CRITICAL READING IN QUESTION
NOTES: Origins & Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
This "slogan" mixes (or creates montage with) three elements: the ideas and images of transatlantic black and queer theorist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien; text describing lessons I learned from LFYT 07; and a related video. In my blog "On Slogans" I write: "I ask you to think of the following slogans, penned by committed artists from long past revolutions, times, and places, and then followed by my own slogan-responses, as a call to arms for how we might better muster today's technology to contribute to an ongoing project of improving the possibilities for presentation, interpretation, and abstract social evaluation, human interaction, perception, and epistemology, through media praxis."
Contextualization
"Isaac Julien has been involved, with forging a new language around black representation, both as filmmaker and cultural critic. His exemplary body of work is informed by critical thinking around representation while not being solely theory driven. Unimpeded by the avant-garde aesthetic which often denies pleasure, his films retain certain conventional narrative strategies which are shot through with diegetic effects that work to disrupt narrative telos."
Kobena Mercer is a cultural worker/critic whose varied work on the politics of representation in African diasporic visual arts has inaugurated an important line of inquiry into post-identitarian cultural politics.
Theoretical conversations about Difference and Commonality: Gender, Sexuality, Race/Ethnicity, and Their Intersections, respond to such work: "While separating racial studies from gender studies from sexuality studies serves to highlight their respective evolutions and achievements, it does so at the cost of obscuring multiple identities and complex interactions."
Diana Fuss says that essentialism: "is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity...Importantly, essentialism is typically defined in opposition to difference...The opposition is a helpful one in that it reminds us that a complex system of cultural, social, psychical, and historical differences, and not a set of pre-existent human essences, position and constitute the subject. However, the binary articulation of essentialism and difference can also be restrictive, even obfuscating, in that it allows us to ignore or deny the differences within essentialism."
"To non-critical readers, texts provide facts. Readers gain knowledge by memorizing the statements within a text. To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual's "take" on the subject matter. Critical readers thus recognize not only what a text says, but also how that text portrays the subject matter. They recognize the various ways in which each and every text is the unique creation of a unique author."
One of my ten founding terms for this project is PARTICIPANT: What is the role and who gets to be a viewer/critic, a participant, in media culture? Then, what is the role of emotion and identification?
Kobena Mercer is a cultural worker/critic whose varied work on the politics of representation in African diasporic visual arts has inaugurated an important line of inquiry into post-identitarian cultural politics.
Theoretical conversations about Difference and Commonality: Gender, Sexuality, Race/Ethnicity, and Their Intersections, respond to such work: "While separating racial studies from gender studies from sexuality studies serves to highlight their respective evolutions and achievements, it does so at the cost of obscuring multiple identities and complex interactions."
Diana Fuss says that essentialism: "is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity...Importantly, essentialism is typically defined in opposition to difference...The opposition is a helpful one in that it reminds us that a complex system of cultural, social, psychical, and historical differences, and not a set of pre-existent human essences, position and constitute the subject. However, the binary articulation of essentialism and difference can also be restrictive, even obfuscating, in that it allows us to ignore or deny the differences within essentialism."
"To non-critical readers, texts provide facts. Readers gain knowledge by memorizing the statements within a text. To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual's "take" on the subject matter. Critical readers thus recognize not only what a text says, but also how that text portrays the subject matter. They recognize the various ways in which each and every text is the unique creation of a unique author."
One of my ten founding terms for this project is PARTICIPANT: What is the role and who gets to be a viewer/critic, a participant, in media culture? Then, what is the role of emotion and identification?
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More videos related to the content of this page
"What is in question is not the expression of some lost origin or some uncontaminated essence in black film-language but the adoption of a critical voice that promotes consciousness of the collision of cultures and histories that constitute our very conditions of existence." Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer
On-line media should promote critical reading practices as well as liberated voices explicating the conditions, including media practices, that are necessary to engender this freedom. YouTube is defined by empty and endless collisions unlinked from culture, history, context, author, or intention. Collision without consciousness.
On-line media should promote critical reading practices as well as liberated voices explicating the conditions, including media practices, that are necessary to engender this freedom. YouTube is defined by empty and endless collisions unlinked from culture, history, context, author, or intention. Collision without consciousness.