“Windows and Mirrors” Curricula and Colonial Control | Anders Villalta

During my early career in elementary school libraries, I frequently encountered enthusiastic discussion and implementation of a “windows and mirrors'' framework for children’s literature. In this analogy, mirrors are books that reflect the reader’s own experiences, while windows are those that show the experiences of others. This framework is attributed to Emily Style, a white educator and founding co-director of the widely acclaimed National S.E.E.D. Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), as originally published in 1988. According to Teaching Tolerance, students need “texts that reflect their own identities, experiences and motivations (mirrors) and also provide insight into the identities, experiences and motivations of others (windows)” so they can build “nuanced perceptions of the world around them.”[1] The framework is largely mobilized to advocate for more representations of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in US school curricula.

In this short paper, I argue that the windows and mirrors framework falls far short of a liberatory strategy for anti-oppression, instead encouraging continued white supremacist colonization through the strategy of white voyeurism. I draw on the work of critical theorists including Said’s Orientalism to implicate Style’s founding text in a larger project of Western domination.[2] These arguments are further illustrated through anecdotes from my own experience as an educator.

One fundamental issue with the windows and mirrors framework is that it requires a binary classification of stories as relating either to the self, or to the Other. Teaching Tolerance suggests that educators ask students, “Is this text a window or a mirror for you,” and provide two answer choices.[3] The centrality of binary oppositional thought to the project of Western imperialism has been explored by critical theorists including Said, and further elaborated in the context of Library and Information Studies. David J. Hudson writes that “narratives of racial difference [...] came to be elaborated in binaries of self and Other.”[4] Hudson argues that this racialized binary promotes descriptions of the West as universal and superior, legitimizing conquest through the physical violence of empire. In effect, asking students to approach and to classify all stories as either mirror or window reaffirms colonial conceptions of self and Other that maintain ideological boundaries between racialized groups.

In 1990, educator Rudine Sims Bishop challenged Style’s framework when asserting, “Usually the window is also a door, and a reader has only to walk through in imagination to become a part of whatever world has been created or re-created in the book.”[5] Here Bishop identifies that the ideological boundary implied by a “window” framing of cultural difference is in fact artificial. Said has further suggested the very notion of separate and distinct cultures is little more than the requisite grounds for aggression.[6] I am not suggesting “all cultures are the same,” but that Western delineations of cultural sameness and difference were and continue to be mobilized for Western domination. By framing literature as a door, Bishop rightly asserts the reader’s agency to meaningfully engage with human experience as constituted by all people. After all, educators can–and I believe they should–use literature to build students’ capacity for supportive engagement in community, rather than promoting passive observation (voyeurism). While “literature as door” may not be a useful framework in isolation, it does effectively demonstrate a major limitation in the window-mirror binary. However, as educators continue to extol the virtues of Style’s framework decades later, Bishop’s contributions have rarely been incorporated into the pedagogical tools shared widely across institutions.

A few years ago, I read the book Jacob’s New Dress with my kindergarten classes.[7] The book is about a child who endeavors to, and then wears a dress to school, which falls outside of the gendered expectations placed on them by family and classmates. After our discussion, each student received a sheet of paper with a simple, customizable drawing of Jacob. I invited the students to “draw an outfit you think Jacob would like.” While the majority designed colorful dresses akin to those Jacob admired throughout the book, many of my students socialized as boys quickly drew Jacob wearing a t-shirt and shorts. More recently, I designed a similar extension activity with the book Hair Love.[8] The story is about Zuri, a Black girl whose father gives her a range of hairstyles before finally finding one Zuri really loves. Kindergarten and first grade students were asked to draw a hairstyle on Zuri that they thought Zuri might like. While some truly beautiful renditions emerged, in multiple classes, several non-Black students colored Zuri’s eyes red, drew devil horns, and/or scribbled emphatically across Zuri’s face. 

In both examples, many students who occupied social positions of privilege struggled with extension activities that asked them to consider the feelings of characters in corresponding positions of marginalization. Even after three to four years of daily lessons using diverse representations in literature, longstanding windows and mirrors curricula failed to prepare students for exercises that employed literature as a door. When presented opportunities to engage and show care informed by what these characters would like, some students responded with expressions of symbolic violence. These outcomes encouraged me to reflect on the uncontroversial adoption of this framework for diverse representation in US schools and libraries.

In Style’s founding piece (which cites the intellectual work of over a dozen scholars and artists, all of whom are white) she writes, “Differences exist. They never melted down into “the melting pot” and, now, in a nuclear age we have no choice but to educate youngsters (and ourselves) to handle them more realistically so as to avoid, at all costs, a foolish nuclear melt-down of us all.”[9] This argument for diverse representation as a means to prevent global catastrophe recalls Said’s invocation of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s charge that the duty of the US is to “construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity.”[10] Here we see the value of diverse curricula as a means to ensure the survival of (white) US empire. 

