Speaking the Lower Frequencies: Students and Media Literacy

4. Strange Texts in Postmodern Space

It is possible for students simultaneously to be very canny about the social forces that define their identity and still take their own subject position as the real itself, against which radical differences are dismissed as bizarre. Even though the day-to-day experiences of contemporary students includes complex negotiations with difference across lines of gender, race, class, religion, etc., these differences are often softened by an offhand , hip, MTVeejay style that can be adopted by almost anyone young. Encounters with truly strange texts and experiences are rare. —thomas mclaughlin, Street Smarts and Critical Literacy The “teacher as text” project involves exposing students to new texts and experiences, exploding the texts into sociological components of analysis like race, class, age, and gender, and explicating new narratives that help students comprehend just how complicated their social worlds are, that differences that they perceive as radical and bizarre may not be as easily dismissed as they’d desire. In my classes I expose students to “strange texts” (Jacobs and Brooks 1999), media products that most have not encountered, and which preclude the easy assimilation described by McLaughlin. Such texts are intertextual: decoding of meanings are dependent on knowledge and use of other media products and messages and resulting lived experiences, even if the products have apparently clear and discreet boundaries. Encounters with strange texts force students to speak the lower frequencies, raising usually background understandings of social structural connections to the conscious level in order to explicitly deal with implications of their particular articulations. Chapter Four Strange Texts in Postmodern Space This is most vividly illustrated by using the short HBO film Space Traders (Hudlin and Hudlin 1994), about extraterrestrial aliens visiting earth with an extraordinary social engineering proposal. I show this film to almost all my classes; in this chapter I will explore individual class reception of the text when used in the 1997–1998 autoethnography. I will also explore another “strange text,” an episode of the TV show The XFiles . In the classroom as Pensieve one of the tasks of the instructor is to expose students to unusual texts such as these, helping students learn that forces exist in their lives that are more complex than they’d care to admit. Although the texts may already be part of the students’ lives in one way or another, in the Pensieve the way in which students relate to the text can be made strange, highlighting the unusual—but very powerful —considerations that students have not investigated. What Is Space Traders? There was no escape, no alternative. Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived. —derrick bell, “The Space Traders” “The Space Traders” is a short story by Derrick Bell in his Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), and Space Traders is an HBO film adaptation (Hudlin and Hudlin 1994) of that story. I showed the forty-minute film to both classes of the 1997–1998 autoethnography, during the ninth (fall) and fourth (spring) weeks of the semester. Then, in a five-page essay assignment students were asked to choose and analyze an important difference in the two treatments, and to discuss implications of their articulations. Both versions depict the United States in the year 2000. The nation is burdened economically with a deficit, faces energy problems, suffers from severe environmental hazards, and continues to struggle with the issue of race. However, all these social ills can be solved if the country surrenders its African American citizens to a group of extraterrestrial travelers—“space traders”—who will turn the Statue of Liberty into gold, clean up polluted waterways, and provide the country with a source of unlimited energy in exchange. The American government is given a set time period (five days in the film, seventeen in the story) to decide whether to accept the offer. What happens on judgment day is far less important, however, than what is revealed over the course of the time period about the country and Americans of all persuasions. As the American government leaves the final decision to its citizens 68 Speaking the Lower Frequencies through a national telephone referendum, the story explores responses to the trade offer from the country’s government, its commercial culture industries, and its citizens, particularly its African Americans. As black people mount traditional strategies of resistance—sit-ins, rallies, and boycotts—American captains of...