Daylight Again: Déjà vu—The Personal Is Pedagogical, Political, and Revolutionary

• In Event: 65.064 - Reading the World and the Word Through Album Covers: Spinning Popular Culture as Public Pedagogy

Abstract

Objectives/purposes:
The purpose of this presentation is to add to the discussion of the record album cover as a visual representation to be studied as an opening to explore the possibilities of aesthetic and critical self-understandings which leads to critical awareness, personal agency and political transformation. The major goal of studying the cover of the album “Déjà vu” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1970) is to develop and elaborate ways in which this type of record album study can lead to these types of understandings.

The presentation will have three major sections. First, the author will discuss the album/art of “Déjà vu” itself, its background, construction and relationship to the music contained in the album. Historical and biographical information will be used in this section (Zimmer, 2008). The second section will deal with the author’s autobiographical reactions to the album and its art and address critical autobiographical questions. How did this album influence a white working-class man’s political understanding of the tempestuous times of the late 1960s and early 1970s? How do those understandings influence him and his pedagogy/politics today? In the third section the author will discuss the ways in which reading an album cover can lead to pedagogical and political understandings that can help to develop critical consciousness and transformation.


Perspectives/theoretical frameworks
This presentation will be based in a critical autobiographical/pedagogical/political perspective. This critical autobiographical work, particularly as it deals with visual representations, relies on the work of Freire and Macedo (1987) and Pinar, (2004). Autobiography is a revolutionary act (Pinar, 2004, p. 35). Critical autobiography is always already about social transformation. Although Freire and Macedo are discussing reading of texts, this perspective includes art, particularly album cover art as a text. Popular culture study has in many cases only focused on the intricacies of the cultural artifacts themselves and have either ignored or avoided the relationship of the culture artifact to the larger socio/political/economic questions that swirl around the artifact. “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world.” (Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 29) By employing a theoretical perspective that encourages the interconnections among autobiography, critique, pedagogy and politics this presentation avoids ignoring the world.

Methods & Data Sources
The methods used in this study will be a theoretical bricolage of critical autobiography, critical theory and aesthetics.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This particular study placed within the context of other studies of the same nature will demonstrate the significance of the analysis of artifacts of media to open up possibilities for the development of critical consciousness and social action (Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2014). It is hoped that the study will open up discussions within the session itself about the significance of album artwork on others in the scholarly community.
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References (See below).

Author

• William M. Reynolds, Georgia Southern University