Propaganda Posters Research Articles

Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food

Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food

The Knights of the Front: Medieval History’s Influence on Great War Propaganda

Spanning a number of academic areas, “Knights of the Front: Medieval History’s Influence on Great War Propaganda” focuses on the emergence of medieval imagery in the First World War propaganda. Examining several specific uses of medieval symbolism in propaganda posters from both Central and Allied powers, the article provides insight into the narrative of war, both politically and culturally constructed. The paper begins with an overview of the psychology behind visual persuasion and the history behind Europe’s cultural affinity for “chivalry,” then continues into specific case studies of period propaganda posters that hold not only themes of military glory and prowess, but also themes of race, gender, and religion as well. Finally, the article makes the argument that the realities of the First World War shattered the chivalrous and romantic ideals of war so completely that the concepts and images were no longer appropriate for use as propaganda.

World War I and Propaganda Poster Art: Comparing the United States and German Cases

This paper looks at some similarities and differences between propaganda art used by Germany and the United States during World War I. The first section briefly looks at aesthetic theory and addresses the philosophical question of whether war propaganda posters are, in fact, ‘art’ at all. Then images of various posters that were popular and widely published by both nations are shown and discussed. This paper concludes that while there are many thematic similarities between the posters used by both sides, there are also some important differences. The most obvious difference between the German and American propaganda art was in regard to the overall tone of the posters and the colors used in the presentation. The images used have been downloaded from a reputable website that depicts reproductions of the posters that were used during WW1. Understanding the nature of the propaganda used by each side can help shed light on the attitudes and sentiments towards the war held by political elites and citizens alike.

Romanticizing the Land: Agriculturally Imagined Communities in Palestine-Israel

This paper argues that images, and specifically agricultural images, play a significant role in the imaginings of the Israeli and Palestinian communities. Agriculture has symbolic and material value among Palestinians and Israelis, and contributes to identities and land claims made by Zionist and Palestinian organizations. Anderson’s discussion of nation building emphasizes the primacy of print in the imagination of a community; this paper highlights non-textual elements of nation building via case studies of the creation and dissemination of propaganda posters by the Jewish National Fund and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A survey of propagandistic agricultural images reveals the shared symbols used by Palestinians and Israelis in forging identities and exclusive claims to land. Despite being common symbols from a shared past, agricultural images are crucial in creating and perpetuating a divide between Israelis and Palestinians, and in arguing for organic links between each group and the land of Palestine-Israel.

The Visual Representations of the Barefoot Doctor: Between Medical Policy and Political Struggles

Exploring the visual representations of the barefoot doctors in China's Cultural Revolution, this article demonstrates how a medical policy is visualized and politicized, and it also shows how the visual culture of the time was richer than it has been assumed. This article meanders through different visual means such as propaganda posters and cinema in order to explore the difficult relationships between politics and policy, as well as the uneasy position occupied by femininity on the national political stage. Focusing on the barefoot doctor as a case study, this article provides a specific angle for us to understand the intense dynamics between culture and politics in the Cultural Revolution.

The War on the Wall. Polish and Soviet War Posters Analysis

Every war is not only the fight of the armies but also a war of the ideologies. One of the forms of the ideological war is propaganda posters. Over forty posters presented and analyzed in this article come from the Polish-Soviet war in 1919-1921. The research work is based on grounded theory procedures adopted for visual data analyses. Particularly useful was a method of coding families worked out by Barney Glaser and modified to the visual data analysis by Krzysztof Konecki. The author reconstructed several basic motifs, formal solutions, and communication strategies (i.e., continuity and continuation versus avant-garde and revolution, image of the enemy and “one’s own” imagination, strategic conversion) used by artists-ideologists from both sides of the conflict.

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

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 conceptualised 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 constructs 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.

Combat and Collaboration: The Clash of Propaganda Prints between the Chinese Guomindang and the Japanese Empire in the 1930s-40s.

