Why funkdafied?The title of this website, “Funkdafied,” dates back to 1994 when 20-year old Da Brat (Shawntae Harris) used this concept as the title of her debut album and became the first woman MC to have a platinum-selling album. Today “Funkdafied” is my call to all of you to notice, hear, and see classroom events in their larger social and cultural contexts.
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What's the story here? What happened?
My memory of Da Brat’s debut album only registers for me now because of a ninth-grade high school classroom. At the time, I was teaching humanities at a Coalition School in Bronx, NY and was hoping to decenter the Odyssey and the Aeneid as the only or main oral texts of the Western literary tradition. I, instead, turned to the Epic of Sundiata. This epic traces the rise to power of the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata, in the early 13th century and has been passed down through oral tradition by generations of Mandinka griots. When students finished reading the text and all of the activities designed to increase comprehension and analysis of the text, it was time to create a culminating project that would move what we had learned beyond mere textual analysis.
My plan was to offer a series of project possibilities, all designed to focus on the epistemological stance of what the griot might represent now. I wanted students to take very seriously this role of the griot, often regarded as time binders, where words and music become the mechanism for griots to use their historical knowledge to unify a people. To be sure, there is no one-to-one correlation between griots of West Africa; however, historical traditions do melt, meld and move onwards. This was the inquiry I opened up to students in the classroom. The project possibilities included: 1) graphic novels that rendered or inquired into the role of a griot (these were not called graphic novels then); 2) 3D, video, or other multimedia representations that featured interviews of family or fictive kin who students believed held or could/should hold this function for a town, community, neighborhood, or building; 3) photo essays that investigated the literature on the griots of West Africa, or; 4) any combination of these three possibilities.
My plan was to offer a series of project possibilities, all designed to focus on the epistemological stance of what the griot might represent now. I wanted students to take very seriously this role of the griot, often regarded as time binders, where words and music become the mechanism for griots to use their historical knowledge to unify a people. To be sure, there is no one-to-one correlation between griots of West Africa; however, historical traditions do melt, meld and move onwards. This was the inquiry I opened up to students in the classroom. The project possibilities included: 1) graphic novels that rendered or inquired into the role of a griot (these were not called graphic novels then); 2) 3D, video, or other multimedia representations that featured interviews of family or fictive kin who students believed held or could/should hold this function for a town, community, neighborhood, or building; 3) photo essays that investigated the literature on the griots of West Africa, or; 4) any combination of these three possibilities.
At this time (and sometimes still today), I did a sample project before I assigned it to students to experience the requisite composing processes to see if such work was do-able and really added meaning to what we were learning. I decided that I would explore the platinum-selling phenomenon of Da Brat and was planning to do a type of graphic inquiry into her style and stature as a griot. Being an MC didn’t automatically mean that she represents time binding and the rhetorical purpose of nation-unification, so I intended to explore those issues. I did a first page where I drew Da Brat standing, in her signature baggie clothes at the time, but in an exaggerated form as if I were an ant looking up at her; and I graffiti-stylistically wrote out my central questions about her as a griot. When I brought the drawing to class on the day I introduced the project, the kids went bonkers! It was like spontaneous combustion. Common sense should have told me this would happen. There was even one class where I never even got the chance to explain the project. All they wanted was for me to teach them to draw, share my sharpies (not an option! I would give them my pencils, pens, or the clothes off my back, but not my graffiti markers!), and make graphic novels to their most beloved rappers! Did I mention that this was in the Bronx in the 1990s, the birthplace of Hip Hop? I fussed back and forth with them about paying attention to the project and not my drawing (and about them not getting my sharpies), all to little avail, because every time I did, someone came back at me with lyrics from Da Brat’s album. Platinum, indeed! I finally calmed my classes (and my nerves) by promising that whoever got most excited and in-depth in their project about the griot could have my drawing of Da Brat…. under one condition, of course: that they never brought that drawing back to class again. Tony won the drawing and inspired his classmates more than anyone had all year. Funkdafied, finally, in the end!
Now what?
On one hand, this was a successful literacy event in the classroom in light of the work and thinking students engaged. On the other hand, I missed the opportunity to gain a deeper political rhetoric of the social constructs of learning in this classroom and geographic space. After this project was over, it was time for the next curriculum unit, grading, parent-teacher conferences, hours photocopying the next readings, new projects, and after-school programs. So certainly, the daily grind did wear me down. But I still needed a real, theoretical foundation to politically claim both my own learning and teaching in this setting that created more barriers in the schooling of Black and Latinx youth than opportunities. Not only could I have engaged the polemics of teaching in this context more explicitly; that engagement would have made me a better teacher.
The anecdote that I provide here is more than just another classroom story about many urban youth’s love for Hip Hop. Black Literacies, rhetoric, multimedia composing, oral traditions, and family histories were so obviously omnipresent:
The anecdote that I provide here is more than just another classroom story about many urban youth’s love for Hip Hop. Black Literacies, rhetoric, multimedia composing, oral traditions, and family histories were so obviously omnipresent:
- the deep history of the role of the griot, as told in The Epic of Sundiata (and its concomitant centering of Africa and African Americans as more than just the home of slaves)
- the need to try out different instructional strategies based on a distrust that what I saw all around me could ever be socially or culturally relevant to young people of color
- the desire to interrogate the meanings of the griot through visual processes alongside contemporary Black cultural icons and music genres
- the incorporation of families, family narratives, and subject positions into writing and thinking
- the ways signifyin (i.e., all the playful language going back and forth between the students and myself) shapes meaning and interactive strategies
- the role of Black Language and discourses in thinking and writing
- the embodied responses of students to their histories, music, and visual cultures
