Spectacles of Violence and Politics: El automóvil gris (1919) and Revolutionary Mexico's Sensational Visual Culture

One of the first box-office successes of Mexican cinema, the 1919 ‘El automóvil gris’ (dir. Enrique Rosas) fictionalized a case that exemplified a national crisis of political legitimacy – a series of robberies committed by the ‘Grey Automobile Gang’ with the complicity of military officials – using the narrative and visual conventions of French and North American crime film. Evoking cosmopolitan iconographies of crime cultivated in the police blotter, serial literature, and cinema, the film casts criminality as a thrilling and threatening sign of local urban modernity, glossing over the problem of corruption by distorting real-life events. Capitalizing on cinema's claims to topicality and authenticity, even as it extends the use of visual reproduction technologies as a means of social control, ‘El automóvil gris’ exemplifies a sensationalistic visual culture fueled by the dissemination of photochemical images and the expansion of the popular press. By incorporating ostensibly unstaged footage of the real criminals' execution into its fictionalization of the case, ‘El automóvil gris’ throws into relief the political uses of the cinematic image's reality effects. The film foregrounds visual reproduction technologies' role in registering the violent costs of industrialization, urbanization, and civil war, processes that defined the contested trajectory of modernization in early twentieth-century Mexico.     

Creativity,geopolitics and ontological security: satire on Russia and the war in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Some states create geographical imaginaries that envision the homeland as coherent and good, and the spaces of Others as disordered, dangerous and therefore legitimate objects of violence. Such ‘violent cartographies’ serve not only to justify policy actions, but constitute bordering practices aiming to provide stability, integrity and continuity to the Self, sometimes referred to as ‘ontological security’. This article examines the role of creativity and artistic imagination in challenging dominant geopolitical narratives. It examines satire on the Russian-language internet, which played upon the Russian state’s geopolitical narrative about the war in Ukraine 2014–15. Three themes within this dominant narrative – (1) the imperialist idea of Russia as a modernising force, (2) the gendering of Ukraine as feminine and Europe as homosexual and (3) the idea that the current war was a re-enactment of Russia’s historical battle against fascism – all became the object of fun-making in satire. I argue that satire, by appropriating, repeating but slightly displacing official rhetoric in ways that make it appear ridiculous, may destabilise dominant narratives of ontological security and challenge their strive towards closure. Satire may expose the silences of dominant narratives and undermine the essentialism and binarism upon which they rely, opening up for estrangement and disidentification.     

The historical dynamics of ethnic conflicts: confrontational nationalisms,democracy and the Basques in contemporary Spain*

ABSTRACT. All the historical moments in which the Basque debate reached political protagonism in contemporary Spain coincided with political contexts of institutional democratisation. The debate on patriotism in the Basque Country is connected with a uniform narrative regarding the Basques and their moral distance from the Spanish nation: the ‘Basque problem’. This narrative has fostered a confrontational discourse between Spanish and Basque nationalism. It has also promoted recourse to specific stereotypical images of the Basques, which bind ethnicity to collective identity. Such representations reveal that the invention of the Basque country as a uniform ethnic collective had much more to do with the internal contradictions of Spanish national identity – and later of Basque identity – than with the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards. The Basque case shows that every ‘ethnic conflict’ requires adequate contextualisation in order to avoid simplifying its origins and past pathways to make it conform to present uses.     

‘It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition,Much Less to Write It’: The Continued Importance of Scribal News in the Early 18th Century

This article engages with recent work on the nature of the press in the late 17th and early 18th centuries that has emphasized that print, and more specifically printed news, came to dominate religious and political affairs. Recent scholarship has suggested that political elites embraced the new opportunities that the lapse of licensing (1695) offered by reading and buying newspapers and periodicals in ever greater numbers. Inherent in this portrayal of news culture is a sense that censorship had little effect on news‐writers. Journalists, so it is claimed, were left alone to pursue their trade free from any consistent interference. This article, by contrast, argues that scribal news – handwritten newspapers – continued to be important in the 18th century. The reason for the survival of scribal news‐writers such as John Dyer can be found, I argue, in understanding the complex relationship between press and parliament. Far from embracing the press, most members of parliament were, in fact, reluctant to allow unhindered publication of their discussions. While recognizing the importance of news to political debate, this article insists that the continued production of scribal news is indispensable for understanding both the nature of censorship and the power of the press in post‐licensing England.     