Historically, Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges were dominated by a China-oriented mentality. This relationship shifted abruptly in the late nineteenth century with Japan’s rapid westernization and industrialization, which coincided with the cultural and political implosion of the Qing Dynasty, and was further inverted as Japan became a world power and China struggled to reassemble itself. It was thus with a sense of justification that the Japanese advertised themselves as the legitimate protector of East Asian culture, and key Chinese cities under their occupation became a battleground for what Japan called the New Order in East Asia. Some Japanese and Chinese were able to agree on a working relationship under a new structure of political authority, and a number of propaganda posters were produced to reflect these negotiations. After 1938, the Chinese Guomindang also began to pay attention to propaganda art. Based on original archival research of primary historical documents and visual analysis of important icons in those propaganda images, this article examines the subsequent war of propaganda prints between the Guomindang and the Japanese militarists during the 1930s and 1940s, and demonstrates how the Chinese were able to utilize a variety of signs, symbols and art techniques to create their own propaganda prints in the effort to break from New Order in East Asia.

The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film ed. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Eleanor Ty (review)

Reviewed by: The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film ed. by Russell J. A. Kilbourn, Eleanor Ty Hannah McGregor Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, eds. The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013. 342pp. $85.00. Contemporary media is obsessed with memory. Take, for example, the season three finale of bbc’s Sherlock, which culminates in a revelation about villainous media mogul Charles Augustus Magnussen. Whereas our hero has believed Magnussen to be in possession of vaults of information, accessed remotely through a Google-Glass-like digital interface, the show reveals that Magnussen in fact, like Sherlock himself, accesses his blackmail material via a mind palace—an ancient mnemonic device that organizes information by translating memory into spatial arrangements. The digital interface is disclosed as a visual metaphor for recollection rather than a mediation of information. This revelation mirrors the premise of the show itself, a contemporary adaptation that enthusiastically relocates Sherlock’s deductive skills in the world of contemporary media and technology while assuaging anxieties about the technologization of memory by insisting that cellphones and databases are only prosthetic enhancements of the human mind. In so doing it gestures toward the fundamentally intertwined concerns that shape The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film: the ever-increasing mediation of memory, the parallels between remediation and adaptation, and the tensions between technological and cultural memory. Together, these topics reinforce editors Russell J. A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty’s claim that “there is nothing outside of memory” (24). This interdisciplinary essay collection, originating from a conference held at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011, approaches memory studies through the lens of media theory to ask how memory may be constituted, or at least profoundly reshaped, by its mediations and remediations in literature, film, and television. How does our contemporary media ecology, in which the same narratives are recycled endlessly between multiple media, in which technology blurs the distinctions between reality and representation, shape what and how we remember? Despite the presentism that Kilbourn and Ty identify, in the introduction, as endemic to modern memory studies, the collected essays in fact span a range of texts and historical moments, from the propaganda posters of the First World War [End Page 224] (Sarah Henstra) to the Heritage Minutes’ production of nationalist nostalgia in the wake of the Quebec referendum (Erin Peters). Kilbourn and Ty’s introduction clearly states the collection’s allegiances: to poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and representation, to cultural theory, and to interdisciplinarity. In the process, the introduction offers a wide-ranging survey of the field, less systematic than evocative as it leaps from Bergson to Proust to Freud, stopping along the way at Deleuze, Hitchcock, St Augustine, and Matt Damon. It culminates in the claim that close engagement with specific texts and cultural objects is key to “an ethics of memory” capable of resisting the ideological deployment of memory as political propaganda. It is through this engagement, they assert, that “[t]he relentless and ineluctable technologization, exteriorization, and virtualizations of memory is mitigated by this model of memory as intersubjective, dialogical, social exchange” (25). The strongest essays in the collection are testaments to the ethical, political, and theoretical value of close engagement with cultural objects. Tanis MacDonald’s analysis of Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries reads poetry as a public archive of mourning and as a prosthetic for the violent rupture of the body and memory. She models how attentiveness to the fragmented and scattered dynamics of the text enacts a refusal to indulge in a fantasy of literature as undoing the violence of the past, concluding that “Brand’s exhumation of a non-existent ossuary is as imperative as it is impossible” (104). In a different register, Anders Bergstrom roots his argument that “cinema has shaped and continues to shape our conceptions of how memory operates” (197) in nuanced comparisons of contemporary memory films, taking into account genre conventions, techniques of representation, and modes of production and circulation. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates that the impact of media on conceptions of memory does not begin and end at the level of representation but...