The imperative for white children to learn about the Other therefore tacitly serves to proliferate white voyeurism–observation without relationship–in order to ensure continued colonial control.[11] Meanwhile, the demand for non-white children to see themselves reflected in US literary programs may be read as part of a larger shift to assimilate non-white people into the project of US imperialism. In Orientalism, Said pays particular attention to the role that educational institutions play in incorporating what might otherwise pose a threat to Western hegemony.[12] In this sense, the mirror is a consolation. In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson calls this passive recognition of cultural difference “a multicultural solution to the settler’s Indian problem.”[13]

These and other projects clearly stress the need for white students to learn about the Other (through windows), and for non-white students to see themselves represented in US educational institutions (in mirrors). But why is it important for white students to see whiteness in literature and, importantly, why should non-white students read about white culture? Moreover, if as Style puts it, “the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self,” what happens to opportunities for cohabitation?[14] Must we live in isolation, in a home with no doors? Is this not in simpler terms a prison? I believe the gaping absence of these considerations from pedagogical discourse about diversity is profound. Ultimately, these silences only further implicate the windows and mirrors approach to literature–and to culture more broadly–as a project of continued colonization through divisive systems of control.

“Free Labor," the gift economy, and fan labor│Julianne Wagner

 

• “Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited.” (Terranova 2000, 37)

We are all big fans of something. At some point in our lives, we have all loved a team, a singer, a movie, a book to some excruciating degree that the text imprints itself on the psyche. Fandom studies, stemming from cultural studies and media studies, takes a multivalent look at just that imprinting experience, tracking the viewer’s reaction and interaction with cultural phenomena, including literature, games, sport, music, fashion, television, and even politics. A highly interdisciplinary area of study, one of its core tenets is that fans are not merely passive consumers; rather, they are highly savvy prosumers (productive consumers, so says Fuchs).[1] They create websites to house extratextual works (fanfic, fan videos, etc.) and commentary, moderate and contribute to forums, edit wikis, exchange information and links, guide fellow fans with search, comment on stories, review and screen-cap episodes, translate, tag, compile newsletters, animate .gif sets, create user icons, edit zines (the list can truly go on and on.) These activities are information work and “communication power,”[2] albeit labor-power freely and joyously volunteered. 

Such practices are guided by loyalty, commitment, and active or passive promotion to/for the particular media objects. When we frame labor as active, participatory, elected, compulsive, dare I say it, something we do out of of love, things get thorny. Such affective labor does operate on a labor theory of value, but not necessarily as Marx saw it. The value of fannish labor is not precisely the worth of labor-power (i.e. the amount of time spent doing communication work like the examples above), nor is it explicitly based on the use-value or exchange-value to be extracted by the capitalist. Fandom is an excellent example of a gift economy, a circular, overlapping network of affinities in which individual agents freely produce, trade, receive, and reciprocate tasks and creative works. 

How can we look at fandom as communitarian, arising from anti-capitalist urges? Simultaneously, how is it shackled to commodity fetishism? Isn’t its existence and maintenance reliant upon digital labor, a feature of capital commodifying leisure time? Does this digital labor necessarily create goods and products, or does it instead result in laborers trained in the craft of world-making? I shall use Terranova’s insights on the digital gift economy, Marx’s formulation of labor as life-activity, and the freedom inherent in Fuchs’ “playbour” to ping-pong between fan labor’s positive and negative dynamics, unearthing their dialectic intertwinement. I close with a few ways LIS professionals and memory institutions can highlight the identities of fans as both cultural producers and amateur digital archivists. 

Marx foresaw that his definitions of capitalist labor would mutate: “…the mode of production and the means of production are continually transformed, revolutionised, how the division of labour is necessarily followed by greater division of labour…”[3] The gift economy woven into our often-always-online lives is evidence of such a shift of traditional Marxist labor-power. Tiziana Terranova’s piece “Free Labor” is vital for working through the complications of fannish labor, especially since in 2020, fandom predominantly originates from and spends time in/on the Internet. Terranova finds overemphasis on autonomy in Barbrook’s optimistic formulations of the gift economy. While the gift economy is increasingly important to late capitalism as a whole, it cannot upset or overturn capitalism “from the inside.” Terranova states: “The Internet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy.”[4] I see fandom in much the same way. 

Media and performance scholar Abigail de Kosnick positions fandom as somewhat oppositional to capitalism: “Fans generally conceive of their activities as ‘resistive’ to consumerism, [therefore refusing] to consider that their works might constitute promotional materials or ancillary products that increase the value of the objects of fandom and therefore might be deserving of compensation.”[5] On the one hand, fandom is a means of approaching consumption of the arts which involves obstinately remaining in a performance frame when it is no longer there. Acts of reenacting, reusing, and preserving the once-purchased commodity through obsession, conscious re-remembering, and re-contextualization into an auxiliary paratext eschews the dangerous refrain of “single-use item.” Yet, as de Kosnick hints, perhaps contributing to a fandom’s gift economy out of love and/or membership in a cherished community is too insular: being blindly invested in a passionate community means fans might not notice how commodity capitalism benefits off of their unseen labor.

