Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptua- lised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or con- structs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s

Iconography of power: Soviet political posters under Lenin and Stalin

Masters at visual propaganda, the Bolsheviks produced thousands of vivid and compelling posters after they seized power in October 1917. Intended for a semi-literate population that was accustomed to the rich visual legacy of the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church, political posters came to occupy a central place in the regime's effort to imprint itself on the hearts and minds of the people and to remold them into the new Soviet women and men. In this first sociological study of Soviet political posters, Victoria Bonnell analyzes the shifts that took place in the images, messages, styles, and functions of political art from 1917 to 1953. Everyone who lived in Russia after the October revolution had some familiarity with stock images of the male worker, the great communist leaders, the collective farm woman, the capitalist, and others. These were the new icons' standardized images that depicted Bolshevik heroes and their adversaries in accordance with a fixed pattern. Like other "invented traditions" of the modern age, iconographic images in propaganda art were relentlessly repeated, bringing together Bolshevik ideology and traditional mythologies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Symbols and emblems featured in Soviet posters of the Civil War and the 1920s gave visual meaning to the Bolshevik worldview dominated by the concept of class. Beginning in the 1930s, visual propaganda became more prescriptive, providing models for the appearance, demeanor, and conduct of the new social types, both positive and negative. Political art also conveyed important messages about the sacred center of the regime which evolved during the 1930s from the celebration of the heroic proletariat to the deification of Stalin. Treating propaganda images as part of a particular visual language, Bonnell shows how people "read" them - relying on their habits of seeing and interpreting folk, religious, commercial, and political art (both before and after 1917) as well as the fine art traditions of Russia and the West. Drawing on monumental sculpture and holiday displays as well as posters, the study traces the way Soviet propaganda art shaped the mentality of the Russian people (the legacy is present even today) and was itself shaped by popular attitudes and assumptions. Iconography of Power includes posters dating from the final decades of the old regime to the death of Stalin, located by the author in Russian, American, and English libraries and archives. One hundred exceptionally striking posters are reproduced in the book, many of them never before published. Bonnell places these posters in a historical context and provides a provocative account of the evolution of the visual discourse on power in Soviet Russia

The influence of maternal metabolic health on placental lipids and the modulatory effects of myo-inositol

Factors affecting fetal development also influence health in utero and in postnatal life. One of the primary determinants of fetal growth and development is the placenta. The placenta supplies the fetus with maternal nutrients and clears waste from the fetal blood. The placenta also mediates maternal-fetal communication with placental hormones adapting maternal metabolism to support the pregnancy, and the placenta mediating fetal responses to maternal signals. Pre-existing and antenatal maternal metabolic dysregulation is known to be associated with unfavourable outcomes for the offspring such as excessive fetal growth, prematurity and later diabetes and obesity. It has been proposed that placental inositol modulates placental lipid metabolism and consequently impacts fetal health and development. Maternal metabolic health, e.g., maternal diabetes, can affect postnatal outcomes and I hypothesise that this is mediated via the placenta. An important question is whether intervention given pre-conception and during pregnancy can influence placental function and therefore pregnancy outcomes including fetal growth and gestational length. The NiPPeR randomised control trial is a dietary intervention that was taken before conception and throughout pregnancy, the intervention was found to reduce the incidence of preterm birth. If this is mediated via the placenta, it would be important to determine potential mechanisms. To assess the potential influence of GDM and maternal obesity, endogenous placental lipids were measured and analysed to identify potential associations in chapter 3. Placental lipids were measured via LC-MS/MS and inositol measured via a Megazyme assay. GDM placenta showed increases in 11 triacylglycerols ; greatest effects were in TG52:3 (correlation coefficient 0.812, p = 0.013) and TG56:6 (0.806, p = 0.009) and decreases in 6 phospholipids greatest effect was in phosphatidylinositol (PI) 36:3 (-0.779, p = 0.011). Adjustment for total placental inositol content attenuated all associations with Triacylglycerols, but not those with phospholipids and the diacylglycerol. Conversely, maternal BMI positively associated with phospholipids with no change in associations upon inositol adjustment. The alterations in placental lipid content associated with GDM were distinct from those seen in response to maternal BMI. In addition, placental lipids in GDM, but not BMI, were modulated by placental inositol. The effect of the NiPPeR randomised control trial on the association of maternal metabolic health and placental lipids was determined in chapter 4. Lipids from NiPPeR placental biopsies were measured via LCMS/MS. I found that fasting glucose was associated with increased triacylglycerols in the control group while this response was modulated by the NiPPeR intervention. However, this response was not due to the myo-inositol content of the NiPPeR intervention despite a demonstrable increase in placental inositol content. In chapter 5, to study the impact of NiPPeR on placental lipid metabolism, placental biopsies were incubated with 13C-labelled fatty acids in vitro to study profiles of newly ii synthesized 13C-labelled lipids. Chapter 5 experiments assessed placental lipid processing activity in vitro, newly synthesised 13C-lipid were quantified after 48 h exposure to 13C - labelled FA. In the NiPPeR-control group, increasing pre-conception HOMA2-IR (a measure of insulin resistance) was positively associated with 13C-labelled arachidonic acid lipids lipids including diacylglycerol 38:4 (P=0.002), phosphatidylcholine (PC) 40:8 (P=0.004) and PC 36:4 (P=0.004). In the intervention group, alterations in all lipids were moderated towards a physiological mean. No significant changes were seen in 13C-labelled docosahexaenoic acid, palmitic acid or oleic acid lipid enrichment with increasing preconception HOMA2-IR in either the control or intervention groups. The potential impact of preconception maternal insulin resistance on placental lipid metabolism is fatty acid specific and may be modulated by the NiPPeR nutritional intervention which started preconception. Moderation of AA metabolism maybe a contributory factor to the reduction in preterm birth observed with the NiPPeR intervention. This work provides further evidence for the effect of maternal metabolic state on the placenta and highlights the potential for a nutritional intervention to affect the placenta. I present evidence that the maternal metabolic state affected placental lipids and that placental inositol can moderate the relationship between GDM and placental lipids. The NiPPeR intervention containing myo-inositol could moderate the relationship between maternal insulin resistance and placental lipids composition and metabolism, which may affect the timing of onset of labour. This thesis demonstrates in principle that maternal dietary intervention can affect placental lipid metabolism and further work could develop interventions that alter placental function to benefit the fetus

Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies

The essay traces the origins and development of Soviet area studies from their inception in the early 1940s to the present. The first part examines the institutional framework and the funding sources for Soviet and post-Soviet area studies. The second part concentrates on the connection between area studies and the disciplines. Next, the authors consider intellectual trends and map the major changes that have taken place in the conceptualization of Soviet area studies from the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. The final section provides an overview of the formation of post-Soviet area studies. The focus of the inquiry is Soviet and post-Soviet area studies in the United States. The paper argues that the institutional context for the study of the region has not changed dramatically since the collapse of communism (despite some changes in nomenclature and the inclusion of "Eurasian" studies). By contrast, the intellectual agenda in both Soviet and post-Soviet studies and the disciplinary distribution of specialists have undergone significant modifications during the past decade