Volume 4, Issue 1 — Intersections: Belief, Pedagogy, and Politics

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    EASTERN IMAGINARIES
    (Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2017) Quinn, Erika
    Orientalist tropes shaped Western ideas about the East in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries through travelogues and fiction, and have persisted into the twenty-first. One central set -piece of these stereotypes is the imaginary Eastern European country, “Ruritania.” The advantages and drawbacks of such an imagined place are explored more thoroughly through two recent pieces of pop culture, Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, and China Miéville’s novel The City and the City. While Anderson’s film entertains and sustains Orientalist stereotypes, Miéville’s novel demands the reader go deeper to empathize with characters and grapple with key issues about collective identity, power, corruption and violence. Keywords: Wes Anderson, China Miéville, World War Two, Stefan Zweig, Bruno Schulz, Identity, Kitsch, Ruritania, Holocaust, Orientalism
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    HYPING THE HYPERREAL: POSTMODERN VISUAL DYNAMICS IN AMY HECKERLING’S CLUELESS
    (Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2017) Urie, Andrew
    An iconic staple of 1990s Hollywood cinema, director-screenwriter Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) is a cult classic. This article examines the film’s postmodern visual dynamics, which parody hyperreal media culture and its connection to feminine teen consumerism amidst the image-saturated society of mid-’90s era Los Angeles. Keywords: Clueless, Amy Heckerling, Jane Austen, Emma, Popular Culture Visual Culture, Film Studies, Media Studies, Postmodernism, Hyperreal
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    MORE THAN SIMPLE PLAGIARISM: LIGOTTI, PIZZOLATTO, AND TRUE DETECTIVE’S TERRESTRIAL HORROR
    (Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2017) Elmore, Jonathan
    Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” (“Long Bright Dark”). In doing so, the series employs Southern gothic conventions to look forward rather than backward in time. Rather than the decay and degeneration of the landscape as reflective of the past, such squalor points forward to a time, rapidly approaching, when the setting will itself be swallowed by the sea. Hence, True Detective enacts a more practical approach to Ligotti’s horror, one I’m calling terrestrial horror. Keywords: True Detective, Terrestrial Horror, Thomas Ligotti, Pessimism, Ecocriticism, Cosmic Horror
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    THE PEDAGOGY AND POLITICS OF RACIAL PASSING: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF VISUAL LITERACY IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY ACTIVIST MEDIA
    (Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2017) Propper, Tara
    This article explores how we can use African American activist media to theorize the role of pedagogy in the public sphere. Focusing on how racial passing stories expose the limiting (and often tropic) binaries through which racial identity is deciphered, this analysis further highlights the extent to which these binary constructions of identity are learned through media narration.. Using the December, 1912, issue of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Crisis Magazine as a touchstone for investigation, this analysis considers how pedagogy is taken up as both a theme and project in the magazine. Foregrounding the degree to which Crisis critiques and counternarrates the demeaning and derogatory portrayals of African American identity in early twentieth-century media, this article suggests that Du Bois’s magazine not only indicts dominant visual systems of seeing and evaluating African American identity but also reveals the extent to which such systems of seeing and interpreting blackness are learned and can be remediated through media intervention. The ultimate aim of this article is to derive an interpretive framework that understands pedagogy as not simply a method for inscribing pre-existent dominant norms but rather as a means for intervening, questioning, and challenging dominant systems of representation and public articulation. Moreover, this analysis intends to reveal the hidden pedagogies within dominant cultural paraphernalia for the purposes of advancing an approach to media literacy that recognizes and endeavors to transform the tropes and archetypes applied to marginal and minority communities. Keywords: Media Activism, Pedagogy, Public Sphere, Race, Giroux, Du Bois, African American, Print Culture
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    VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1 — INTERSECTIONS: BELIEF, PEDAGOGY, AND POLITICS
    (Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, 2017) King, Lynnea Chapman; CohenMiller, Anna S.
    We are pleased to present issue 4.1 of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, in which we explore belief systems, pedagogy, and politics. Across these nine works, ranging from explorations of social justice within teaching and learning to critical analysis of scholarship within the field, these articles provide an opportunity to think about the ways in which popular culture and pedagogy can deeply engage both within the classroom and beyond, as well as within informal learning spaces. We begin the issue with Tara Propper’s “The Pedagogy and Politics of Racial Passing: Examining the Role of Visual Literacy in Turn-of-the-Century Activist Media” and Erika Quinn’s “Eastern Imaginaries,” examining important implications for individuals and society as well as suggestions for pedagogy. Using an historical lens, Propper’s article emphasizes the importance of the media in shaping individual racial identity, speaking to current topics of concern including racial passing. Specifically, she explores the use of African American activist media in theorizing the role of pedagogy in the public sphere through historical analysis. Moving from historical perceptions of race as seen in African American activist media, Quinn’s work addresses the historical influence of Western ideas shaped by Orientialist tropes of the East. In particular, she uses the imaginary Eastern European country of Ruritania as a central example of stereotypical beliefs. Quinn uses two contemporary artifacts—Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel and China Miéville’s novel The City and the City— to explore the way in which popular culture can reify harmful stereotypes or reject such racial conceptions, pushing the audience to confront “issues about collective identity, power, corruption and violence.” While the first two articles address key contemporary concerns as seen through news media and fiction, Jonathan Elmore’s, “More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, and True Detective’s Terrestrial Horror,” considers how horror can speak to common human issues. He explores how “Nic Pizzolatto, the writer of True Detective, ‘borrowed’ sections of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” and ultimately developed a new type of horror, “terrestrial horror,” which incorporates discussion of worldwide threats such as climate change and environmental collapse. The final article in this section discusses postmodern visual dynamics in film. Andrew Urie in “ Hyping the Hyperreal: Postmodern Visual Dynamics in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless,” focuses not on the standard reading of the 1995 film as an adaptation of Austen’s Emma, but instead, conducts an examination of the postmodern visual texture of Clueless, connecting feminine teen consumerism to the time frame of the in the mid-’90s era Los Angeles. The second section of this issue, Applications in the Classroom, features Edward Janak and Lisa Pescara-Kovach’s “Four Decades, Three Songs, Too Much Violence: Using Popular Culture Media Analysis to Prepare Preservice Teachers for Dealing with School Violence” and Jason Gulya’s “Teaching Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out within the Tradition of Allegorical Personification.” Janak and Pescara-Kovach address the role of music in the context of teacher education, providing preservice educators with approaches for countering bullying and school violence. Gulya then examines a recent Disney film as a modern iteration of the historical literary form, allegory. Though approaching pedagogy from two very different perspectives—social justice teacher education and content delivery in the classroom—the authors provide innovative perspectives on the role of popular culture for both instructors and students on how to engage with others and texts. We conclude the issue with three reviews, of copyright laws, of a design museum, and of popular culture in the classroom. Janet Brennan Croft takes on the ever-challenging topic of copyright laws in academia and the resources used by scholars, reviewing multiple texts to unpack the dynamic sociopolitical nature of US copyright laws. As Croft examines numerous sources, Laurence Raw likewise looks across multiple texts, critically discussing the use of popular culture in the classroom in high schools and universities. Lastly, Michael Samuel engages in a review of The Design Museum in London, discussing details of the museum ranging from architectural features and exhibitions engaging the viewing public. We look forward to your engagement with these articles tackling new topics and approaches drawing intersections between popular culture and pedagogy.