Communication devices

ible. It is this dichotomy of being perceived as neutral or non-threatening as compared with being seen as different or ethnic and thus non-conformist that confronts Black women continuously.

 Visual studies have historically been associated with the mechanical means of creating representational images through cinematic and photographic apparati (Benjamin, 1935; Barthes, 1977; Mitchell, 1980; Baudrillard, 1981/1994; Mitchell, 1994). Ideally, the function of the image was to represent reality or to portray a constructed view of reality. Griffin (2001) notes that the schism between the realists and formalists—those who wish to realistically portray the visual world and those who wish to create an imagined perception of the visual world—surfaced in the film studies and later moved to the areas of photography, traditional art, mass media, and popular culture. As critics of the fields of traditional art (Berger, 1972; Wysocki, 2001) and popular culture (Cooke and Wollen, 1995) wrestled with images, representation issues, and the standing of text, critics of graphic design argued about the relationship of images and text (Mitchell, 1986; Arntson, 1987; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Lupton and Miller, 1999; Wysocki, 2003). Arnheim (1969) examines the reasoning behind visual images shaping how “[o]ne perceives only particulars, but one thinks in generalities” (188). He argues that individuals fashion simple perceptions about the world, but the concepts of more abstracts ideas have been traditionally ascribed to more complex thought processes. This binary formulation leads an individual to ignore the role of simple perceptions in complex thought processes. An individual is assumed to attain pure abstract thinking or logic by moving from concrete physical objects to abstract mental concepts. Arnheim asserts that the functions of perceiving and thinking, while separated for theoretical purposes, can not be separated so carelessly in practice.

            Arnheim suggests that a reconsideration of this formulation is important goal in the educator's task “to bridge the gap between the bewildering complexity of primary observations and the relative simplicity of that relevant image” (305). This bridging, in order to be effective, must help the student see the simple, conceptual, mental concept behind the multitude of physical, experiential objects. When using a stripped-down or generic image for educational purposes, the student is introduced to the image in its purportedly pure state—which does not allow for negotiation or re-conceptualization of the image without a surrounding context from which to infer. This generic or monolithic image leads the student to believe in the “assumption that what was true before must be true this time” (45). Arnheim argues that these generalized images can serve the student more fruitfully, enabling the student to use images to describe abstract thought. However, he cautions about the uninterrogated use of these images—especially illustrations and photographic representations—for their introduction in the classroom may seen confusing and incomprehensible. Taken out of context and offered as monolithic representations, these images could be interpreted as a re-conceptualization of the rigid and constant forms. Arnheim's caution is appreciated; too often visual images are presented as unproblematic and not complex. Scientific and technical communication teachers may seek to use generic or monolithic abstracts as representational images, but those same images could be “alien to the thinking of certain persons” (Arnheim, p. 200). The association of images with a different context could render a different and contrary interpretation. Rather than limiting the productive thinking of students, Arnheim argues for drawing abstractions from a meaningful context. This pedagogical engagement will aid the student's visual thinking capability by encouraging the association of physical objects with mental concepts, but only as long as the training of visual sensitivity is complemented with the training of a cultural sensitivity.

            The association of visual perception and visual interpretation is linked with social and cultural influences (Eco, 1985; Minh-ha, 1989; Willis, 1994; Collins, 1990; Harris, 2003), which are manifest through mnemonic devices and oral modes of communication (Lanker, 1989; Yates, 1992; Etter-Lewis, 1993; Carruthers, 1998). These cultural influences in turn offer culturally-toned terminology which with to speak about images and representation (Jakobson, 1971/1996; Christian, 1983/1985; Fischer, 1986; Minh-ha, 1990; Spillers, 2003), and to reclaim and re-appropriate those representations (Mercer, 1991; Fusco, 1995; Royster and Hammonds, 1995; Willis and Williams, 2002). The perspectives from these analytical viewpoints reveal what Minh-ha (1990) suggests is the duality and anxiety of the insider-outsider, one who “looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside” (145), when using generic imagery to represent complex representation. The individual's choice of which linguistic and visual terministic screen to use when interrogating images is complicated by their cultural beliefs and values, and consequently impacts visual comprehension and subsequent interpretation.

