Catch the Italo Calvino reference?

This virtual presentation at 4C24 was complicated, as it involved designing and scripting a tiny game, writing a talk with numbered lines, reordering the lines to correlate with the path of the avatar in the game, then recording myself reading the lines aloud in accordance with the avatar’s path. The text is intentionally left out of the game to compel the audience to engage in multiple modalities: my voice, the recorded gameplay, the text itself in the provided access copy.

I used Bitsy HD to design the game: a point lattice on the ground on a clay-colored screen, and an avatar who triggers a numbered dialog box each time it steps onto a point, leaving patterned blocks in its wake in an approximation of a kolam (the pixelated nature of the game made it tricky to accurately render the intricate, interconnected loops in time for the presentation, but the final game uses a pulli kolam design). Each number corresponds to an excerpt of the full text, and each number signals something about that excerpt’s purpose. I revealed what each number means at the end of the talk. To ensure my timing was right, I created a screen recording with a voiceover and played it during my panel.

Notably, in the talk, I ask the audience to write down the numbers of the excerpts that appealed to them most. Apparently, by a rough poll, there was one vote for 1 (thesis and argumentation), five votes for 5 (context), and at least seven votes for 3 (intertextual meaning-making). So despite the profession’s insistence on traditional scholarly writing, it seems like—in this case, anyway—those excerpts were least compelling.

The prerecorded video is available on YouTube:

You can also play the Bitsy game for yourself on Github. Access copy of the talk below.

If to Move the Soul a Writer

Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
CCCC, Spokane, WA
April 5, 2024

Audience: Write or type the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in a column. When a line moves you, make a notation next to its corresponding number.

2. An avatar walks around a clay-colored screen, pausing to create patterns on the ground. Dialogue boxes appear, listing numbers. A design emerges.

1. Communicative competence in traditional academic scholarship means state, then elaborate, the Eurocentric model of writing, but my diasporic composition practice has always involved lateral thinking and subtle clues. After I became disabled, the latter began surfacing in my scholarship, as intermittently as chronic pain and fatigue in my bodymind.

2. In family lore, I stopped breathing when I was born and brought something back with me when I revived. According to my parents, its preternatural contours are intermittently perceptible. This is the closest thing to difference that was said about me at home, but home isn’t where my ways of knowing were different. 

3. Lau (2022) describes being an undisciplined cognator: a person whose arrhythmic states of cognition—disorderly thinking, stuttering, disoriented responses—renders their capability, professionalism, and “fit” for the needs of a job suspect. 

1. I’m an Eelam Tamil American writer with chronic pain and fatigue, and as is the case with so many BIPOC and disabled folks, academia’s demands are slowly killing me in body, mind, and spirit.

3. Perera’s (2016) survival media: the spaces, practices, narratives, and artifacts produced by refugee bodyminds and the generation after them, the ones who never lived it but are silently charged with keeping the memory alive.

2. I grew up in New York, an ocean away from ethnic conflict, but my parents brought it with them when they immigrated and, due to conflict, couldn’t return home. Names were rarely offered. Just dates, deaths, disappearances. Who did it was left ambiguous, even when my parents had answers. I inherited this relationship to mystery. 

1. I’m watching myself fade a little more with each uphill battle about what my composition process and product should be to succeed: a transparently purposeful, linear process, a disembodied, monolingual, monomodal, autonomous text (Canagarajah, 2023; McRuer, 2004).

1. If there’s a classical Indian analogue to European rhetoric, it’s rasa aesthetics, always embodied and enminded. Wilke (2018) calls it “a concept of rhetoric which surpasses mere intellectual persuasiveness and conviction but includes body, mind, and intellect in a holistic manner.” Banerjee (2004) describes it as an affective phenomenon of emergence, “an aesthetic gustatory pleasure and […] a cognition”—the indescribable flavor or essence imbued in a work by its creator.

3. From a mini-game like this one in my monograph-in-progress: “This brain is an Eelam Tamil American brain, acculturated to glitched media. Noise was an aesthetic, material, sensorial quality of Tamil media I was exposed to as a kid.” I found—still find—pleasure in differentiating noise and signal, in interpreting their interplay.

1. Tamil literacy assumes that texts exist in a communicative ecology and are always intertextual, and that readers want an interpretive puzzle to solve and take pleasure in the exercise of constructing, connecting, and creating meanings. 

3. Canagarajah (2023) says: “We cultivated a writing that deployed subtle clues to weave the textual threads together rather than offering the thesis on a platter.”

2. I only began presenting at 4Cs in 2020. I avoided it for years because I was told only disciplined cognition is a good fit. This talk—the only shit my pained, fatigued, immune-dysregulated bodymind can produce right now—isn’t that. I write this while recovering from surgery. I write this during the ongoing Palestinian genocide. I write this knowing most of our organizations could give a fuck about that or about public health risk mitigations for community protection. I write this unable to intensely engage with anything.

2. The Batticaloa Tamilness of my composition practice was so insidiously acquired I really bought my bullshit when I said I was entirely Americanized. Through the epics, parables, and stories Appa taught me when I was a kid, I learned and internalized Advaita philosophy, a flat ontology that understands existence as interconnected, mutually constitutive and cooperative, that values relational ethics and communal care (Canagarajah, 2022; Poonamallee, 2010). Through stories of local sorcery and relatives who channeled the supernatural, I learned there is magic in writing.

3. Too often, “the successful text is the one that murders me to protect you” (Manivannan, 2022).

1. The Eurocentric tradition is filled with binaries: mind/body; human/nonhuman; representation/object; normal/abnormal. School taught me anomaly is deviancy, in both bodymind and writing, so I lean hard into writerly techniques and disciplinary names that help disguise or legitimize my diasporic-disabled composition practice. 

