Title: Race, rhetoric, and technology : searching for higher ground /
Authors: Banks, Adam J.
Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum ; National Council of Teachers of English,
Year: 2006
Subjects: African Americans Social conditions; African Americans Intellectual life; African Americans Communication; Digital divide United States.; Technology Social aspects United States; Rhetoric Social aspects United States.; Racism United States; United States Race relations
Abstract: "In this book Adam Banks uses the concept of the Digital Divide as a metonym for America's larger racial divide, in an attempt to figure out what meaningful access for African Americans to technologies and the larger American society can or should mean. He argues that African American rhetorical traditions - the traditions of struggle for justice and equitable participation in American society - exhibit complex and nuanced ways of understanding the difficulties inherent in the attempt to navigate through the seemingly impossible contradictions of gaining meaningful access to technological systems with the good they seem to make possible and at the same time resisting the exploitative impulses that such systems always seem to present."--Jacket.
Contents: Introduction: Looking for Unity in the Midst of Madness: Transformative Access as the ONE in African American Rhetoric and Technology Studies -- Oakland, the Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment -- Martin, Malcolm, and a Black Digital Ethos -- Taking Black Technology Use Seriously: African American Discursive Traditions in the Digital Underground -- Rewriting Racist Code: The Black Jeremiad as Countertechnology in Critical Race Theory -- Through This Hell Into Freedom: Black Architects, Slave Quilters, and an African American Rhetoric of Design -- A Digital Jeremiad in Search of Higher Ground: Transforming Technologies, Transforming a Nation.