I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the transformative power of comic books as a medium that fosters freedom and challenge to normativity.
Edward Said expresses how the act of reading comic books instilled in him a sense of liberation and subversion. The quote highlights the profound impact that literature, especially in its more unconventional forms like comics, can have on one's perspective, encouraging an exploration of ideas that challenge societal norms and expectations.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion on the importance of comic books in educational settings.
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa.
Refuse to allow yourself to become a vegetable that simply absorbs information, pre-packaged, pre-ideologized , because no message.. is anything but an ideological package that has gone through a kind of processing.
Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings.
It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.
Everybody, no matter what vocation they're looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It's so powerful.
The thing that I love most about being on stage is making people happy...It's my job to do that, and I enjoy it.
You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet, that the two disciplines were totally separate, and if you did one, you couldn’t do the other. I’m beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.