Metamorfosi del corpo nella cultura (post)sovietica

In this article we draw an outline of the ways the body has been represented in Russian and Soviet culture, from the October Revolution up to the present after the breakup of the USSR. Visual and literary texts are the object of this study. We start with Soviet propaganda posters published immediately after the Revolution and with the work of artists like sculptor Vera Muchina, who represented the official line. We compare their representation of the body, and in particular the female body, with that of unofficial Soviet artists who started to organize art exhibitions in the 1960s as an alternative to the established canons of art. The works of Ernst Neizvestnyj and Vladimir Jankilevskij are briefly discussed. We then proceed then to compare them with the literary production of Ljudmila Petrusevkaja, who started writing in the same period and was not allowed to publish until the late 1980s. Finally, we analyze the works of artist Irina Nakhova, who since the early 1980s has further developed the process of deconstruction of the canons of representation of the body.

‘Crops for the State!’ Agriculture and the Countryside in 1950s Propaganda Posters of Central and Eastern Europe

The paper discusses an international exhibition of propaganda posters from the 1950s showing agriculture in the light of socialist propaganda. The aim and the major value of the exhibition was to showcase the similarity of propaganda posters in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe, while simultaneously exploring each country’s specificities. The posters show propaganda view of ‘progressive’ socialist agriculture, whereas the reality was quite different. It is interesting to see how propaganda posters reflected all elements of ‘successful’ socialist agriculture: collective farms, mandatory supplies, agriculture plans, an alliance of workers and peasants, work leadership, People’s authorities, elections, friendship with the USSR, mechanization of agriculture and electrification of rural areas, prosperity and peace, harvest festivals, fighting the Colorado beetle, fighting the kulak, and others. The exhibition organizers were also keen to observe and make comments on reactions of museum visitors to a display on such a controversial topic.

For the Lulz: Anonymous, Aesthetics and Affect

The focus of this paper is on different but connected areas of power – relating to things such as economic globalisation, surveillance, censorship/freedom, ‘terrorism’ and/or specific military activity – visually represented through online media, and intentionally produced to inform a wide spectrum of individuals and interest groups about global and local social injustices. Or, more importantly, produced and distributed with the purpose of providing users with possibilities to engage, bodily and emotionally, in diverse ways: may it be through physical antiwar/anti-wall street protests or hacktivist tactics (e.g. DDoS attacks). We examine a sample of videos, photographs and propaganda posters produced, and digitally distributed (2008-2013), by the fragmented body of activists united globally under the generic name of Anonymous. Analytically, we will draw upon Mouffe’s thoughts on ‘antagonism’ and ‘passion,’ Foucault’s ideas on international citizenship and the (ethical) ‘right to intervene’ (beyond governmentality), together with Sontag’s notion of institutional political inertia and the Deleuzian/Spinozian perspective on affect as a capacity for action. The goal is to analyse the ways in which Anonymous systematically inspire (not only) the radical and social imaginary but also other direct forms of action that have potential societal effects.

For the Lulz: Anonymous, Aesthetics and Affect

The focus of this paper is on different but connected areas of power – relating to things such as economic globalisation, surveillance, censorship/freedom, ‘terrorism’ and/or specific military activity – visually represented through online media, and intentionally produced to inform a wide spectrum of individuals and interest groups about global and local social injustices. Or, more importantly, produced and distributed with the purpose of providing users with possibilities to engage, bodily and emotionally, in diverse ways: may it be through physical antiwar/anti-wall street protests or hacktivist tactics (e.g. DDoS attacks). We examine a sample of videos, photographs and propaganda posters produced, and digitally distributed (2008-2013), by the fragmented body of activists united globally under the generic name of Anonymous. Analytically, we will draw upon Mouffe’s thoughts on ‘antagonism’ and ‘passion,’ Foucault’s ideas on international citizenship and the (ethical) ‘right to intervene’ (beyond governmentality), together with Sontag’s notion of institutional political inertia and the Deleuzian/Spinozian perspective on affect as a capacity for action. The goal is to analyse the ways in which Anonymous systematically inspire (not only) the radical and social imaginary but also other direct forms of action that have potential societal effects.

