Teaching Green Cultural Studies and New Media

Abstract

The year is 2007, and I stand before the students in my environmental humanities class and introduce Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon. Pride of Baghdad tells the story of a group of lions from the Baghdad Zoo who lived and died through the American siege of the city in the first years of the Iraq War. Though the lions speak in human words, they are drawn in a realistic style with roots in nature documentary to denote the historical truth of the tale (see BBC News 2003). As I prepare to unleash a brilliant thought about zoos, empire and humanity as political animal, a student raises her hand and asks, ‘Professor, why are we reading a story with pictures in it?’ Having been apprised of the digital proclivities of the millennial generation, I am taken aback. I am used to justifying the intellectual and aesthetic value of popular culture to my own teachers, who may be forgiven the prejudices of the Frankfurt School — ‘mass culture rots your brain’ and so on — in honour of the good fight of 1968 and beyond. I am less prepared to forgive their children, whose near-constant exposure to animation, digital hypertext and the myriad forms of contemporary media should have inoculated them against this kind of reaction. But, as Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron remind us, cultural ubiquity does not translate smoothly into cultural capital (1990). In this essay, I will explore the problem of teaching new media to ecocritical ends, not only as a puzzle for classroom pedagogy, but as a challenge to the Arnoldian structures of the ecocritical canon itself. There should be a good answer to the question about stories with pictures in them.