These are lived things. If you don’t know I’m Cherokee (or if you don’t THINK I’m Cherokee, because I don’t fit your impression of an Indian) that doesn’t change the fact that I AM Cherokee and that I carry the cultural understanding of that with me everywhere I go.
Homage, in contrast, is the eternal defense of the dominant culture as it consumes the cultures it colonizes. We’re “honoring” you, only you aren’t honoring anyone. You’re eating and digesting then shitting out other people’s histories, traditions and ways of life. It’s awful, but there’s an entire cottage industry based on it, one that is invoked frequently in games.
Then we’ve got the ol’ Social Justice Warrior ™ explanation of what colonization looks like in digital space: Cultural Appropriation. If you don’t know what that word means, read yesterday’s post on this blog and get back to me.
Lastly, there’s survivance. I take flack from people about how I use this phrase, but if you’re not DOING it I revoke your right to tell me how I can use the word. Survivance is something creators and gamers do, something we write through, and something I’m doing right now.
So… that was then. Some of it’s still now.
But I needed to redefine myself, as I’m in a new discipline now and don’t have to spend hour upon hour convincing a literary scholar who specializes on a single author or a ten or fifteen year span of writing in one geographic location that my odd mix of things gets to exist.
This time to define my identity I looked at what I do. I still ended up with 4 quadrants, but they’re more sticky now. I’m not going to explain them. Not in this post. I might spend the next four posts explaining each piece and end that with a fifth that tries to justify the fusion. But what am I? I’m the spot in the middle of this:
Simple, right?