Abstract
AbstractWithin cognitive science, narratives are regarded as crucial and fundamental cognitive instruments or tools. As Roger Schank suggests, the identity of (sub-)cultures is to a considerable extent based upon the sharing of narrative structures (Schank. 1995.Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.). According to Schank, culturally shared stories, as do many other stories, occur frequently in highly abbreviated form, as “skeleton stories” or “gists.” Collective identities are conveyed in and between cultures not only through verbal discourse, but also by pictorial means. Many pictures and visual artworks have indeed been produced in order to establish and to consolidate a home-culture and to demarcate it from conceived extra-cultural counterparts.Some of my previous work on these lines has been concerned with demarcation efforts in visual media of “Jews” as extra-cultural, since the Middle Ages onwards, in the Third Reich’s iconography, as well as in modern, radicalized forms of anti-Semitic picturing in Arab media (Ranta. 2016. The (pictorial) construction of collective identities in the Third Reich.Language and Semiotic Studies2(3). 107–124, Ranta. 2017. Master narratives and the (pictorial) construction of otherness: Anti-semitic images in the Third Reich and beyond.Contemporary Aesthetics15.https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=765(accessed 17 November 2019.). In building upon and extending this work, I shall focus in the current paper upon attempts of creating cultural and political cohesion by means of pictorial propaganda in post-war China from the early 1950’s onwards, as promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership by Mao Zedong. Some concrete pictorial examples indicating these attempts will be discussed from a narratological and cultural semiotic perspective.
Highlights
Some of my previous work on these lines has been concerned with demarcation efforts in visual media of “Jews” as extra-cultural, since the Middle Ages onwards, in the Third Reich’s iconography, as well as in modern, radicalized forms of antiSemitic picturing in Arab media
In building upon and extending this work, I shall focus in the current paper upon attempts of creating cultural and political cohesion by means of pictorial propaganda in post-war China from the early 1950’s onwards, as promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership by Mao Zedong
From a cultural semiotic viewpoint, e. g. as suggested by the Tartu school of semiotics, it might be argued that all societies make models of their own culture, conceived of as in opposition to other cultures (Lotman et al 1975)
Summary
In his philosophical analysis of experience and consciousness, the phenomenologist Husserl (1973; cf. Sonesson 2016) introduced and elucidated the concept of Lifeworld – the (dynamic) horizon and shared “ground” of all our experiences and the world taken for granted, i. e. the background on which all things appear as themselves and as meaningful. The Homeworld might be described as a single community of subjects, their common lifeworld – a general framework which can be looked upon as a system of values or meanings, fixed by (implicit) intersubjective standards that determine what should count as “normal.” An Alienworld, on the other hand, is something considered abnormal to a perceived standard of normality, conceived as alien, which can only be appropriated or assimilated into the Lifeworld, and only understood against the latter’s background. Important in this context is the role of language and narrativity. I shall extend this approach by considering the employment of pictorial propaganda in postwar China from the early 1950s onwards
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