Marx’s formulation of labor as life-activity is particularly interesting and can be interpreted in the two opposing lenses we have engaged with thus far.[6] Consider the term “diehard”, which is defined as “strongly or fanatically determined or devoted;” there are countless examples of devotees of a given sports team, musical artist, television show, or film who would consider it an object, experience, or world they are involved with for their entire life. Such love means labor given to fandom does not feel like work. Yet, neoliberal capitalism preys on emotive pull towards work to reproduce it.

Relatedly, it is impossible to ignore that fandom ecosystems require capitalist consumerism, and in tandem, capitalism needs fandom’s labor-power. If you have found yourself a fan of an active musical act or currently “on-air” television show, even waiting for new material is labor-power. While the process of waiting and anticipating can be a way to build community amongst the fandom, this waiting to consume is part of capital’s choreography.[7] As Terranova puts it: “the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cyber cultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital.”[8] The matter is further complicated by the fact that many fans and fandoms now utilize social media (especially Tumblr and Twitter) to share information, exchange fan graphics, and a whole host of other “new forms of creativity, sociality, and participation.”[9] The high visibility of social media interactions invites exploitation. Privileging the capitalist’s survival (but not the laborers’) remains intact — it is becoming more commonplace for media monoliths to assume, prepare, and extract fans’ hype to use in marketing campaigns. Examples include HBO’s multi-platform transmedia storytelling campaign before the release of Game of Thrones, corporate ownership of fan conventions, or brands partnering with makeup companies in advance of a film’s release, like 2011’s Wonder Woman x Mac Cosmetics, or 2015’s Star Wars x CoverGirl. Industry doesn’t prey only on positive behavioral surplus: even fan outrage (e.g. men upset by the all-female cast of 2014’s Ghostbusters re-boot) can be used so as to become “a viable market focus down the road.”[10]

I’d like to turn back from the overwhelming glare of industry commodifying affective fannish labor and return to what possibilities fan labor affords its laborers. Christian Fuchs’ deliberate convergence between play and labor (“playbour”) offers a useful handle: “Play is a free activity without duration and permanence; labour is an unfree activity with duration and permanence. Play labour has the semblance of freedom but is unfree in that it creates wealth and profits that are controlled by others.”[11] I agree with the former statement, but not the latter. A cursory glance at two genres of fannish texts — erotic fanfiction and video game playthroughs — suggests that the ultimate products (if they exist at all) are not items to be sold or purchased; their takeaways are to be accepted and experienced. Fanfiction, generally, and smut, in particular, asks that both writer and reader drop preconceptions of their present reality and imagine somewhere and/with someone else. While many video game playthroughs act as instructional manuals, some few are invitations: less this is how you win the game and more this is how you can win the game. The practiced labor of choosing and building a different/better/not-this world is a muscle our society would do well to exercise. Imagination and love may just be the way out; as Charlie Ledbetter puts it: “Escapism is not a departure from reality. Rather, escape de-centers the hegemony of oppressive systems that announce themselves as real and creates space to imagine alternatives.”[12]

So, in closing, where can we go from here? How can LIS professionals and memory institutions fit in? As for industry co-optation, for starters, all digital workers (both in the “free” moments of clacking and clicking towards play, growth, and investigation, and during the plodding tedium of doing the email job) need to practice resistance while we stare at the screens, and discipline in building face-to-face communities. But at a perhaps more innocent level, library and information studies scholars can illuminate the labor behind the work of media connoisseurs like fans through acquisition and exhibition. Certain fan archives can be found in university libraries (e.g. Sandy Hereld Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University, digital fanzine archives at the University of Iowa, the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, which owes an incredible debt to personal collections by Deadheads) but current curation of these items suggest that the fanmade works are the subjects to be valorized, instead of the identities and labor of their makers. Could this be done by a library or archive creating an emulation to a born-digital archive? Secondarily, archival workers may be exactly the individuals to work with fandom communities to move their archives off proprietary platforms and/or create robust cataloging and description systems to enhance resource discovery and knowledge exchange. “Digital technologies are not innately archival, but must be made to serve archival purposes by the constant efforts of archivists.”[13] Trained archivists collaborating with passionate amateur archivists (fans) could hold the potential to revolutionize how we all continually remake and preserve Internet locales. If a collaborative project between archivists and fan-archivists were to take shape, it would need to be tailored precisely to the needs and wishes of fans, so as to retain the fans’ agency over their own community archival spaces. Most crucial to fandom communities and their archival habitats is that they remain in flux, they remain welcoming, and they are a place done together.[14]