Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
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1ac—Dark Twisted PedagogyKanye West – Powerhttps://youtu.be/ieXMNNOYWXI?t=2m19s 2:19 – 3:02 the system broken, the school's closed, the prison's open we ain't got nothing to lose … we rollin huh? … we rollin with some light skinned girls and some Kelly Rowland's in this white man's world we the ones chosen so goodnight cruel world, I'll see you in the mornin huh? I see you in the mornin' this is way too much, I need a moment no one man should have all that power the clocks tickin' I just count the hours stop trippin' I'm tripping off the power til then, … that, the world's ours …but is the world our’s? Who does the surveilling, who is the target of that surveillance, why does that surveillance exist and how can it be curtailed?Our advocacy is that you should affirm Kanye West’s “Power” as a fugitive poetics to challenge the United States Federal Government’s domestic surveillance apparatus and anti-black violence.American surveillance grew from slavery—the original lists of human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries were used by masters to govern slaves. Disciplinary power operated through the compulsory visibility of targets, and fugitives became targets of additional layers of surveillance like wanted posters and slave patrols that evolved into modern policing and oversightBrowne 2012 – PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone; “Race and Surveillance” “Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies”; Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillance+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW) According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often non-property owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld. Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place." For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for "a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: "sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to." This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of Whiteness". Our performance is an act of poetics from a “legacy gone missing,” a strategy that both utilizes enclosure and run, that is here but is not here, that is there but is not there, visible but not visible.We begin with a radically different interpretation of freedom. Freedom from surveillance isn’t achieved when the NSA dissolves or the PATRIOT Act is reversed, nor is the fugitive simply imagined or demanded as a concept in the 1ac.Fugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitiveTremblay McGraw 10 – Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford University Press [E.Smith] Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115), Cummings points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly” (24). Surveying Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of “true freedom . . . at the point of [the slave’s] deciding to escape and . . . journey.” This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,” Mullen notes that in Equiano’s own discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean “form of this Narrative.” . . . In the pages of Equiano’s prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures. (“Gender” 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano “retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—a destiny constructed out of the individual’s unique interaction with chance and continually changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity” (60). For some individuals fl ight and “cultural disruption” will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the “recyclopedias” of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullen’s collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting “to use again in the original form,” and the taking of intractable “used” or “waste” material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen’s neologism clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless “waste” materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen’s recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original “use” (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullen’s recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies. If you’re thinking “lol Kanye West as fugitive poetics?” then the aff worked, and that’s why it can exist as both a visible protest and remain elusive in the face of targeting and surveillance.When slaves sang songs like “follow the drinking gourd” they were singing the steps and guides for fugitive slaves to navigate the underground railroad and escape the plantation. They could sing these songs publicly because their masters interpreted it as the delightful tone of slaves singing in the fields. It was at once visible but not visible, there but not there.Similarly, the hook from “Power” – no one man should have all that power – was easily interpreted by dominant powers as more Kanye egoism, another “I’m going to let you finish…” moment.Deeper listeners heard the real message – Kanye speaks of being chosen in this white man’s world and that “no one man should have all that power” before envisaging a fugitive departure, a “beautiful death, jumping out the window, letting everything go.” The reference to power is an historical allegory to the police’s reaction to Malcolm X’s resistance to racialized police surveillance and government control that Kanye remixed as this generation’s rallying cry against white supremacy – and, we’re gonna let you finish about the power of fiat, but Kanye’s message reached more people than any presidential speech of all time.As an educator you should affirm a space away from surveillance, fugitive knowledge—in short, a Dark Twisted Pedagogy. Our classroom