Analysis of Styles and Characteristics in Poster Advertising Design - Focused on Political Propaganda and Social Protest Posters -

Analysis of Styles and Characteristics in Poster Advertising Design - Focused on Political Propaganda and Social Protest Posters -

Projecting the Good Life at Home and Abroad: Lineages of the Chinese National Image from 1949 to the Present

AbstractBoth post-1949 Maoist China and post-1978 reform China have seen a national image of “the good life” imprinted on the domestic public imagination. In both cases such images seek to mobilize the Chinese people towards a vision of a better life. In both, the idea of “industriousness” is present, but the vision of what constitutes “the good life” has changed significantly, becoming more determinedly modernist and outward-looking. With the Beijing Olympics of 2008 and the Shanghai World Expo of 2010, suddenly the vision of the good life was not only a national call to arms for industriousness, but also a vision of China projected globally, yet in a way that, domestically, served to maintain the continuity of the communist party in a fast-changing socio-political landscape. So, while the desire for “the good life” remains a national call to arms, the projected images of it may well now depict a drastically different vision of what it actually consists of. Comparison between 1950s Mao propaganda posters and those from other eras will be used in this article to explore the continuity of political rhetoric surrounding “the good life” in contemporary China.

Visualizing Social Studies Literacy: Teaching Content and Skills to English Language Learners

Because of its conceptually dense character, social studies can be difficult to learn. Educators often struggle to find ways to teach higher-order thinking and make academic language and concepts comprehensible for English language learners (ELLs). Visuals may be the key to effective social studies instruction for this student population. Images can be located and obtained easily through the Internet, meshing well with the learning styles of today’s adolescents. This article presents some of the most promising approaches—including historical photographs, paintings and illustrations, maps, propaganda posters, and graphic organizers— that can be used with learners at all levels of language proficiency.

Marking Time: Women and Nazi Propaganda Art during World War II

"Marking Time" considers the relative scarcity of woman's image in Nazi propaganda posters during World War II. This scarcity departs from the ubiquity of women in paintings and sculptures of the same period. In the fine arts, woman served to solidify the "Nazi myth" and its claim to the timeless time of an Aryan order simultaneously achieved and yet to come. Looking at poster art and using Ernst Bloch's notion of the nonsynchronous, this essay explores the extent to which women as signifiers of the modern – and thus as markers of time – threatened to expose the limits of this Nazi myth especially as the regime's war effort ground to its catastrophic end.

Monsters and Clowns Incorporated: the Representations of Adolf Hitler in British and American WWII Propaganda Posters

Dans les affiches de propagande britanniques et américaines de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les représentations d’Adolf Hitler font de lui soit un monstre effrayant, sanguinaire et diabolique, soit un clown grotesque, un pantin ridicule et risible, une cible qu’il faut frapper, écraser, ou détruire d’une façon ou d’une autre. S’adressant au sens de l’humour du spectateur, à ses peurs ou à son aversion, les artistes de propagande des deux côtés de l’Atlantique utilisent des leviers émotionnels et des tons très variés pour faire du dictateur nazi un des ressorts principaux de la participation à l’effort de guerre. Ces caricatures d’Hitler, dont l’objectif final était d’encourager la production et les économies ou de lutter contre les bavardages intempestifs, révèlent une condamnation morale ou politique et font partie de la propagande de soutien au moral, qui vise à galvaniser les Troupes de l’Intérieur en présentant la victoire comme quelque chose de vital ou d’inéluctable. Qu’il soit monstre ou clown, on fait tomber le dictateur déshumanisé de son piédestal, un piédestal si soigneusement construit pour lui par la propagande nazie.