Parody and Satire in the 2008 Canadian Federal Election: Reading the Rick Mercer Report

Political satire and parody continue to influence young adult viewers to a greater degree than traditional political or hard news shows. Soft news has become increasingly important in the category of political entertainment television shows. These shows discursively integrate political information, humor, entertainment and the news. Soft news programs often emphasize public policy issues in their programming while sensationalized, tabloid-style reporting has come to define many segments of Canadian hard news programming. Using Stuart Hall's three main categories of reading televisual cultural texts, this article critically analyzes the Rick Mercer Report. I argue that despite some significant shortcomings and limitations, the Rick Mercer Report does make an important and unique contribution to political entertainment television in Canada.     

Popular culture,post-truth and emotional framings of world politics

ABSTRACT

With the election of US President Donald Trump, the separation between high and low politics and the line between fiction and reality has become fundamentally blurred. Yet popular culture offers an important vector through which we might make sense of this political turmoil. The purpose of this essay is two-fold: conceptually, I examine how television provides opportunities for the insight into the visual and emotional registers of the post-truth era. I illustrate this empirically by examining two popular television series – Homeland and The Good Fight. I argue that the power of popular culture is derived from its visuality as the intersection of image and sound, through which emotional registers related to anxiety and outrage can be elicited and visually narrated. Even more so, the visual nature of popular culture has a strong affective component that shapes how we experience representations of reality and reveals the power and political significance of popular culture.     

‘That Gleaming Sword of Satire’1: Power,Passion and Parliament in the Mid-Victorian City

Political print satire, construed as an articulation of sedition and dissent, is most commonly associated in Britain with its 18th-century ‘Golden Age’. Beyond Victorian fiction, the go-to 19th-century source tends to be the hegemonic, London-centric Punch. It is not widely known that, as Punch mellowed and popularised in the 1860s and 1870s, England's booming urban centres gave rise to a distinct form of citizen journalism which used boisterous satire as an effective vehicle for sociopolitical comment, evidence-based analysis and civic activism. Not only did the provincial satirical periodical filter parliamentary affairs through a critical provincial lens but at a time when politics were largely local, it engaged with the extra-parliamentary power vested in civic and municipal governance. It aspired to much more than diversion through witty posturing. Morally and ideologically inspired, fuelled by righteous indignation, it successfully used the protest of the pen to agitate in the cause of social and political reform, demonstrating the ‘everyday’ resistance and common sense essential to liberal governmentality. Referencing some of the most enduring and respected examples of the genre – the Porcupine in Liverpool, the Town Crier in Birmingham and the Free Lance in Manchester – this article casts light upon this poorly understood journalism of conviction. A cause and effect of both emotional and intellectual release, it serves as an excellent example of citizenship as performed political passion, in an age of public conformity and restraint.     

Visual Persuasion in George W. Bush's Presidency: Cowboy Imagery in Public Discourse

Discussion of George W. Bush's rhetoric typically focuses on his spoken address, yet his use of cowboy visuals also qualifies as public communication. By visually identifying himself as a cowboy Bush associated his presidency with the story of the mythic cowboy, a powerful concept in American culture. While visual images are typically not considered a substantive and rational form of political communication, Bush's cowboy persona, emphasized visually, prompted widespread debate about his leadership style and approach to national problems, particularly terrorism. While many did not agree with his policies, the simplicity of the visual message and the foundational nature of the cowboy story provided a narrative that prompted a national debate on substantive issues of the day. Language is still considered the critical element of political debate, but as Bush's experience demonstrates, rhetoric includes visual communication as well.     

Cutting the cake: the Congress of Vienna in British,French and German political caricature

Although the Congress of Vienna was not a main topic for political caricature, it was anything but ignored. During the first five months of 1815, while monarchs and diplomats were deliberating on Europe’s future, caricaturists in Great Britain, France and the German-speaking states depicted the Congress as a major or minor subject in 20 satirical prints. Together these caricatures provide a multi-perspectival view of the way contemporaries assessed the diplomatic deliberations taking place in Vienna. To obtain an insight into this important part of contemporary public opinion on the Congress, the corpus of graphic satire was submitted to close scrutiny in two ways. Firstly, a context analysis ascertained the artists who produced them; how the prints were published and brought to public attention; and for what audiences they were intended. Secondly, a content analysis explored the political messages that the caricatures on the Vienna Congress tried to convey and the persuasive techniques that were applied to visualise these points of view. Notwithstanding different national origins and opposite political views, the message is a negative one: the satires denounce the territorial greed of the Great Powers and their disregard for the demands and aspirations of the peoples they seek to incorporate.     

‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani,Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss published an article on Caduveo body painting in the first number of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton and cover by Max Ernst. In the article, Lévi-Strauss uses the photographs of the Caduveo women taken during his fieldtrip in 1935–36, together with drawings of facial designs collected to reflect on their ‘strong originality’, which ‘evokes a very ancient culture, and one full of preciosities’. Amongst these illustrations, there is an engraving taken from Guido Boggiani’s book, I Caduvei, published in 1895. Boggiani, an Italian landscape painter who visited South America in 1887–93, was captivated by the Caduveo graphic art, which he sketched in detail. In 1896 he returned, travelling to Paraguay, this time equipped with a new tool to help his ethnographic research: a photographic camera. Over a period of five years, Boggiani completed more than 400 photographs on glass gelatin plates of various sizes. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boggiani, the originality of the Caduveo graphic art remained enigmatic, evoking a very ancient culture; it was a topic to which he would return in several of his most influential works. In this article, I focus on the visual images (engraved, drawn, photographed and filmed) that depict the body painting of the Caduveo people in central Brazil by Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss in order to explore the ways in which they enabled an ephemeral art – delicate arabesques painted on skin – to be studied as archaeological vestiges. In the process, I trace the aesthetic sensibility of Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss that provided them with the imaginative tools to do so.     

Towards new (graphic) narratives of Europe

The cultural policy of the European Union (EU) has become more important than before as economic crisis threatens to undermine the EU’s nascent political identity. This paper offers graphic narrative (or comics) as a medium particularly suited to the task. This suitability results from several features: (1) the text/image hybridity of comics, which eases translation into multiple languages; (2) the topological aspect of graphic narrative, in which panels compose a spatial network of relations of various intensities that is isomorphic with the theorization of European space offered by a key EU think tank; and (3) the potential for comics of the ‘everyday’ to narrate a plural, non-didactic identity with which both Europeans and others can identify. It is hoped that a policy such as this could have a more positive influence on the more territorial, exclusive notions of the EU.     

BALANCED TRUTH: STEVEN SPIELBERG'S SCHINDLER'S LIST AMONG HISTORY,MEMORY, AND POPULAR CULTURE1

Looking at the public reaction to it, one might say that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is undoubtedly the most successful film about the Holocaust. The film's success in the U.S. and other Western countries can be traced back mainly to the fact that it creates the impression of telling a true, apparently authentic, story. This essay investigates how this impression of historical truth and authenticity emerges in a fiction film. For this purpose the essay reverts to a concept developed by Jörn Rüsen, which distinguishes among three dimensions of historical culture, namely political, aesthetic, and cognitive. In addition to the historical context that serves as a specific precondition for the film's success, the essay primarily investigates the strategies of authentication Spielberg applied at both the visual and narrative levels. The investigation concludes that the impression of evidence produced by the movie is significantly a result of the sophisticated balancing of the three dimensions mentioned above. The film utilizes artifacts of an existing and increasingly transnational (visual) memory for the benefit of a closed, archetypical narrative. It follows the aesthetic and artistic rules of popular narrative cinema, and largely recurs to conventions of representation that were common in film and television programs of the 1990s. Although these forms condense the historical course of events, the film manages to stay close to insights gained by historiography. The hybrid amalgamation of history and memory, and of the imaginary and the real, as well as the combination of dramaturgies of popular culture with an instinct for what can (not) be shown—all of these factors have helped Schindler's List to render a representation of the founding Holocaust myth in Western societies that can be sensually experienced while being emotionally impressive at the same time.     

Sensitive travelers: Jewish and non-Jewish visitors from Eastern Europe to Palestine between the two World Wars

Beginning with a reference to early modern, religiously motivated pilgrimages to Erets-Yisroel, this article explores the quest of four travelers of the interwar period for clues of personal, cultural, and political belonging by visiting Mandatory Palestine. It reveals to what significant degree the perceptions of the travelers – two East European Jews, a Polish-Catholic journalist, and one Central European Jewish author – were shaped by preexisting attitudes towards Jewish history, culture, and identity, and how the narrative of the journey itself serves as an instrument to confirm these attitudes. It shows that travelogues offer fascinating insights into the complex relationship of subjectivity, identity, cultural memory, and history.     

