JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997 Page: 197
143-198 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Racial Politics, Pedagogy, and Disposable Youth 197
If educators and others are to develop a cultural politics that links theoretical
rigor and social relevance, they also must further the implications of such a
politics by acknowledging the importance of those diverse educational sites
through which a generation of youth are being shaped within a postmodern
culture where information and its channels of circulation demand new forms of
understanding, literacy, and pedagogical practice. This suggests progressives
address how and where politics are being constructed and used in a global world
steeped in visual and electronically mediated technologies that are refashioning
the control and production of new information-based knowledge systems. Kids
no longer view schools as the primary source of education, and rightfully so.
Media texts-videos, films, music, television, radio, computers-and the new
public spheres they inhabit have far more influence on shaping the memories,
language, values, and identities of young people. The new technologies that
influence and shape youth are important to register not merely because they
produce new forms of knowledge, new identities, new social relations, or point
to new forces actively engaged in new forms of cultural pedagogy, but also
because they point to public spheres in which youth are writing and creating their
histories and narratives within social formations that are largely ignored or only
superficially acknowledged in trendy postmodern symposiums on music,
youth, and performance.
Popular culture represents more than a weak version of politics or a facile
notion of innocent entertainment. In its various registers-from cinema to fanzine
magazines-popular culture constitutes a powerful pedagogical site where chil-
dren and adults are being offered specific lessons in how to view themselves, others,
and the world they inhabit. In this sense, the cultural texts that operate within such
spheres must be addressed as serious objects of social analysis by anyone who takes
education seriously. But recognizing that Hollywood films, for instance, function
as teaching machines demands more than including them in the school curricula
as a matter of relevance; it also demands that educators interrogate such texts for
the connections they propose between epistemology and ethics. For instance, as
Geoffrey Hartman has argued, there is a pedagogical connection between "how we
get to know what we know (through various, including electronic media) and the
moral life we aspire to lead" (Hartman 28).
Raising ethical questions about cultural texts is not meant to deny that such
texts register different readings for youth. On the contrary, I am proposing that
popular culture texts have important pedagogical consequences. Difficult as it
may be to gauge what is precisely learned from reading, listening, or engaging
such texts, educators need to analyze how popular texts function as public
discourses. Further, educators must be critically attentive to how such texts
work intertextually, either resonating or conflicting with ideologies produced
in other sites which serve to legitimate or resist dominant policies, and social
relations. Educators cannot treat popular texts as if they were hermetic or pure;
such approaches often ignore how representations are linked to questions of
power and broader social struggles. Reading popular texts through a political
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997, periodical, 1997; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28619/m1/59/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .