Cultural Representation in/as the Global Studies Curriculum: Seeing and Knowing China in the United States

• In Event: Roundtable Session 56
  In Roundtable Session: It's More Than TV: Cultural Representation in Media Spaces

Abstract

This study examines how two popular magazines, National Geographic and Life, and one educational journal, Social Education, perform the work of representation in general, and representing China more specifically. Conceptualized as sources of cultural pedagogy, these publications employed specific pedagogical practices, which reinforced imperialist structures of Western dominance over the non-Western world. National Geographic’s travelogue, Life’s photo-essay, and Social Education’s educational resources, taught/instructed their readers, primarily middle class Americans, [what to know and see] about China. Drawing on postcolonial theorists and theories of photographic representation, the perspectives employed in this study reveal the constructed nature of representation, and how narrative and visual representation can work (and has worked) to capture and secure the meaning of difference.

Author

• Amy Mungur, Green Mountain College