This new style of activism doesn’t require us to paint ourselves blue; it does ask that we think in creative ways about the iconography that comes to us through every available media channel. Consider the ways that Dora the Explorer, the Latina girl at the centre of a popular American public television series, has been deployed by both the right and the left to dramatize the likely consequences of Arizona’s new immigration law; or how the U.S. Tea Party has embraced a mash-up of Obama and the Joker from The Dark Knight Returns (one of the Batman films) as a recurring image in its battle against health-care reform.
Such analogies don’t capture the complexities of these policy debates, just as we can’t reduce the distinctions between American political parties to the differences between elephants and donkeys (icons from an earlier decade’s political cartoonists). Such tactics work only if we read these images as metaphors, standing in for something bigger than they can fully express. Avatar can’t do justice to the old struggle over the Occupied Territories, and the YouTube video is no substitute for informed discourse about what’s at stake there. Yet their spectacular and participatory performance does provide the emotional energy needed to keep on fighting. And that may direct attention to other resources.
Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of communication, journalism and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California and the author of Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.
