Adaptation and Self-Celebration: the Formation of Injustice Icons in a North-South Perspective

Abstract

This article argues that the study of political icons offers a new route to understanding the global condition. In particular, it provides a prism for analyzing political meaning work in the global public sphere from a cultural power perspective. Many contemporary icons originate in the global South, but are iconized in a global public sphere dominated by Western interpretive schemas and by Western media and political actors. This involves a twin dynamic of adaptation and self-celebration, where icons are adapted to dominant value sets and, as a result, become sites and occasions for celebrating these values. To understand this dynamic, this paper initiates a dialogue between postcolonial theory and the cultural sociology of Jeffrey Alexander and others. The potential for theoretical cross-fertilization across these distinct theoretical fields lies in a shared concern with cultural-political logics and the structuring capacities of values and meanings. This theoretical dialogue paves the way for two interrelated lines of analysis in the article. First, drawing on the cases of Malala Yousafzai, Neda Agha Soltan, and Mohamed Bouazizi, the article empirically illustrates the twin processes of adaptation and self-celebration. Second, it goes on to discuss some of the potential consequences of these dynamics. It focuses on two in particular: that adaptation and self-celebration often entail elements of simplification, reduction, and even erasure, and that the very acts of adaptation and embracing in many cases lead to counter-iconization and contestation over dominant meaning and symbolization.