“Ball Licky-Lickly!” Pedagogical Strategies for Interrogating Pop Culture Images

A student: “This class rocks because we get to just watch TV and music videos.”

Three beliefs organize much of my pedagogy: popular culture must be assessed for its capacity as a teaching machine, critical media literacy should be a part of every individual’s formal schooling, and understanding injustice means seeing how events (representations) of today connect to those of the past. Therefore, I always use content from popular culture in the classes that I offer to undergraduate students, most of whom aspire to be teachers. One of the more challenging aspects of my approach is getting my students to take pop culture content seriously. For students, the appeal of cartoons, toys and video games, TV shows, music videos and movies in the classroom is that they are easy and fun, entertaining curriculum. The idea that media entertainment is benign, which is common among students, is one of the first myths I must dispel in class.

I situate my approach within childhood cultural studies in which media and pop culture texts are defined as a cultural pedagogy -- the idea that education occurs in a variety of social sites including, but not only in, formal schooling (Steinberg and Kincheloe 2004; Kellner and Share 2005; Marshall and Sensoy 2011). These sites of learning include film, toys, movies, as well as other texts produced for or consumed by children. What this scholarship contends is that pop culture representations don’t simply reflect what’s in the world, but they shape and construct one’s ideas about it. Thus for many educators, critical media literacy has been a useful (though not widespread) strategy by which to educate students about the role institutions like media play in shaping one’s ideas about society. Furthermore, given the overwhelming power of mainstream corporate media to circulate their messages in a manner, format, and consistency that classroom texts rarely enjoy, media texts may in fact demand closer scrutiny than any other curricula with which young people engage.

The Genealogy of Representation Activity

When I begin an undergraduate course, students and I spend the first few sessions studying theories of representation from cultural studies and critical media literacy perspectives. Then we move to textual analyses of pop culture texts mostly related to youth culture. These texts include cartoons, music videos, tween magazines, movies, and video games. This activity arose from two interrelated challenges. The first has been to get students to think about the pop culture they consume as a teaching force that normalizes and naturalizes relations of unequal power in broader society. The second challenge has been to move beyond a single textual to a multiple and intertextual analysis that incorporates ideas about the genealogy of the current image (and its history relating to other images like it) into the analysis. In this way, images are understood not as products of one particular filmmaker’s (or text-maker’s) imagining’s but as stock characters that have a history.

As a response to this challenge, I developed what I call a “genealogy of representation” pedagogy. This activity traces representations in contemporary texts, such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), by giving students an understanding of how various images and stock characters within the text build on one another in ways that map a landscape in which the discourses of racism become familiar, unremarkable, and fixed.

Like most pedagogical “a-ha” moments, the geneology of representation strategy came out of a flop of an activity. In a session on representations of indigeneity in popular culture, students were reading work about race and media broadly (e.g., Allan Luke, Chyng Sun, Meenakshi Durham) in which the authors write about the importance of members of a community telling their own stories. The in-class lecture began with a screening of a short clip from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) in which Jack Sparrow is captured and stranded at Pelegosto, a fictional island inhabited by a vicious cannibal tribe (as they are referred to in the script).1 The cannibals eat Jack’s crew but believe Jack is a god in human form, and so spare him for ceremony.

In this scene we see Jack’s authority over the cannibals as he speaks to them in their language, “Say-say lam shoop-shoop sha smalay-lama shoo-koo. Savvy? Ball licky-licky.” To which the cannibals begin chanting, “Ball licky-licky!”2

Despite seemingly obvious elements of discursive racism organizing the representation of indigenous people (from the costumes and demeanors of the fictional Pelegosto cannibals, to the jibberish-talk of Jack Sparrow, to the worshipping of a white god by the tribe of ignorant indigenous peoples), many of my students reacted with doubt and even disinterest. What to me were horrific depictions of indigenous people (and a virtual reversal of the direction of violence in colonial/indigenous relations) was not a big deal to most of my students. It was not uncommon for me to hear, “yeah but no one takes the film seriously ... “ In essence the message was, lighten up.

While I wanted to scream, “you’ve got to be kidding me?!” the incident forced me to deal with the problem of how racism in this text was invisible to my students, and what to do about it. While it was true that many of my students did not know much about the history of colonialism or genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the Caribbean and Americas, it wasn’t the only challenge. My students also viewed this representation as isolated from its discursive ancestors. In other words, there was no connection in their minds between this representation, and all previous ones upon which this text drew.