Anatomy of the national myth: archetypes and narrative in the study of nationalism

This paper argues that recognising types of underlying narrative form which repeatedly occur across cases is critical to the study of nationalism. It proposes a method borrowed from the literary theory of Northrop Frye – archetypal criticism – for identifying the four basic forms of emotional architecture that characterise the myths of particular nations: tragic, romantic, comic and satiric. The study of nationalism has long acknowledged the importance of narrative in political behaviour. But consideration of how distinct types of narratives affect specific emotions is missing. The ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences, which has responded to instrumentalist scepticism, has thus far focused on the cognitive functions of narrative. That is, how narrative influences the acquisition and interpretation of information and how stories are used to construct or reinforce a collective understanding of events. The undertheorised dimension of narrative in nationalism relates to the emotional structures embedded within narrative. This is where this paper makes its contribution.     

Conservative Journalists’ Myth Making in South Korea: Use of the Past in News Coverage of the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil

This article explores the role of three conservative newspapers in South Korea as storytellers that create and maintain the collective memory of Korean conservatives through textual analysis of news stories on one particular recent event, the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil. Several protests since the 1980s in which the democratic-progressives were a leading force have been used as a source of historical analogies that have helped conservative journalists to interpret contemporary events and issues, including the 2008 vigil. These past protests were framed as anti-American, pro-North Korean leftist actions in the news stories. Some aspects of these past events were omitted – for example, former democratic-progressive activists’ contribution to the democratisation process – while other aspects were emphasised, notably the violent nature of the earlier generation of activists. In addition, conservative journalists constructed a revisionist version of one particular past protest, the 2002 Korean Candlelight Vigil, and used it to serve present political purposes, conflating the rhetoric and language of the earlier protests into their reporting of the current protest. These discourse strategies helped to incorporate the current protest into a larger discourse of “the threat posed by the leftists”, which is embedded in the collective memory of Korean conservatives.     

Political Satire as an Index of Press Freedom: A Review of Political Satire in the Iranian Press during the 2000s

Political satire has had a prominent part to play in the social and political sphere of journalism in Iran since the appearance of an independent press in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper examines the problems of political satire in the Iranian press during the 2000s with respect to their historical context during the past century. The paper argues that, addressing the essential relationship between satire and criticism, and the primary role that criticism has in the freedom of press, what happened to political satire and satirists in Iran can be seen as an index of the freedom of the press and journalistic expression for an era.     

Framed Memories: The Politics of Recollection in Mana Neyestani’s An Iranian Metamorphosis

This essay examines the graphic memoir An Iranian Metamorphosis, by the acclaimed cartoonist Mana Neyestani, in the context of Iranian diaspora literature, particularly the genre of comics. Neyestani’s book is analyzed for its engagement with the politics of exile literature, and its attempt at challenging a two-dimensional view of the political discourse, in which the ethical boundaries of pro- and anti-government are overtly simple. The essay focuses on the book’s narrative techniques that exhibit a complex awareness of what is anticipated from a representative work of Iranian exile memoir, and the way it negotiates its own narrative politics. To clarify the arguments, several comparative examples are drawn from two well-known graphic narratives by Iranian diaspora authors, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Amir and Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise.     

The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

The moral geographies of public sector job relocation: discourses of compensation and competence in the Swedish news press

Previous research has pointed to the fact that ideological images of geographies are bound up with the ongoing struggle for economic and social resources, and that moral values and emotions are central in rendering such images intelligible and accepted. To explore this further, we critically engage with the ways in which moral values and emotions contribute to the (re)production of centres and peripheries in the Swedish news press reports of public-sector job relocations. We deploy the discourse theoretical notion of ideological fantasy to critically explain the forces that make particular moral and emotional judgements comprehensible. We identify two discourses in the news press material – one about competence and one about compensation – built up by morally and emotionally charged articulations. We argue that ideological fantasies worked as driving forces both in this moral and emotional news debate and also in the ongoing constitution of geographies.