model is one that envelops students in opportunities to speak back and re-envisage the lines they’ve heard thousands of times as poetics but never thought of as useful knowledge as their own guide to critical consciousness through fugitivityGarcia, 13—Antero, Assistant Professor in the English department at Colorado State University, “Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy: Kanye West and the Lessons of Participatory Culture,” Radical Teacher, no 97 (Fall 2013), http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/article/view/38/22 --BR Over the fall of 2010, rapper Kanye West reimagined the way music was distributed. He did this by engaging in an online conversation with millions. For the greater part of that year, Kanye West was firmly present on the cultural radar. This was deliberate and done in a way that made his presence, his performances, and his music an ongoing conversation with his fans, with his past, and with a larger network of engaged online participants. Through demonstrating the affordances of participatory culture, West presents a framework for engagement and communication that critical educators can leverage even within the increasingly restrictive space of public education. Though the capitalist practices that led to his album spending more than six months on the Billboard 200 may not seem like the obvious place to search for liberatory educational pedagogy, I argue that the strategies developed and tested by West offer an important framework for guiding critical consciousness and fomenting action within our classrooms. As a Hip Hop fan and former music journalist, I often infused my classroom with beats and rhymes. Whether it was the first Lupe Fiasco album encouraging my students to consider the blend between Hip Hop and skateboarder social groups on my campus or formally utilizing classics like Grandmaster Flash‟s “The Message” and Dead Prez‟s “Police State” as starting points for literary and critical analysis, Hip Hop played a formative part in my teaching practice. For the eight years that I spent teaching English and ELL courses at a public school in South Central Los Angeles, my classroom breathed Hip Hop as well as music across genres to speak to the diverse youth population I worked with. Comprised of approximately 80% of my students identifying as Latino and 19% as Black and a dropout rate that rocketed above 60%, my school was characterized in the media by stereotypes of a failing school while my students exuded the passion to learn that showed me an optimism in transforming schools. Throughout this teaching time, I can see now how Kanye West‟s music acted as a through line in my classroom. On a year-round schedule, my first year teaching allowed me to bring in West‟s infamous 2005 declaration that “George Bush doesn‟t care about Black people” during a Hurricane Katrina relief telethon. Meanwhile West‟s singles filtered into my classroom as music played by students or analyzed for various writing assignments. At the time that West revolutionized media distribution and opportunities for pedagogical growth in 2010, I was working with ninth grade students and exploring how mobile devices like iPods could help connect urban youth with civically engaging movements beyond the classroom (Garcia, 2012a). Just in time to be heralded critically by music publications ranging from XXL to Rolling Stone, Kanye West's fifth solo album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was released in the United States on November 22, 2010. However, even by the time the album leaked through file sharing networks and torrents online, weeks before the official release date, its music was anything but surprising. Via his own music label, G.O.O.D. (Getting Out Our Dreams), West leaked many of the tracks from his album as free downloads during the fall. A matter of a few clicks from his official website yielded more than snippets from the album. Releasing one song each week on “G.O.O.D. Fridays,” responding to challenges and criticism from fans via Twitter, West sustained interest and anticipation throughout the world. In addition to a slew of tracks from the album including the lead single "Power," West released numerous tracks that were subsequently never officially included in the final album. Speculation of what would make the cut drove buzz around My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy rather than speculation about what kind of sound the album would take. By the end of 2010, fifteen different tracks were given away by West, including two of the lead singles from his album: a remix of “Power” and the cameo- filled “Monster.” Through use of simple and public media tools like Twitter, West moved popular hip-hop models of marketing beyond traditional mixtape culture and illustrated how participatory culture can help foment profit as well as awareness and social organization. Moving Beyond the Mixtape As far as Hip Hop is concerned, the role of mixtapes is one that dates back to the early days of Hip Hop in the late 70s (Westhoff, 2011). Splicing together popular rap verses with unreleased Hip Hop beats, mixtapes were underground commodities traded and sold by the aficionados within an exclusive subculture. Though it has been years since mixtapes were widely distributed as actual cassettes, the concept is still the same; otherwise unreleased or un-cleared samples are released non- commercially. Like electronic music's prevalent use of "white label", unofficial releases (Reynolds, 1999), to help build interest in a track, Hip Hop has incorporated mixtapes as more than underground productions by individuals and part of a larger marketing and distribution ecology. Transitioning from tapes to CDs and now to direct Internet downloads, mixtapes are used by mainstream rappers to sustain interest between album releases. Lil‟ Wayne, for example, has benefited from a plethora of mixtape releases that have helped garner radio play and online reviews long before his albums are available for media consumers (Westhoff, 2011). No longer are mixtapes simply an extension of the listening experience for rap fans. Instead, they act as previews and major marketing ploys for Hip Hop artists. Additionally, because they are steeped in the history of Hip Hop, they may signal an artist‟s credibility for some rap fans. However, where the mixtape largely succeeded in previewing a forthcoming album and playing with the expected commercial limitations of what could be released, Kanye West takes the model and deconstructs it. