Publishing Without Walls

Et Al.

Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 -0500

With cover art by Kio Griffith

Et Al. imagines kaleidoscopic possibilities for the stewardship of culture and land as decolonizing practices. Culture and the arts can enhance society by strengthening our connections to each other and to the earth. This arts management book was born during a racial reckoning and accelerated by a global pandemic. What exactly is the business of no-business-as-usual? The ethical challenge for arts management is far more complex than asking how to get things done; we must also ask who gets to do things, where, and with what resources? Our task is to generate cultures that refuse to annihilate themselves or each other, much less the planet. Et Al. contributes to the conversation about arts and cultural management by providing rare, behind-the-scenes insights on justice-centered arts management praxis — ideas tied to action. The book makes space for people to publicly reflect, write, and share insights about their own ideas and ways of working. Its polyphonic voices speak to pragmatic strategies for arts management across cultures, genres, and spaces. Its stories are told from the perspective of individuals and families, micro businesses, artist collectives, and civic institutions. As a digital publication, the platform lends itself to multi-media knowledge objects; the experiences documented within it include ethnographies, qualitative social research, personal and communal manifestos, dialogues between peers, visual essays, videos, and audio tracks.

This open source, multimedia book is structured into six streams which are numbered for their exponential powers: Stream¹: Center is Everywhere; Stream²: Gathering Community; Stream³: Honoring Histories; Stream⁴: Shifting Research; Stream⁵: Forging Paths; Stream⁶: Generative Practice. The book discusses imaginative ways of generating cultural equity in praxis, and is an invitation for further imagination, conversation, and connection.

Et Al. presents an interactive landscape for readers, thinkers, and creators to engage with multimedia and intergenerational essays by Amy Shimshon-Santo, Genevieve Kaplan, Gerlie Collado, Abraham Ferrer, Julie House, Britt Campbell, Delia Xóchitl Chávez, Sean Cheng, Yvonne Farrow, Allen Kwabena Frimpong, Kayla Jackson, Erika Karina Jiménez Flores, Cobi Krieger, Loreto Lopez, Cynthia Martínez Benavides, Christy McCarthy, Janice Ngan, Cailin Nolte, Michaela Paulette Shirley, Robin Sukhadia, Katrina Sullivan, and Tatiana Vahan.

Love and Suspense in Paris Noir

Tyechia Thompson — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00:00 -0500

“… I find this project fascinating, as it seeks to accomplish what Lamar attempts in his novel, that is, take a diverse audience on a journey not through the famed City of Light per se, but through another Paris, its underside.”

Trica Keaton, Dartmouth University

"Thompson mines her digital essay with Amine’s purposeful intervention. She embeds links to research that complements the author that she studies. Lastly, Thompson’s digital essay reveals the multi-ethnic and geographically alert awareness. There is a crucial need for this type of academic digital essays in which authors write in an easily lucid manner."

Mark A. Reid, University of Florida

Taking readers on an itinerant journey through Jake Lamar’s novel Rendezvous Eighteenth, Tyechia Thompson, practitioner of Black Paris, explores narratives of African-American expatriates in Lamar’s life, his Paris, and his work. Unfolding in six different paths, this interactive literary analysis pulls together interviews with Jake Lamar and relevant videos, showing Lamar’s chosen setting of the Eighteenth Arrondissement and treatment of race as a departure from contemporary fiction of its type. Introducing the “different side of Paris” through narrator Ricky Jenks, Lamar centers his novel on the lesser known parts of the city, enabling direct challenges to migration narratives of inclusion and racially utopic France. Building a new layer of analysis in each path, Thompson demonstrates a flexible approach to text, showing the complexities of Rendezvous Eighteenth in both form and content.

This title was peer reviewed with a single-blind process by the AFRO-PWW editorial board.

Please cite this book using the DOI 10.21900/pww.3

iBlack Studies

marilyn m. thomas-houston (Volume editor) — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Rooted in long-incubated plans to use digital methods to explore the Black experience and from a 2006 gathering organized by editor marilyn m. thomas-houston, iBlack Studies introduces readers to the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of Black Studies. Serving as a hub for accessing collections of research and resources on the Black experience by providing a no-cost open access home for digitized and born-digital research and minimally distributed publications, its resources include but are not limited to fieldnotes, video and audio recordings, datasets, and conference papers and proceedings. The hub is expected to grow, with new sections contributed by scholars interested in the creation of an online, no-cost, open-source presence for their work.

