Learning What Questions to Ask

"How do media representations of race, gender, and class impact the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?" This question was the nexus of the American Issues course I developed during my eight-year tenure as a high school history teacher in suburban Boston. To put it simply, while I had bemoaned the dearth of spaces for meaningful discussion of media in what was becoming an exam-driven curricular climate, I also knew that there was so much that I did not know. The search for answers to abstract, historical, and political questions about the power of the media led me back to graduate school in film and television studies at UCLA.

I offer this bit of autobiography as a means of introducing the critical texts that have had the most profound effect on my development as a scholar of cultural and media studies. While my time in the academy has made clear to me that the questions I thought about while I was developing the high school course had myriad answers, Iain Chambers's Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Ellen Seiter's Television and New Media Audiences, and Herman Gray's Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness" reset my intellectual trajectory by transforming my understanding of identity, revealing the significance of the audience's role in the historical power of television, and presenting a model for the sociopolitical study of television history in general and the representation of race in television more specifically. In other words, these books provided me with the insight, language, and theoretical savvy to determine what questions I needed to ask in order to grow as a scholar, as a teacher, and, of course, as a media baby.

There have been a few times in my life when a collection of words, lines, or sentences has had an indelible impact on my worldview: the last lines of The Great Gatsby in high school, the entirety of Tom Waits's "Kentucky Avenue" in college, and Stuart Hall's pronouncement in "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation" that identity "is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of being." After Fitzgerald and Waits and before Hall, during my first year at UCLA, I read Iain Chambers's Migrancy, Culture, Identity. I was a nontraditional student venturing into film and television studies and a novice in cultural theory, who had come home to California after almost a decade on the East Coast. Notions of home and identity resonated for me. When I read Chambers's description of "migrancy" as a sort of postmodern mobility that "involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain"—and as a mobile mode of "inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and clear structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of languages that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging" intuitively made sense to me—I felt as though I had been given the words to describe my own sense of displacement, re-rooting and redefinition as a fledgling scholar of color who had come home again.¹ Chambers's small, theory-packed volume, replete with anecdotal moments and stories, took me on a cathartic journey through notions of culture, home, identity formation, and cultural theory.

Moreover, Chambers's work acted as my official introduction to both cultural studies and postcolonialism. I was both intrigued and inspired by his definition, or more aptly, directive for the former: "[Culture studies] exists as an act of interrogation: a moment of doubt, dispersal, and dissemination. It reveals an opening, not a conclusion; it always marks the moment of departure, never a homecoming."² Chambers's poetic and personal book is challenging and compassionate, rigorous and resonating, and it offered me a point of departure as a media studies scholar, whose work endeavors to find "the intersections of histories and memories, experiencing both their preliminary dispersal and their subsequent translation."³

While Migrancy, Culture, Identity acted as a revelatory text on issues of identity, Ellen Seiter's Television and New Media Audiences offered the...