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. Instead of the mishmash of 40-70 minutes of free music usually released on a mixtape, West slowly strings along track after track over months at a time, responding and changing his music as responses are blogged and status-updated. In one notable example, teen-idol Justin Bieber, upon hearing that Kanye liked his song “Runaway Love” tweeted, “@kanyewest it's not a so what moment for me. I'm 16 and a fan. I'm kinda hyped u are listening to my stuff. Thank u. Nice sunday morning" (Vilensky, 2010). Shortly afterwards, West responded to fomenting interest from online fans and released his remix of “Runaway Love” featuring both West and Wu Tang rapper Raekwon. In terms of his album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also built upon mixtape culture by reflecting the practice within the production of his album. The silly mashup of unexpected artists that is typically reserved for mixtapes became a centerpiece for the album: soft- crooning indie musician Justin Vernon of the band Bon Iver is featured prominently in the album's penultimate song, "Lost in the World;" Vernon‟s lilting voice is paired earnestly with Hip Hop verses. No longer a mixtape novelty, West builds upon accepted underground Hip Hop practices and subverts what is expected within commercial Hip Hop. Amplification and the Participatory Culture of G.O.O.D. Fridays Though the mixtape formula was popular in subverting official release dates, West moved from the singular verses and cobbled together mixes of unreleased music to a model that placed agency and music decisions in the hands of his fans. In short, Kanye West released music in ways that utilized the connected culture of social media to invigorate enthusiasm and to build camaraderie with a continually building fan base. Henry Jenkins et al. (2009) describe the ways media as "participatory culture" shift “the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.” Further, Jenkins et al. write, “Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.” West‟s G.O.O.D. Friday releases, in responding to and encouraging dialogue with his fans, indicate a mass media application of participatory culture for profit. However, the general tenets of participatory culture typically wrest control of media distribution from traditional mass media outlets in ways that empower teens fluent with the tools on their laptops and smartphones. The recognition that today's media consumer is also a media producer means that sustaining interest means responsiveness. It wasn‟t enough, for instance, for West to thank Bieber for the Twitter shout out. The voice (and the thousands that followed echoing wishes to see a collaboration between the two musical stars) encouraged participation, remix and playfulness. YouTube is rife with tributes and parodies of West‟s songs. From a version of his song “Monster” that pays tribute to the food at Taco Bell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnUKmk5Lz50) to one that is sung by Harry Potter‟s nemesis Voldermort (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA7leadDk9g), the digital tools online allow for new forms of participation and engagement. In my own research on how young people may be able to challenge existing power structures and dominant narratives via social tools, I have described the potential of participatory culture as an “amplifying” process (Garcia, 2012b). In the public, persistent spaces of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, for instance, comments youth make can be seen by anybody. However, within the educational world, the participatory culture of out-of-school time is frequently stifled by school and district policies that limit socialization (see Frey and Fisher, 2008). Further, like the central argument of this article: that a massively popular, wealthy rapper can provide meaningful pedagogical guidance for critical educators, I have also argued that the mainstream and profit-driven companies like MySpace and Facebook can build important socializing spaces for critical dialogue and student support (Garcia, 2008). Through reimagining his relationship with an audience of millions, West demonstrates ways to challenge traditional power structures─a model that can be forged within today's classrooms. A year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest. Though critical educators should rightfully challenge West‟s capitalistic intentions, the pragmatic lessons of utility and philosophy with social media should not be disregarded. To date, West's album has sold more than one million physical copies (Recording Industry Association of America, 2013). His follow up tour a year later, co-headlined by collaborator Jay-Z, was the highest grossing Hip Hop tour of 2011, making more than $48 million in ticket sales (Lewis, 2011). To consider West's popularity anything of an underground phenomenon would be ludicrous. It is important to recognize that West‟s lyrical content can lead to further disregard for the relevance of mainstream Hip Hop within the classroom. And the