This title was peer reviewed with a single-blind process by the AFRO-PWW editorial board.

Please cite this book using the DOI 10.21900/pww.9.

Lost in the City

Kenton Rambsy, Peace Ossom-Williamson (Volume editor) — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0600

Merging the best of distant and close reading, Kenton Rambsy and Peace Ossom-Williamson lead a stunning digital investigation of space and narrative in the short fiction of Edward P. Jones. This edited collection contains essays from graduate students enrolled in a literature seminar at the University of Texas at Arlington. Collectively, they examine Jones’s practice of “literary geo-tagging” to show how this master of literary prose delves into a remembered Washington, DC where the city’s African American population finds itself at the precipice of the gentrification and displacement that would lead to today’s very different city. Caught in this moment, the characters negotiate regional identities and generational conflicts. Exploring Jones’s fiction from Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the authors of this collection’s investigations employ mapping and data visualization methods that make novel contributions to critical methods for literary study even as they establish how Jones embeds DC’s geography in his texts.

This title was peer reviewed with a single-blind process by the AFRO-PWW editorial board.

Please cite this book using the identifier 10.21900/pww.10

Constructing Solidarities for a Humane Urbanism

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0600

Traversing the financial industry’s takeover of shelter and basic services in Chicago and Cape Town, and the movements fighting eviction, displacement and gross urban inequalities in South Africa and the US, the authors of Constructing Solidarities for a Humane Urbanism reveal transnational connections between these conflicts and movements. Even more, they document how activists in those conflicts draw inspiration from and collaborate with one another to achieve their goals and refine strategies for future battles. Based on an event that brought together academics and activists, the approaches described by the authors create alliances across nations and across the interwoven fabrics of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, as well as between formal and informal political practices. Responding to an urgent need for collaborative reflection and exchange among scholars and activists with experience in transnational social and solidarity movements, Constructing Solidarities is both a record of conversations advancing our understanding of humane urbanisms and a roadmap for those seeking to participate in a global movement for more just approaches to urban development.

Please cite this book using the DOI 10.21900/pww.5

#TheJayZMixtape

Kenton Rambsy — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0600

Honourable Mention, Open Scholarship Award (2020)

"Rarely have I seen such a thoroughly researched project on its own terms. The massive amount of information/data that is collected, examined and discoverable alone makes this project a must share/must replicate. This project is extremely innovative in its blending of ideas about knowledge production, data about a particular producer, Jay Z, and introduces us to a method or 'blueprint' for scholarly engagement that foregrounds contemporary digital practices. The premise is very clear, the conceptual framework smart."
Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas

"This Scalar book contributes to the study of rap and hip hop as a significant sphere of cultural and literary production. In particular, it depicts the artist Jay Z as … a vernacular public intellectual. Prof. Rambsy's digital humanities project is organized around an impressive compilation of evidence from a variety of sources--YouTube and Vimeo interviews, music videos, and visualizations of interactive tables and graphs. The dataset compiled can be unpacked in so many ways, even beyond the ways the author himself suggests."
Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jay-Z is one of the most popular and prolific rap artists of all time. The Brooklyn-born rapper, known for his introspective lyrics and frequent collaborations with other rappers and producers, currently holds the record for most No. 1 albums of any solo artist. In #TheJayZMixtape, Kenton Rambsy takes us on a journey through Jay-Z’s career and sheds light on his storytelling style, extensive musical collaborations, and connection to black music history. Drawing on a rich dataset, including the lyrics from 189 songs comprising 12 solo albums, Rambsy uses computational approaches to explore Jay-Z’s musical influences and allusions to other black artists and historical figures. Rambsy’s investigation unites innovative digital humanities techniques with the tradition of African American literary analysis of major black authors, revealing new and different dimensions of Jay-Z’s body of work. Visually engaging, and full of interactive ways to explore Jay-Z’s work, #TheJayZMixtape not only delivers an analysis of Jay-Z’s music, but also makes a compelling case for Jay-Z’s place in the greater African American literary tradition.

This title was peer reviewed with a single-blind process by the AFRO-PWW editorial board.

Please cite this book using the identifer doi:10.21900/pww.2