4.3: Looking for Trouble- Practice, Practice, Practice

Let’s walk through the process using specific texts. A few years ago I was teaching an essay writing course at Columbia University, and I asked my students to read bell hooks’s “In our Glory: Photography and Black Life.”2 In this essay, hooks describes the important role played by family photographs displayed on the walls of African American homes.When she was a child and media representation of black Americans was either negative or over-simplified, this semi-public display of personal photos served as a site of protest. In other words, on these walls her race was depicted in rich and complex ways unlike anything in the mainstream media. Here’s how I went through the process of noticing, articulating problems, posing and assessing questions, and identifying what is at stake:

Noticing

What struck me the most, and even surprised me, was hooks’ idea that what we hang on our walls—even the walls of our homes—could be so meaningful or powerful.

Articulating Problems

This naturally led me to consider what hangs on my walls. At the time, an image I took while on vacation in Nicaragua was hanging on my office wall. Here’s the image:

Fig. 1. Nicaraguan woman on a side street in Granada.

Once hooks’ ideas entered my office, trouble was not hard to find. I hung this picture on my wall because it appealed to me aesthetically: the vibrant pastel colors, the distinct patterns, the candid look on the woman’s face. After reading hooks’ essay, this 16” x 20” framed image hanging on my office wall became fraught with tension. I genuinely became troubled by it and worried I that I should take it down. Here are some problems, or germs of problems, that I brainstormed:

1. There is a tension inherent in the juxtaposition of the woman’s context with the context of the image: the streets of Granada in the second poorest country in the west contrasts with the image’s context, the walls of an Ivy League University in the richest country in the western hemisphere.

2. I do not know this woman, and she does not know me; yet, she hangs on my wall. Somehow the woman represented in this photo has come to represent something about me. When people come into my office and ask about the image, it leads into a discussion of my trip to Nicaragua. People tend to walk away with the impression that I’m somewhat adventurous.

3. hooks and her family represented themselves in images on the walls in their homes and in this way challenged the mainstream media’s representation of black Americans. The tourist photos that I hang on the walls of my office (a semi-public space) have the power to influence people’s perceptions of Nicaragua, a poor country that has a long history of civil unrest.

Posing Fruitful Questions

Questions I asked that emerged out of the above problems:

1. What is the story of this woman’s life?

2. What percentage of Nicaraguan women are in the work force, and what kinds of work do they do?

3. Should I hang this photo on my wall?

4. What are ethical responsibilities of tourists when it comes to displaying and/or sharing pictures of their travels?

 

The first question regarding the woman’s life story is impossible to answer without flying back to Nicaragua, tracking the woman down on the streets of Granada, and hiring a translator to interview her. While I think this has the potential to be interesting, it is not feasible for a one-semester course. If I were to fly back to interview her, my interview would likely be more productive if I had a specific purpose and genre in mind: would I write a piece for a newspaper? Would I write an academic article? Both genre and discipline shape the kinds of questions people ask and their approach to the same questions.

Question two is looking for a statistic; a statistic is a factual answer rather than an idea or an argument. In this case, either the answer is out there to be recovered and reported, or I would have to conduct a study and write a book about women in the Nicaraguan work force. Simply reporting this answer would not lead me to write an interesting paper unless I raised some new questions. If I were to conduct a study, I would probably need some disciplinary expertise in the field of economics. So either the question is a dead end (you uncover the answer and that is it), or it is not feasible (too big of a project requiring a tremendous amount of time and a certain level of expertise).

At this point, I hope you are getting a sense of what kinds of questions might not be appropriate for an undergraduate, academic paper. That is not to say that questions one and two are not worthwhile. It is simply that they do not work in the context of a one-semester course.

Questions three and four, on the other hand, are headed in the right direction. The third question is a yes/no question, which as I’ve said tends to lead toward a dead end, but I can reframe it as a why question: why should I or shouldn’t I hang this photo on my wall? This question has potential for an academic paper provided that I consider the question’s ramifications within a larger context that extends beyond my office. In other words, I’ll need to explain the impact of the images we choose to hang in semi-public spaces like an office.

The final question emerges from hooks’s ideas about the power of images and her claim that, “the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle” (57). This last question is the most promising in the context of the assignment for this class, which is: “Use hooks’s essay as a lens to analyze a personal experience and develop an argument of your own.”

What Is at Stake Here?

Let’s say that I decide to pursue the final question: What are the ethical responsibilities of tourists when it comes to displaying pictures of their travels? What do we gain by answering this question and/or what do we lose by not answering it? By answering this question, we can develop an ethical approach to taking tourist photos and displaying them. Developing an approach and a heightened awareness of how we represent other cultures seems particularly important when the received idea of these places is negative and overly-simplistic. The stereotype is that Nicaragua is a violent and dangerous country, and while there are unsafe pockets, this, of course, is not the whole picture. Additionally, tourism to Nicaragua has the potential to boost the economy; how I represent this country could influence people to either visit or to avoid the country. In fact, two separate friends of mine decided to visit after hearing about my trip. Considering what is at stake not only helps test the question’s potential, it also leads in the direction of an argument. If I were to pursue this question with the help of hooks and my own experience, I might end up with an argument that goes something like this:

Individuals who visit locales that are not your typical tourist
destinations should be careful in how they represent these
places to others particularly in the form of images. Tourists
should seek to present the many dimensions of a place and its
culture, in both their photos and their stories, and avoid reinforcing
common misperceptions.

A common pitfall when attempting to answer the so-what question is to assume that your contribution has to solve major world problems, but the truth is that most published scholarly articles add a bit of information in a specific corner of knowledge, or they provide us with a new way of seeing or thinking about something.