            Bourdieu (1984) also argues that an individual's judgment of taste is not free from any external, influential factors. Values of culture are constructed as the reflection of an individual's social sphere. These constructed values constitute cultural capital, educational capital, and social capital, where cultural capital is influenced and mediated by educational and social capital. This idea of cultural capital is pivitol to what Bourdieu argues as serving to reinforce class habitas, “the internalized form of class condition” (101), as a system of classificatory schemes. He contends that these classificatory schemes function “below the level of consciousness and language, beyond...scrutiny” (466). Akin to Arnheim’s contention that abstract, generalized images could be representative of meaningful, physical manifestations, Bourdieu argues that social class habits are those orienting practices which reflect the individual's automatic gestures and “techniques of the body” (466). Thus, acceptance of and interpretation of visual images can argued as developing along group norms rather than individual reactions. Bourdieu asserts that “the classification systems which fix [the social classes] are not so much means of knowledge as means of power” (477). I argue here that the dominant culture’s political and thus social power is the terministic screen used to interpret and classify images and representations. While the cultural capital or class habitas of the dominant culture undeniably influences how images are interrogated, by also naming the parameters used to represent and interpret those images, the dominant culture ensures that those interrogations remain undisputed.

            The effort of African Americans to challenge the dominant culture’s representations from an individual, personal experience becomes interpreted as one speaking for the entire community. This opposition perpetuates the ideas and notions of stereotypes, and homogenizes community members to a “sameness.” Even so, Fusco (1995) remarks that “collective memories... once activated, become power sites of cultural resistance” (36). She argues that the visual and economic appropriation of minority ethnic cultural artifacts, symbols, and signs by the dominant, Euro-American culture, become aesthetic or commodified artifacts for the dominant culture's entertainment. Fusco contends that cultural identity and values become charged issues for people who historically have not been able to define and control their visual representations. Thus, in order to claim and re-appropriate their culture, ethnic minority communities see “symbolic representation as a key site of political struggle” (31). This battleground reflects not only the right of ethnic minorities to determine the meaning of their culture, but also to take cultural representations imposed by the dominant culture and imbue the “icons, objects, and symbols” (35) with a different set of meanings. Here, I aruge, is where the photographic or print image becomes a complex representation bolstered with the need to infuse reality or a constructed view of reality with cultural-specific overtones. On the other hand, the influence of cinema in imposing identity construction through visual representation is more thorough due to its insidious nature. The cinematic gaze presents the added dimension of action as a complication of visual representation.

            Feminist film critics routinely focused on gender as the site to critique the lack of women’s subjectivity, voice, and expressive roles in cinematic endeavors (Mulvey, 1975; Rich, 1978; Mayne, 1985; Welsch, 1991). Mulvey (1975) argues that only by interrogating the looks of the camera, the audience, and the characters can a disruption of the “voyeuristic-scopophilic look” (39) of the traditional male-oriented cinematic viewing pleasure occur. She states that traditional film survives on two psychoanalytical models. The first is scopophilia, where looking is pleasurable unto itself. The second is narcissistic scopophilia, where the individual becomes fascinated with his likeness and recognizes that liking. In cinematic contexts, the former is associated with “sexual instincts, [and the latter with] ego libido” (32). As a result of this theoretical basis, psychoanalysis becomes a method used to interrogate the male-as-subject gaze of cinema (Walker, 1981; Byars, 1994; Silverman, 1996). Attributing the cinematic ‘gaze’ as being male-inscribed only offered an alternative reading as a female gaze that took woman from the object position (Cohan and Hark, 1993) and placed her in the subject position (Mayne, 1993), often without interrogating the presence of race. Some critics resist using the psychoanalytical methodological basis, identifying it as being centered upon the Eurocentric view of the white, middle class, nuclear family (Pribham, 1988; Spillers, 2003). Cinematic theoretical focus on psychoanalysis “restrict the means to envision alternatives” (Pribham, p. 3), and situated analysis in a “pathological register” (Spillers, p. 427). The location of the body as a physical manifestation of the subject-identity without cultural inscription can be attributed to the imposition of gender as a primary factor of identity (Butler, 1990). Bordo (1999) candidly admits that in her early endeavors in assessing masculine and feminine roles she was “utterly oblivious to racial differences” (208). A multitude of voices from an edited collection attest that “African American feminists and other women of color... demonstrate that all bodies are not treated equally” (Bennett and Dickerson, 2001, p. 4). This single-minded focus led to the gender issue being criticized as an ideological position that “reinforce[d] white middle-class values, and...ke[pt] women from seeing other structures of oppression” (Gaines, 1986, p. 177). Hall (1981) remarks that the difficulty in identifying other structures of oppression lies in the indecision about how to “conduct [an] ...anti-racist struggle [against the]...racist common sense which ...dominates popular thinking” (52). hooks (1996) offers an “oppositional gaze” to the cinematic gaze as one that did not seek to replace white women with Black women in the subject position, but one that functions as a critical gaze “wherein representations of blackness [that] were stereotypically degrading and dehumanizing coexisted with a critical practice that restored presence where it was negated” (199). This critical gaze replaces stereotypical and degrading representations of Blacks with more realistic ones of their lived experiences. Bobo (1988) argues that, “a Black audience through a history of theatre-going and film-watching knows...more [as] an unconscious reaction to and defense against racist depictions of Black people...to filter out that which is negative and select from the work elements we can relate to” (101). These cinematic audiences reconstruct meaning by interrogating the message presented and filling in the gaps in the presentation, thereby privileging a different set of meanings.

