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Think ‘text’ and you think ‘words on a page’. Today ‘words on a screen’ are not that much different. If the words are not laid out in ways that at least mimic or evoke the world of movable type, the printed page and the authoritative world of ‘book learning’, then as readers we are a bit lost and possibly begin to reach for alternative categories, such as art or entertainment. You can tell a book by its cover, because that is what covers are supposed to do. Learning is about knowledge, knowledge is serious, and out go the jazzy covers and picture-pages, unless of course it’s a children’s book, and thus relegated to fun-learning. Too much seriousness seems to be bad for children, and good for the rest of us.

The ‘us’ in question is of course cross-cut with hierarchies of race/ethnicity, class, language(s), literacies, modernity/‘Westerness’ or ‘Global Northness’ and any number of other inter-sectional and post-colonial ways of highlighting exclusions, devaluations and oppressions. Female literacy at all, and of what sort and in what contexts, is still a global battle. Literacy rates are a prime indicator of ‘development’, and textual testing is a huge force throughout the literate world in determining life-chances at any number of nodal points. The ‘standard’ letters, numbers, idiographic characters and character-like symbols are now internationally specified and digitally coded. ‘Lines of type’ is becoming ‘strings of characters’, but effectively there is little difference from the mud tablets, lapidary inscriptions and scrolled-up papyri of the last three thousand years or so.

Famously – as feminists have said – ‘adding women’ (to male-dominated and masculinized institutions) and ‘stirring’ (a bit) doesn’t change very much (Hekman 1990). Adding something – i.e. inclusion – to the text-dominated hierarchies of knowledge and learning described above won’t change very much either. Making textuality more ‘inclusive’ is rather like making ‘whiteness’ more inclusive; it’s a contradiction in terms. You have to start thinking in other terms in the first place, and then see what ‘text’ might mean after you do that. This is not a particularly easy process.

Meaning-making as a Practice

Or is it? Woody Allen’s movie ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ (1985) does quite a good job of dramatizing – with clear visual tropes of rupture and impossible but ‘real’ situations – how to do this, with the clear result that textuality is thoroughly mocked for its instability, indeterminacy and oppressiveness. Turning on the subtitles in your DVD or download screening of this film reinforces the message within the film that text is meaningful within, but not between, different worlds. And commencing intellectual change with a film, and indeed a funny one that is ‘merely entertainment’, underlines the transgressions required in order to accept a film as a teacher. These claims raise a very large number of issues, and these issues can function effectively here as a starting point for transcending the logocentricity that –........

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