The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement’s critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor’s propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japan’s most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women

Hollywood Loving

In this Essay, I highlight how nongovernmental entities establish political, moral, and sexual standards through visual media, which powerfully underscores and expresses human behavior. Through the Motion Picture Production Code (the “Hays Code”) and the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (the “TV Code”), Americans viewed entertainment as a pre-mediated, engineered world that existed outside of claims of censorship and propaganda. This Essay critically examines the role of film and television as persuasive and integral legal actors and it considers how these sectors operate to maintain, and sometimes challenge, racial order

Propaganda visualizations of Chinese communist party in posters and magazine covers during 1989-2009

This research-based thesis is to discover the development of visualizations of political ideology and the utilization of visual language in contemporary Chinese propaganda posters and magazine covers during 1989-2009 (including 1989). The chosen set of poster cases contains posters that were published only by the party’s propaganda organs. The set of magazine cover cases contains a Chinese state-level magazine “China Pictorial” aimed for commercial circulation. It can be purchased by every Chinese citizen in book stores in China. In general, the author aims to discover how visual language is applied in political propaganda in two different media and to discover what kind of visual rhetoric is used in contemporary Chinese political propaganda. The author has applied content analysis, semiology and Marja Seliger’s visual rhetoric theory (2008) as research methods to conduct the visual research on 210 visual cases in total including both propaganda posters and covers of “China Pictorial”. Through the visual content analysis, the author finds out that there are three types of visual signs applied in research material. They are “iconic sign”, “indexical sign” and “symbolic sign”. Moreover, the author also discovers that the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda organ has applied different symbolic actions in posters and magazine covers to construct various visual arguments. These visual arguments can be concluded in five reflexive themes. The author finds out that the five themes are ‘China’s modernization’, ‘China’s technological progression and competence’, ‘the excellence of the Chinese Communist Party’, ‘happy Chinese people’ and ‘the glories of the socialist China’. In addition to that, the author discovers “brand rhetoric”, “personalized rhetoric” and “poetic rhetoric” in the five reflexive themes

Ein Pakt mit dem Teufel : Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, and the Nature of Guilt

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is rightly considered a massive technical achievement in the world of cinema and propaganda. However, this achievement was undertaken at the behest of the immoral, murderous regime of Nazi Germany, a regime that Riefenstahl was more than willing to work with and glorify in order to further her career. This thesis will argue that Riefenstahl’s onscreen deification of Hitler, visual representation of völkisch ideology, and use of the music of Richard Wagner make her later claims of ignorance as to the film’s ultimate meaning impossible to correlate with established facts

Disputes over small territories : a study of the spatial, political and philatelic aspects of such disputes : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Geography at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

“Most governments are now alive to the advertising and propaganda value of postage stamps” Sir Dudley Stamp (1966) Professor of Geography Seventy years after the formation of the United Nations, the world continues to be plagued by civil disorder, territorial claims and border disputes. Currently, there are some 150 claims and disputes still outstanding. Previous published work has revealed that postage stamps have played a key role in the propaganda associated with territorial disputes in Latin American countries. This dissertation aims to ascertain whether this finding holds true for disputes outside of Latin America and to what extent postage stamp propaganda can influence these various disputes. This study then describes and examines the background of 20 selected territorial claims and two special situations in small territories in Europe, European Colonies and Asia. The disputes form a cross section of those which have occurred over the last 125 years. A brief historical and geographical review is included along with the known causation and the actual or possible solution to each dispute. Written and visual evidence is collected and presented to illustrate the role played by postage stamps in the propaganda associated with these selected small territorial disagreements. When appropriate, the relevant postal history is described and postage stamp examples illustrated. The results indicate that, in the disputes studied, violence and loss of life was endemic at some stage in the dispute. Potential or real economic gain was not the obvious prime trigger factor which initiated the dispute. Further analysis of the findings indicates that postage stamps do play an important role in the propaganda associated with territorial claims in Europe, European Colonies and in Asia. Specific examples are identified in which the role of the stamp proved to be a key item in exacerbating the discord further. No clear evidence could be demonstrated to indicate that the effects differed significantly in geographic or political terms between Europe and her Colonies. There is some evidence that stamp usage for political purposes may be more frequently used in recent years than in the past. In Asia, Japan has not utilised stamps for propaganda purposes in her territorial disputes. Postage stamps are a powerful source of political propaganda and can play an important role in territorial claims