I reorganized the materials and created what became a much more effective strategy of presenting a genealogy of the image. I began by challenging what I knew for sure: many of my students believe that racist, sexist, and other oppressive discourses existed in the past, that things are better today, and that those representations back then are way worse than anything on TV or in the movies today.

I hunted for the oldest image I could find that was widely loved in its day and that captured some of the most problematic representational discourses about indigenous peoples. I settled on Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), and in particular the song “What Makes the Red Man Red.”3 After screening the clip from the film together, we generate a list of all the problematic representations. Our list often includes elements such as: white characters finding the red men “interesting,” a stoic chief, an Indian princess capturing the eye of the white man, “woo woo” style chanting, dancing around fires, feathers, war paint, interchangeable “red men,” drumming, nondescript dance moves, the ease with which the white folks learn and participate in native customs, and so on. We then compare the themes from our readings by indigenous authors (including Debbie Reese, Sherman Alexie, and Cornel Pewewardy) about caricatures of the Indian princess, noble savage, or warrior “fit” with the Peter Pan text.

Then we watch a series of clips tracing these identified caricatures and plot features from the past into the present time. After viewing each clip, we revisit our list, checking off repeated elements and adding any new elements. I try to select clips that are other-generated, and that are widely known shows and/or events. While I have used many different clips and often change my choices, these are examples of clips I often use:

--Seinfeld’s “Cigar Store Indian” episode in Season 5 (1993), in which Jerry gives Elaine a Cigar Store Indian figure, and begins a running joke about racial over-sensitivity.4

--OutKast’s “Hey Ya” performance from the 2004 Grammy awards. The performance begins with the lowering of a tipi to the stage accompanied by chanting and drumming. The performance begins with André 3000 stating, “The natives are definitely restless ... “5

--A clip from The Proposal (2009) featuring Sandra Bullock and Betty White. Betty White’s character, Grandma Annie, is giving thanks to Mother Earth in a fire ceremony in the woods. Sandra Bullock’s character, Margaret, comes upon the scene and is invited to participate, which she does, breaking out into a hip hop club track “Get Low” by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz with lyrics “To the window, to the wall, to the sweat drip down my balls ... “6

--The So You Think You Can Dance reality show’s “Warrior” dance number from the 2009 season. In this performance, the finalists are brought together as warriors through various nonspecific artifacts of indigenous cultures from across North, Central, and South America. Their face paint, war posturing, and stoicism are central aspects of the performance. 7

The goal here is to move students from past to present incrementally and at each stage to identify the way in which discursive vocabulary from past representations informs and shapes present-day ones. In moving students incrementally from the past “problematic” representations to the current ones, I find I have more success pre-empting--if not altogether unsettling--the idea that current representations are separate and distinct from past representations, just entertainment, and not problematic. It sets me up to engage with the scholarship that argues for a historical consciousness about indigenous representations. When students are able to see how elements they agreed were racist from past representations are still there in contemporary ones, it gives me an opportunity to disrupt the idea that racist (sexist, classist) representations of the past are left in the dustbins of history.

When using the genealogy of the image approach, students will, at times, raise questions about the social context in which the text occurs, offering disclaimers like, we know more now and so what was racist back then isn’t the same today. While this complaint is common, we discuss how it serves as an inadequate explanation for outright inaccuracies, such as the erroneous usage of cultural artifacts from various First Nations, or the jibberish standing in for indigenous languages. Furthermore, this complaint, when it does surface, allows for a discussion to occur about how audiences can and do read texts differently. The now well-known Geronimo antiterrorism culture jam poster is a great example of this.

The genealogy of representation activity can be modified to trace representations of other social groups. For example, I have conducted and written about the harem seductress stereotype of Middle Eastern women that appears in texts from orientalist-era paintings (such as Odalisque with Red Cullottes by Matisse, 1921) to I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970), to Christina Aguilera’s Genie in a Bottle (1999), and Bratz’s Genie Magic line of dolls (Sensoy 2010).

History is powerful. It has the power of tradition and the familiarity of certain discourses and relations over others. I share the goal of many of my critically minded colleagues to have students trace how discourses of the past are connected to those in the present. I believe this activity has worked to unsettle and problematize the notion that representations in media are mere entertainment, and that oppression is a problem left in the past.