Remixing Antarctica

Remixing Antarctica Gretchen E. Henderson (bio) The Book of Ice. Paul D. Miller. Mark Batty Publisher. http://markbattypublisher.com. 128 pages; cloth, $29.95. “[T]ruth itself is a remix,” writes Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in his new project of projections, The Book of Ice. The book is one element of a hexagonally amplified process that led Miller to Antarctica for four weeks in late 2007 to sample that landscape and remix it: sonically, graphically, scientifically, cinematically, emotionally, paradoxically. Embedded with graphs and graphic design (maps, charts, blueprints, timeline, diagrams), archival and contemporary photographs, multimedia content ranging from short symphonic films to downloadable propaganda posters (accessed through Quick Response, or QR, codes that can be scanned with a mobile device, like the black-and-white boxes at the start and end of this review), interviews, and preface by the noted physicist, Brian Greene: the “book” of ice encapsulates a truth as much as ice is able—thawing as we speak. Ice derives from the Old English “is,” Miller tells us, and from the outset, we feel The Book of Ice is more verb than noun, less stagnant than kinetic, less object than subject: undergoing shifting subjectifications. Miller describes the continent as a cracked mirror held up to ourselves, a projection surface not only visually but also aurally: to see and to hear. “[A]ny sound can be you,” he writes, as if the listener/reader/viewer is an instrument being tuned by and tuning the continent through interdependent planetary motions, not unlike the antiquated notion of the Music of the Spheres. The Book of Ice doesn’t resemble the environmental writings of Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, or Rachel Carson, yet it belongs in that lineage, remixing advocacy and awe into a kind of “visual hip-hop” and “info-aesthetics,” engaging waxing and waning technologies that spin our ideas of landscape, if not the landscape itself—the idea of Antarctica, unreachable to most and melting—into a white noise that overpowers the calving, cracking, crystallizing sounds that dissipate into a semblance of silence, the sound of science, buzzing in our brains. A tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? A continent melts away at the bottom of the planet but nobody hears it. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? The Book of Ice remixes advocacy and awe into a kind of “visual hip-hop” and “info-aesthetics.” The Greeks named antarktikos opposite of the Arctic (Arktos being “The Bear”), although they never visited—like many of us whose notions of Antarctica bear themselves out along the surface of our imaginations. Our concept amalgamates by degrees of separation: from near-death tales of explorers like Shackleton and Scott, to penguins penguins penguins, complicated by films like Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Miller goes over the edge, remixing these and more, diving into an archive that plays back: ice’s molecular structure and sonifications, “collateralized debt,” Fluxus to Afrofuturism, colonization to consumerism, Ice-T to a water bottle factiously labeled “100% Pure Melted Continent.” Played out through his acoustic palate, Miller appeals to a lineage of music inspired by landscape (from the works of John Cage to Ralph Vaughan Williams to Cornelius Cardew) to compose a score about the plight of our planet and our (in)ability to listen, think, act. Known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid (a moniker that dates from college, adopted from Sigmund Freud’s notion of “the uncanny,” how “people assign qualities to objects around them that may not exist”), Miller works as a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. His works have appeared internationally in galleries, museums, and venues including the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennial for Architecture, and Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He conceived of The Book of Ice as one component of a larger multimedia portrait of a rapidly transforming continent, and the accompanying symphony, Terra Nova, was commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival and debuted at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. His earlier books include Rhythm Science (2004) and Sound Unbound (2008) (both from MIT Press), as well as the cinematic Rebirth of...

Picturing the Other: Targets of Delegitimization across Time

Italian Fascist propaganda was compared with contemporary right-wing material to explore how political propaganda depicts specific target groups in different historical periods. Taking the theory of delegitimization as the theoretical framework, we analyzed visual images concerning despised social groups used by the Fascist regime and current images of contemporary targets of social resentment used by Lega Nord (currently part of the governing coalition). Images of Jewish and Black people published in the Fascist magazine La Difesa della Razza were classified according to eight delegitimizing strategies, as were images of immigrants used on Lega Nord propaganda posters. Although the target group has changed, six of the eight strategies of delegitimization were used in both periods. In most cases, overlap was found in the way target groups were portrayed in the past and in the present.