            Bobo discusses the reception and fallout from the movie The Color Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg, and based loosely on the novel by Alice Walker. The novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, follows the epistolary life of Celie, “a young, abused, uneducated Black girl who evolves into womanhood and a sense of her own worth” (92). Walker sold the screen rights in order to expose the novels message to a larger audience but, as Bobo notes, the message was changed to be a “commercial venture produced in Hollywood by a white male according to all the tenets and conventions of commercial cultural production in the United States” (93). The movie became a pariah and many attacked it and the novel’s author for a racist and slanderous depiction of misogynistic Black men; for stereotypical sexual behavior of African American men and women; and for failing to provide a positive portrayal of the Black family. Bobo notes that Spielberg discussed how his choice of “unknown” actors was to prevent character-associated stereotypes, for well-known Black movie stars could have tainted the novel's characterizations. Even so, Bobo argues that while Spielberg chose not to cast known Black stars, “he could not break away from his culturally acquired conceptions of how Black people are and how they should act” (97) within his cinematic interpretation of the novel. One scene in the movie that reflects Spielberg's culturally acquired notions is where the “grown Celie tak[es] up a knife that she will use to shave Mister [as if to stab him]” (98)—a scene that is not in the novel. Bobo contends that continual cross-cutting of this scene with scenes of Shug in a red dress running across a field and scenes of the initiation rites of Adam and Pasha in Africa suggest that all Blacks are a wild and 'savage' people, as if connected by a blood urge. In spite of these cinematic-distorted portrayals and the firestorm of controversy the movie created in the Black community, Bobo notes that many Black women gave the movie a favorable response. She suggests that the “different history and consequently a different perspective from other viewers of the film” (101) gave Black women a historical place from where their parallel and alternative stories as collective memories provided a place for cultural resistance to the reactionary firestorm. She surmises that this different perspective has led to Black women's “intertextual cultural experience” (103) forming a decoding strategy for films about them. Bobo suggests that it is this decoding strategy that allows Black women to reconstruct meaning in the cinematic presentation by filtering the message presented to realize more realistic representations of lived experiences in the gaps.

            Gibson-Hudson (1994) explores how black women who are independent filmmakers seek to make complex the reality of black womanhood. By their efforts, they hope to engage cinematic audiences in revisiting and reconsidering their ideological assumptions of black women from the stereotypic caricatures to the “recognition and understanding of black women’s life experiences as valuable, complex, and diverse” (366). Gibson-Hudson also notes that these cinematic artists seek to “expose racial and sexual inequalities” (366) that are often subsumed in the stereotypes brought forth by the dominant mass media. She suggests that using narrative as a vehicle to present the “complexity of black women’s existence” (367) serves as an effective means for the artists to convey their values. This may infer that other black women’s values not held by these artists may be subsequently ignored or become subject to more stereotype or ridicule.

            As Gibson-Hudson examines and analyzes three films that reflect a narrative representation of defying stereotypic images and the lives of black women, she relates how a true and more realistic identity is reconstituted by peeling away the layers of social ideology. In Hair Piece, the norm of straight hair was mimicked by Blacks as a means to conform to the dominant ideology of beauty. This strategy was undertaken in the belief that “an approximation of white standards would translate into social acceptance in white America” (368). The cinematic narrative relates that the dilemma of self-identity may be addressed by considering that “perhaps the comb you use was not designed with your hair in mind” (369). The film Illusions engages the myths of one-dimensional stereotypes. As quoted from William Edward Burghart DuBois, Gibson-Hudson relates that the reality for a black person was translated through the dominant culture that “le[t] him see himself through the revelation of the [dominant] world” (371). It is the fractured reality that reflects the illusion of a one-dimensional cinematic character that this film revisits. Rather than succumb to racism and sexism, the two characters support each other, and “illustrate how female bonding can ultimately provide self-healing and inner strength” (372). From the external identification to the community identification, the film Losing Ground explores internal or self-definition. Gibson-Hudson notes that the movement of Black women into the professional sphere has caused them to “den[y] certain aspects of [their] own ‘womanhood’ (373). What is explored in this cinematic narrative is the stereotype of the dependable maternal pillar that Black women purportedly characterize. But it is conflict that induces “introspection... to empowerment” (376), enabling an inner searching that “encourages women to develop the inner resources they need to cope with greater social forces” (376).