oral tradition

Much of Nigerian oral poetry, especially the musical genre, has been increasingly reduced to digital formats through the instrumentality of new media technologies. This transformation has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged in oral literary researches and discourses. This alternative existence acquired by the oral forms manifests itself in digital technological modes like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, digital radio and television and the internet which assure them of longevity. This paper, therefore, engages Nigerian oral poetry and its inscription in digital processes using new media technologies. In particular, it negotiates the trajectory of transforming primary orality to secondary and tertiary orality through which oral performances like songs have acquired new modes of existence and meanings by way of recordings and digitalization using the new media. Many of these poetic forms have travelled through historical time to the postmodern moment as migrant metaphors and have become stored in digital forms thus making them new wine though preserved in the old wineskins of the poets and new media processes. Using an emergent generation of Nigerian popular poets and musical artistes, the paper problematizes the episteme of authorship. It interrogates the very idea of authorship in the contested and interstitial space of communal and individual authorship in the digital age where the term has undergone radical destabilisation. Who owns the oral forms, for instance? Is it the so-called anonymous composer in traditional society, the collector or recorder who mediates the creative process and becomes a surrogate agent, or the contemporary artist who is heir to this timeless tradition of oral intellection through performances that are digitalized and stored in retrieval systems, or is it a virtual community of authors, or a hybrid of all of these? The paper concludes that digital technologies are a means of preserving these oral forms and endowing them with vitality and enduring relevance to meet the immediacy and urgency of postmodern societal needs in Nigeria.

The current Indian government’s dream of a ‘Digital India’ does not include digital culture or the digital humanities. The country now has its digital library of digitised analog works (mainly printed texts) but it does not have a significant electronic literature. It does have a growing videogames industry that is becoming keener on sophisticated means of non-linear storytelling and also deeper investment in digital storytelling through platforms such as wevideo etc. mainly for the purposes of raising social awareness. Recent videogames such as the indie RPG, Unrest as well as adaptations of Bollywood films such as Ghajini attempt non-linear storytelling. Digital stories, such as ‘We are Angry’, a story about the recent brutalities against women in India, are becoming a popular medium of spreading awareness.

Together with this, the popularity of using the web as a medium for publishing poetry is on the rise. Some of this poetry, often not acceptable to print journals, tends to go viral on the web and on social media. Indeed, songs such as ‘Kolaveri di’ (sung in Tanglish, a mix of Tamil and English) and ‘Hok Kolorob’ became overnight hits on Youtube and other social media sites. While the former gained cult status in the country, the latter inspired a political movement against a corrupt education system. Another example is the digital recording and dissemination of the late-poet Vidrohi who lived by himself in a university campus in Delhi and composed poems in the oral tradition.

Non-linear traditions of storytelling and poetry have existed in India since ancient times and in a variety of forms ranging from the stories in the Katha traditions to the Urdu dastangoi plays. Strangely, though, despite its recent digital commitment, the government has not considered digital counterparts of such nonlinear literature worthy of its attention. Electronic literature, as it is understood in Europe and the U.S.A, does not have a presence in Indian literary and cultural traditions yet. The few Digital Humanities programmes that have developed in the country might be engaging with electronic literature in their curriculum. If so, the beginnings of e-lit are already evident in older cultural traditions and the process of remediation is certainly This article aims to explore the (non)beginnings of electronic literature in India and to think through larger implications of electronic literature in the digital culture and Humanities teaching at large.

As new ways of sharing stories emerge, how does this impact on our writing processes, the ways in which they are informed by previous practices, and the development of new possibilities? Technologies shape stories (Zipes, 2012, p. 21), yet as digital texts take on ever more varied forms – multimedia, sensor-driven, embedded in objects and located in landscapes – contemporary writing practices remain linked to the production of the printed book (Bolter, 1991, p. 5). This paper considers opportunities and challenges in shifting from using only chirographic and typographic tools in writing practice to utilising methods from the oral tradition and other practices.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

Janet Murray writes, “The kaleidoscopic powers the computer offers us…might also lead to compelling narratives that capture our new situation as citizens of a global community. The media explosion of the past one hundred years has brought us face-to-face with particular individuals around the world without telling us how to connect with them” (282). This assertion points to the transforming effects digital media are now having on the ways that we experience representational arts following the advent of digital technology, and points to some of the potential setbacks that Internet-based narrative might embody. This paper will investigate these implications as they relate to narrative trajectory and possibility through analysis of Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s networked novel Flight Paths (2009).

One of the greatest assets of using Internet-based technologies resides in the potential for these technologies to expand the possibilities for action and interaction among people disbursed through time and space. Flight Paths hearkens to the beginnings of a return to the notion of reading and writing as a social activity and the reestablishment of literature to historical “oral” traditions. In this presentation, I will identify the implications of communal narratives developed via digital means, exploring the potentials of networked narrative spaces as they apply to the larger field of narrative. The potentials for this and other socially generated electronic texts collapse time, space, or both through the instantaneously reciprocal possibilities inherent to works that exist within the digital realm. The Internet and its instant communication possibilities allow for a further change in digital narratives that return us to some of our earliest narrative roots.

This return to early narrative traditions is perhaps one of the most important ways in which narrative is becoming increasingly mimetic in the wake of digital technologies, pointing to the ways in which electronic literature may be positioning itself to become a hyperreal cultural stand-in for real-life narrative exchanges. Flight Paths is a text that connects global readers and allows for continual streams of data incorporation into the narrative. Many other authors are pursuing this trend through Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, illustrating a drift towards collaborative, continually updated narrative strategies that are further pushing us towards Baudrillard’s conception of the simulacra as indicative of our 21st-century reality. If fictionalized narratives can convincingly-enough simulate real-life experiences of their content, while simultaneously replicating interpersonal exchanges of said narrative and further overstepping the limiting possibilities of the tangible world through digital means, what is to stop them from assuming the revered place of the hyperreal that our culture already so highly values? This paper will connect these seemingly contradictory threads, asserting that Flight Paths and other similar works are moving us in two directions simultaneously – towards a group-centered oral culture of the past that is likewise a marker of the hyperreal ideals of the future.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)