In the legacy of French academic superstar Roland Barthes, one of the overarching projects of practicing media literacy is to “restore history” to “naturalized myth.” This process involves both disrupting the feeling that meanings are fixed or inevitable by analysis of their construction, and entertaining alternative notions and possibilities of meaning from different points of view. When we study holidays in school, rather than opening possibilities of meaning and revealing competing points of view, we most often simply learn a “better,” or more “correct,” “official” version of history to take for granted. Learning multi-cultural perspectives on and versions of holidays is a step towards the sort of thinking involved in media literacy practice. Learning about how a holiday came to be and considering alternative ideas for what we might celebrate is another way to activate media literate thinking. To this end, here’s a crass alternative holiday to Thanksgiving from the Daily Show’s Sarah Vowell, Evacuation Day:
To add media literacy to multi-cultural study of holidays, we must simply take a small step to ask: How is the holiday represented using various production values in different media?; Who created the traditions and representations and how have they changed over time?; What purposes do the representations serve?; How do different audiences understand the holiday representations differently?; and How do historical realities compare to the representations in the holiday tradition?
