ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag (1973) theorizes the expanding place of images in late 19th-Century culture by arguing “a society becomes ‘modern’ when one of its chief activities is producing and consuming images, when images [become invested with] extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality and are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience” (p. 153). On Photography, Sontag’s treatise on the power of culturally produced images, particularly resonates with my experience, particularly since a couple of years ago, when I presented a paper at AERA’s annual meeting during one of the Media, Culture, and Curriculum Special Interest Group’s (SIG) sessions. I drew from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God to theorize what it means for humans to embark on life as a journey-one replete with, imbued with, becomingsand what such stories of human quest might tell us about the role of education. The text of the novel served as my entrée into the realm of the group, for, last I checked, a book still “counted” as media. My paper had been paired with four others and while one other utilized a written text as her source, the remaining three authors brought feature film as their media source. When time came for questions and answers, the standing-room-only audience (in an admittedly small room) could not wait to offer their thoughts on and interpretations of the films and excitedly interrupted one another to offer ever-morefinely-nuanced details. At the first break in the conversation I offered a comment that went something like this: “I think it is worth remarking that in a SIG focused on media, people seem only to want to talk about visual forms of popular culture. We should really discuss what this means for the direction of the SIG.”My question about our mission having been put, after a short (and silent) skipped beat, the room regained its unapologetically lusty enthusiasm for talking about what had been seen-and, of course, what the one-seeing supposed. Such is the zeal for and
power of the visual and so follows the need for an area of scholarship on visual culture.
