In A Special Relationship? Cultural Studies, Academia and Pedagogy, Alan O’Shea questions how "the misunderstanding of ‘institutionalization’ can lead to the idealist positioning of the cultural studies practitioner as an ‘outsider’ or a romantically marginal ‘semiotic guerilla’ relates to a pedagogical orthodoxy in the field. In specific, O’Shea refers to a phenomenon of "romancing the margins" by cultural analysts whereby the danger is present of deconstruction becoming a (self-) representation of the marginal figure. What occurs then follows the logic that "although the figure of the cultural bandit offers…a certain glamour and piquancy (and hence is popular with students), it misrepresents its social location."
Is the inverse possibility of being viewed as elitist reposition the validity of representation itself? So how then does one who produces and/or critiques culture avoid over-romanticizing the margin? And what is the role of those in such positions insofar as their pedagogical responsibility?
I discussed showing Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, "Triumph of the Will" to an art appreciation class as a strategy to discuss the social accountability of the artist beyond the usual discussions of Nazi propaganda or cinematic formalism in the context of a modernist architecture. Afterward, the class learned of the historical context that the film was made and its intended purpose before opening the floor for discussion in relation to that information. Henry Giroux stressed that it is vital to "never dehistoricize, depoliticize and decontextualize this kind of work" because of the peril of it losing its sociocultural meaning for the class or audience.
The point also comes to bear in how the cultural content of my own work is related and interpreted. Indeed, my art is a bicultural search for meaning of place, to situate myself in what is history, past and present. I often ask, " what becomes of those who traverse in between these worlds, people with their feet planted in more than one place? How do they confront or cope with these issues?"
But is the gist of the questions asked in such work typical of romancing the margins really dependent on the larger political project of what the artist intends by way of pedagogy. Is it a tightrope for those who see their work as being more than simply spoonfeeding a different side of the coin to tread? Do artists like teachers run the risk of becoming a cliched mouthpiece for these types of discourse that seem to only "tell" rather than "think"?