public persona that West plays up does little to convince critical educators to consider the possibilities that West represents. When West grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift to decry that Beyonce did not win a 2009 MTV Award, even President Obama called West a “jackass” (BBC 2009). To be clear, I do not apologize or account for West‟s actions. Instead, the focus on the rapper‟s ability to expand the world of Hip Hop and the possibilities for critical educators mean looking beyond these actions; West‟s resources for engagement and community building offer myriad tools to encourage challenging and critiquing his non-critical work. Toward a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy West’s every step in releasing the album, from ludicrous twitter messages to on-air blowups to banned album artwork meant that there was not a day that I was unable to catch up with the latest in the Kanye-verse. In all of these updates Kanye evolved the Hip Hop mixtape to its proper participatory-culture configuration: it is an “always- on” amalgam of music, personality, and hype. The pervasive nature of Kanye‟s approach to marketing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is something educators can lift. How can we deconstruct classroom pedagogy to move beyond traditional application of emergent technologies? Is it really the best we can do to simply duplicate textbooks and textbook practices when equipping students with iPads and mobile devices? This is essentially reducing the possibilities of screen and interfaces to a glowing page. Likewise, pedagogy must incorporate the persistent “always-on” nature of West‟s approach. His persistence and personality are what helped transfer knowledge, interest, and passion for his work. Critical educators, qualms about West aside, must evaluate how this approach may be adopted for classroom use. Teachers should ask themselves, how is my practice pervasive? How does the work that I do in my classroom transform students’ lives throughout the day? A year before the Occupy movement would capture America's consciousness and months before the Arab Spring more fully rolled across northern Africa, Kanye West demonstrated the possibilities of social media as tools for knowledge building and sustained interest. I want to reiterate that what West accomplished was not some secret phenomenon. West made abundant profits from his efforts. At the same time West was mirroring widely adopted digital practices at a highly visible level: responding to tweets, sharing updates, hosting online Q&As and producing video and music content for others are all attributes of what youth can and do easily engage in while online. In essence, West‟s efforts mimic what young people regularly do on their own. He mimics the literacy and learning practices that take place outside the classroom. For educators, this is also an important reminder: classroom practices should mirror the real world settings that students will venture to after leaving our classrooms. Students are already experts in media production and West reminds us to bring in these outside skills. How can critical educators adjust their teaching practice in light of the work of Kanye West? Perhaps this may not seem the most astutely worded of education- related questions, but a necessary one nonetheless. West makes participating and communicating with fans fun, memorable, and engaging. Classrooms can leverage similar tools to get young people excited, in conversation, and networking globally around classroom content. To be clear, I am not advocating co-opting youth practices within a classroom. On the contrary, I am speaking about a large- scale effort to update the classroom into the kinds of networked ecologies that are utilized for interaction everywhere except for in schools. As Castells (2009) writes, “A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening its balance” (pp. 501-502). A Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy is one that envelops students in opportunities to engage with extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. It allows youth to speak back to the content and see work in dialogue. An instantiation of this pedagogy, despite the capitalistic intentions of its namesake, begins with “a dramatic reorganization of power relationships” (Castells, 2009, pp. 502) and funnels classroom agency toward youth. It begins with youth interest and quickly amplifies key concepts that resonate within a classroom and well beyond. Like West, this shift toward meaningful engagement is one that requires educators to remain attuned to the interests and cultural landmarks of youth culture as entre into dialogues about socially conscious curriculum. The corners of commercialism─video games, music videos on YouTube, series on MTV─are going to function as signals for how young people‟s attention is being drawn both outside of schools and in classrooms. Instead of merely challenging the messages, images, and intentions of these multimodal texts, this is a pedagogy that can use these as starting places for youth-oriented production. Youth can remix and speak back to dominant texts not solely as classroom exercises but as public statements to be shared in the same social networks that they utilize daily. In this sense My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy illustrates ways transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013) and textual play can emerge fluidly with the many digital pathways enabled for youth. Transmedia, as described here, are media products that unfold across multiple platforms: a narrative may be told via movie productions, video game plotlines, comic books, and cartoons (as is the case with The Matrix series, for example). Instead of looking at a novel as a singular and