Week 7: The Mystory inspired "Naystory" (Am I doing this right?)

This week, I continue my reflections on complex concepts unearthed in Ulmer's TELEtheory. In the second half of his book, Ulmer provides the foundation for the creation of the Mystory, a set of elements "temporarily" gathered to represent "a scene of academic discourse" (Ulmer, 2004, p. 106), particularly as it relates to electracy. Ulmer draws upon a wide range of theoretical concepts, from post-structuralism and historiography to psychoanalysis and the nature of a joke, in the creation of this pedagogical form that is rooted in invention. Such invention is on display with Ulmer's fondness for neologisms that appear throughout his writing.

In the title of this week's entry, I play with some of his concepts, starting with the creation of my own neologism - the Naystory, which aims to capture the story that a nation creates for itself, still using Ulmer's three levels of discourse, the [collective] personal, the popular and the expert. The use of the prefix "nay" is a play on words, a pun, if you will, capturing both the phonetic 'na' sound that begins the word 'nation' and the locutionary meaning of the word 'nay,' used either for emphasis or the more archaic meaning, to dispute a position.

The punctum for this neologism was happened upon during the viewing of one of Ulmer's videos in which he considers the inevitable impact that the apparatus shift from orality to literacy to electracy will have on nationhood, a concept, he states, that is contingent upon literacy. What caught me by surprise in the two-minute clip, however, was the mention of my home country, The Bahamas, during Ulmer's discourse. At the 1:30 mark, Ulmer, comments that "everyone is getting a Dropbox in The Bahamas" in support of his point about the disintegration of nations' economic boundaries as we currently perceive them.

MY PERCEPTION OF THE BAHAMAS' REACTION:

The use of drop boxes in The Bahamas, as exemplified by the US based company GM (General Motors) in Ulmer's remarks, instantiates the questionable movement of financial products from developed nations to other countries in order to evade taxes. His comment led me to think about how The Bahamas, a developing nation, is resultantly perceived, both denotatively and connotatively. Mentions of The Bahamas in popular film and television present an uneven but dialectic view of the country, and a specific narrative appears to emerge: paradise (a modern day Eden) versus piracy (evasion or escape tied to illegal activities), as seen in the clip below:

On a (collectively) personal level, the people of The Bahamas are more likely to have a nostalgic view of country, one that plays up elements of paradise, as that is key to the nation's economic stability, but also focuses on the unifying qualities of culture as captured through the people, food, marine life, its archipelagic geography, art, food and the premier cultural expression that combines music and the arts, Junkanoo. This nostalgic view is captured in Bahamian music producer Antonio Samuel Dean's (https://www.instagram.com/tonio_dean/) "soundtrack" to life in The Bahamas below:

Bahamian experts, however, including historians and academicians may have a view of nationhood that is less nostalgic, drawing upon anthropological and social references to establish a view grounded less in the heuretics evident in Dean's video and more in the hermeneutics of historical and current texts. Those views, however, because of their situation in institutional and ideological practices that privilege the essay or the treatise, can be less accessible to an electrate audience that is more responsive to images, sounds and other graphic semiotic tools to evoke powerful responses and create meaning. So while noted Bahamian scholar and writer Dr. Ian Strachan in the snippet below makes a compelling case about the insidious nature of the paradisical view of The Bahamas, and the corresponding negative effects on the Bahamian people, arguably, the imagery present in the preceding video has greater impact in the affective domain, that is joy vs sadness, on the axis of electracy. As a result, truth remains hidden.

(Full keynote address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GTDzZyuYbU)

Perhaps embedded in these opposing views is the joke that Ulmer notes is pivotal to mystory - the irony that Dr. Strachan notes later in his speech, that The Bahamas, also in contrast to the United States, chooses to hide the truth about our past from ourselves.

Having come to the end of my mini experiential reflection, I hope I have engaged the practice of mystory/naystory in a way that creates the kind of thought and discovery that Ulmer hopes it will achieve.