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term memories, and the power national history has in creating and subverting student
identities:
In truth, I can close my eyes and vividly call to mind those images of Columbus and
his men sketched in history books. I can see the crazed and savage looks that were on
the faces of indigenous men, just as I remember the drawings of sparsely clothed,
shackled African slaves. I want to forget them even as they linger against my will in
memory...When I recall the shame I felt seeing those images, of the Indian and the
‘great’ white men, I recognize that there is also a rage there. I was not only angry at
these images, which did not feel right in my heart, I felt that being forced to look at
them was like being forced to witness the symbolic re-enactment of a colonizing
ritual, a drama of white supremacy. The shame was feeling powerless to protest or
intervene. (1994, p. 205)
In drawing this discussion of visual analysis to a close, a criticism that has been lodged in
particular towards van Leeuwen is his ‘text-centred’ approach to analysing texts. In an
interview conducted by Reitstaetter and Rheindorf, van Leeuwen was asked to comment to
the following question, on how he justifies this method:
…insofar as it analyzes preferred meanings of texts rather than actual meanings
derived by recipients. How do you respond to criticism that maintains that, in fixing
a “reading” for a text – without doing audience research – you are ignoring/reducing
the multiplicity of possible meanings for any given text? (Reitstaetter et al., 2005, p.
2)
The response van Leeuwen gave fits well with how this project views the data, particularly
within its place as an historical study, whereby in some cases it is impractical and other cases
impossible to gauge how any particular student engaged with the texts on the level of
emotion (other than the occasional scribble or note written to deface a textbook). The part of
van Leeuwen’s response that is relevant to this research, is his answer that his work
concentrates on
…attempts to describe these resources and their meaning potential. As for the
‘multiplicity’ of meanings…from a social semiotic point of view, it is not possible to
make categorical statements about whether meanings are multiple or not. How
multiple they are depends on the way their use is regulated in a given domain.
(Reitstaetter et al., 2005, p. 2-3)
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