definitive version of a text, the notion of transmedia allows youth literacies to demonstrate the text as a hub for building upon and collaboration. How can the canonical text taught in a classroom extend learning from the context of the Shakespearean era to contemporary social issues for youth. We can see burgeoning examples of this now: a quick search on Facebook and it is clear I can friend dozens of Holden Caulfields and Othellos and Katniss Everdeens: teachers and students alike are using today‟s tools to extend stories across various forms. These are not concepts presently being taught in teacher education programs and a Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy calls for intentionality in this respect. West‟s album ends with the song “Who Will Survive in America,” built primarily around an excerpt from a 1970 poem by Gil Scott Heron, “Comment #1.” This finds West not only recontextualizing a critique of leftist organizing in the late sixties and seventies for the modern day but also continuing a dialogue between West‟s and Heron‟s work that extended across several albums; in 2005, West sampled a different Heron poem for his song “My Way Home”; Heron responded with a sample of West‟s “Flashing Lights” for his final album, I’m New Here in 2010. West builds upon, reinterprets, and engages in conversation with Heron‟s work. The narrative and melodic dialogue spreads across three albums and invites listeners to rethink the lyrics, music, and context for both works. It is a transformative work that challenges critical new literacies to build upon the notion of the “meme” as an educational possibility (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006). With memes helping describe quickly spreading, “viral”, media across networks, literature on memes often credits Dawkins (1976) with imbuing the term as a unit that spreads cultural content over time. As not merely a delivery system of information, memes effectively write upon the world and change it. In their 1987 text, Freire and Macedo describe literacy as a process of reading the world and then reading the word. It is an order often lost in discussions of Freire‟s development of critical literacies: cultural, “worldly” experience imbue the process of reading texts. West illustrates how advances in technology allow the world to be written upon and the need for educators to renegotiate their pedagogical stance. “No one man should have all that power”: The Contradictions of Kanye In the lead single off of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Power,” West raps that “No one man should have all that power.” It is a declaration that contributes to West‟s ongoing braggadocio. However, it is also a quote that is steeped in pedagogical meaning and historical precedent. A near word-for-word iteration of this quote was printed in 1957 in the Amsterdam News; a “stunned” police officer, noted about Malcolm X, “No one man should have that much power” (Marable, 2011, p. 128). It is likely that the quote was picked up by West in the 1992 Spike Lee directed biopic, X. This would not be the first time that Malcolm X is invoked in West‟s lyrics. In “Good Morning” West claims he‟s “like the fly Malcolm X buy any jeans necessary.” Both invocations of the civil rights leader point back to the remixing and transmedia literacies that West demonstrates; they are necessary components of Beautiful Dark Twisted Pedagogy. However, I want to also return to the line from “Power” and its implications both for reflecting on West and for classroom practice. As a self-critique, West’s statement points to the problematic ways his performance of the Hip Hop genre upholds individuals and capitalism in boasts that separate fans through recognizable power structures. However, it is a model that West also challenges in content: the song “Power” was shared in multiple mixes before its profitable release on West’s album with power and voice distributed (though not evenly) with his fans. From my own classroom experience, it is easy for critical educators to look at the realm of capitalism and disregard it wholesale; though I secretly indulged in West’s music, I would deride it in discussions with my 11th graders. And yet, while the content is a problematic perpetuation of marketing practices, the approaches themselves speak to the ways students are engaging, interacting, and approaching informal learning. Approaching the challenging domain of capitalism with a lens of pragmatic optimism, West illustrates the potential of participatory media as enacted by for-profit companies and illustrates ways these can be harnessed for wholesale social transformation. Finally, in returning to West‟s lyric, “No one man should have all that power,” it is important to notice that West distributes production, input, and narrative across various platforms with numerous points of input for others. It is a reflection of what radical educators classrooms can look like. The decentralization of the teacher as singular leader within the classroom is neither new nor revolutionary. However, in looking at the ways teacher- leaders, like West, can spark conversation, invite multimodal exploration, and direct connection with the community, the role of the teacher is not diminished as much as it is altered. Perhaps a problematic source for some, in terms of beginning a conversation of how critical pedagogy continues to shift in the 21st Century, Kanye West‟s work illustrates practices our students are engaged in everyday. His work functions as a provocation for a redefinition of pedagogy that addresses the cultural shifts of participatory media. It is messy, problematic, and─in the liberatory possibilities it signals─beautiful. It is a pedagogy of hope for the digital age. 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