2. Scholars senior to me said traditional work is easier for the academic community to understand, but isn’t it insulting to imply that this audience doesn’t want to work for it, is too inflexible to vary its monolingual, monomodal reading orientation and hermeneutics? Not to mention the Eurocentric audacity of it. The use of rasa, magic, and intentional ambiguity is what makes my work traditional (Trawick, 1990).

3. Van Hollen (2003) characterizes her writing as a kolam: a design that intersects with and loops around various non-hierarchically arranged points, with no identifiable beginning or end. Rather than making a single, overarching, neatly packaged point, her writing “loops and swirls around several key points of reference, each of which is given equal valence. Each point in the kolam maintains its independence, suspended in space in the interstices of the looping lines which pull the individual points together into one web of interlocking boomerangs flying in different directions.”

1. Academic composition is an inherently normalizing enterprise, where normal is Euro-American and nondisabled, rejecting cultural and disabled narrative practices for their apparent failure to conform with ideals of rhetorical competence (McRuer, 2004; Dolmage, 2012). English language standards and academic genre conventions fetishize a final product that is this normal (McRuer, 2004).

3. Fictocriticism: A form of writing for which there is no blueprint, specific to the writer’s politics of poiesis; as Gibbs (2005) puts it, “a self-conscious mixing of registers and (already mixed) genres that mimics both a multidisciplinary approach—which may encounter areas of incommensurability in the overlaps between disciplines—and the ‘methodological impurity’ of cultural studies.”

1. Wilke (2018) describes rasa as the “pre-reflexive, sensory-affective, non-notional experience triggered by sensory mediation.” It’s a theatrical aesthetics that enjoins readers to relish texts, to participate and respond to them corporeally; invites writers to write texts that preserve the auditory and gustatory dimensions of rhetoric; insists that the text itself wield its agency to channel and evoke emotion. This is what I mean when I ask if the text moves you.

3. Felluss (2020) observes that rasas lose their liminality when placed into neat, gridded compartments, and actors trained to occupy each box like regimented subjects lose their emotional agility. In process and product, evocation is enhanced by refusing the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence. 

2. Creating a kolam is an embodied, artistic, and mathematical performance, sometimes ceremonial, sometimes routine. According to Amma, we never did it, ambiguously meaning our family, Batticaloa, or all of Sri Lanka. But we sort of did, in America. We had a 1980s edition Spirograph when I was little. We all played with it. Amma showed me how to avoid slipping the gears and interrupting the pattern, but creating a continuous curve was more important than avoiding or correcting anomalies.

1. It’s not that staging rasa is easier. When chronic illness limits my capacity to intensely engage, to juggle multiple registers in my working memory, I default to the associative leaps and participatory sense-making of my diasporic composition practice. 

3. Reaume (2021) says: “I do not see examples of how my brain works or my days move in ‘good writing.’ What bodies does that ‘good writing’ come from? What kinds of cognition? […] What if the refusal to fix a thing as just one thing is a Crip aesthetic? […] Why do we crave meaning that exists only in one valence? What kind of worldview is that aesthetics the logical outcome of? And more importantly, what kind of world does that logic help build?”

2. And isn’t that kind of world the reason why so many of us die unheard?

1. Rasa is the linguistic production of emotion. The sphere of literary production never forgot this abundance.

2. An avatar walks around a screen strewing patterns in their path. A design emerges. I can no longer tell where I began.

Audience: Hold up the number of fingers that represents the number you voted for most. 1 indicated thesis statements; 2 offered context; 3 made space for intertextual meaning-making. Reflect, silently, on what your preference means.

Works Cited

Banerjee, P. (2004). Aesthetics of navigational performance in hypertext. AI & Society, 18, 297-309.

Canagarajah, S. (2022). A decolonial crip linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 1-22.

Canagarajah, S. (2023). Decolonizing academic writing pedagogies for multilingual students. TESOL Quarterly, 1-27.

Dolmage, J. (2012). Writing against normal: Navigating a corporeal turn. In K. Arola & A. Wysocki (Eds.), composing (media) = composing (embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing (pp. 115-131). Utah State University Press.

Felluss, S. (2020). Walking rasic space: A critique of Schechner’s “Rasaesthetics.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 16(1), 1-19.

Gibbs, A. (2005). Fictocriticism, affect, mimesis: Engendering differences. Text, 9(1).

Lau, T. (2022). “Undisciplined cognators”: Invisible disability and neurodiversity on the academic job market. In C. McGunnigle (Ed.), Disability and the academic job market (pp. 53-72). Vernon Press.

Manivannan, V. (2022). The successful text is not always the one that murders me to protect you. In Knoblauch, A., & Moeller, M. (Eds.), Bodies of knowledge: Embodied rhetorics in theory and practice (pp. 193-198). University Press of Colorado.

McRuer, R. (2004). Composing bodies; or, De-Composition: Queer theory, disability studies, and alternative corporealities. JAC, 24(1), 47-78.

Perera, S. (2016). Survival media: The politics and poetics of mobility and the war in Sri Lanka. Palgrave.

Poonamallee, L. (2010). Advaita (non-dualism) as metatheory: A constellation of ontology, epistemology, and praxis. Integral Review, 6(3), 190-200.

Reaume, A. H. (2021, June). Brain fog: An essay. Open Book.

Trawick, M. (1990). Notes on love in a Tamil family. University of California Press.

Van Hollen, C. (2003). Birth on the threshold: childbirth and modernity in South India. University of California Press.

Wilke, A. (2018). Classical Indian aesthetics and rasa theory: Observations on embodied religion and aesthetic experience. In S. Dorpmüller, J. Scholz, M. Stille, & I. Weinrich (Eds.), Religion and aesthetic experience: Drama—sermons—literature (pp. 47-89). Heidelberg University Publishing.