Art+Politics

For the exhibition Art + Politics, students worked closely with the holdings of Gettysburg College\u27s Special Collections and College Archives to curate an exhibition in Schmucker Art Gallery that engages with issues of public policy, activism, war, propaganda, and other critical socio-political themes. Each of the students worked diligently to contextualize the objects historically, politically, and art-historically. The art and artifacts presented in this exhibition reveal how various political events and social issues have been interpreted through various visual and printed materials, including posters, pins, illustrations, song sheets, as well as a Chinese shoe for bound feet. The students\u27 essays that follow demonstrate careful research and thoughtful reflection on the American Civil War, nineteenth-century politics, the First and Second World Wars, World\u27s Fairs, Dwight D. Eisenhower\u27s campaign, Vietnam-War era protests, and the Cultural Revolution in China. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1009/thumbnail.jp

Bodies in Conflict: From Gettysburg to Iraq

The exhibition Bodies in Conflict: From Gettysburg to Iraq not only conveys an ambitious geographic and historical range, but also reflects the sensitivity, ambition, and thoughtfulness of its curator, Laura Bergin ’17. In examining how the human figure is represented in prints and photographs of modern war and political conflict, Laura considers how journalistic photographs, artistic interpretations, and other visual documentation of conflict and its aftermath compare between wars and across historical periods. Specific objects include a print and photographs from the Civil War, propaganda posters from World Wars I and II, photographs and a protest poster from the Vietnam War, and a large-scale photograph of a reconstructed journalistic image of Saddam Hussein’s palace by Iraqi-born contemporary artist Wafaa Bilal. Taken together, the works in the exhibition make a profound political and humanitarian statement about suffering, heroism, death, compassion, and appeals to nationalism throughout wars over the last 150 years. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1018/thumbnail.jp

Digital ethnography, resistance art and communication media in Iran

Iranian visual materials relating to the presidential election crisis have the potential to become the sites of analysis and debate for fields as diverse as history, visual history, memory and post-memory, or trauma studies. References to memory are now omnipresent in scholarly discourse and in a wider public debate: ”social memory’, “collective remembrance”, “national memory”, “public memory”, “counter memory”, “popular history making” and “lived history” jostle for attention.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Neurocognitive Process of Digital Radicalization: A Theoretical Model and Analytical Framework

Recent studies suggest that empathy induced by narrative messages can effectively facilitate persuasion and reduce psychological reactance. Although limited, emerging research on the etiology of radical political behavior has begun to explore the role of narratives in shaping an individual’s beliefs, attitudes, and intentions that culminate in radicalization. The existing studies focus exclusively on the influence of narrative persuasion on an individual, but they overlook the necessity of empathy and that in the absence of empathy, persuasion is not salient. We argue that terrorist organizations are strategic in cultivating empathetic-persuasive messages using audiovisual materials, and disseminating their message within the digital medium. Therefore, in this paper we propose a theoretical model and analytical framework capable of helping us better understand the neurocognitive process of digital radicalization

Flavian Visual Propaganda : Building a Dynasty

The Flavian triumph itself was a complex and elaborate pageant that must be examined in each of its parts. It, as Beard persuasively argues, was designed to be the “Flavian coronation, the official launch party and press night of the Flavian dynasty.” The usurpers are transformed into an “established imperial dynasty” and Titus changes from “conqueror of Jerusalem to Flavian Caesar.” The triumph is the beginning of the propaganda program designed to give legitimacy to Vespasian and his sons