Spectacular Death: Sheng Xuanhuai's Funeral Procession in 1917

This article focuses on the extravagant funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916) in November 1917. This mile-long procession attracted over a million spectators and, thereby, lent the residents and sojourners in Shanghai of the day a unique visual sensibility of the modern urban milieu. Various parties to the funeral procession—namely the colonial authorities, the bereaved family, businessmen, and lower-class spectators—developed various tactics to manipulate the spectacle of the procession for political control, commercial gains, and visual pleasure. The author argues that the spectacularization of daily life, as exemplified by the 1917 funeral procession, and a collective will to look and to be looked at in early twentieth-century China, contributed to binding together otherwise segregated people, thus restructuring interpersonal relationships in the modernized city of Shanghai.     

EXHIBITING CHINESENESS: THE TAIWAN PROVINCIAL EXPOSITION OF 1948

Abstract

During the immediate postwar years, visual propaganda served as constitutive and instrumental means for the Nationalist government to “decolonize” the minds of people in Taiwan. The 1948 Taiwan Provincial Exposition highlighted the impact of politics on exhibitions during the critical period in Taiwan’s history. Unable to hold it in the national capital of Nanjing as initially planned, the Provincial Exposition Committee nonetheless maintained the core mission, “enhancing the mainlanders’ understanding of Taiwan,” and strove to mobilize official and individual participants from the mainland. Financed mainly by state-run enterprises, the Exposition delivered a spectacle in serving conservative interests, as encoded in the Exposition’s slogan, “Ensuring Prosperity through Stability.” The Exposition may be seen as an illuminating case to review postwar Taiwan at the threshold of a new era. This paper aims to reveal the complex, and perhaps paradoxical, narrative structures and competitive cultural forces behind the Exposition in redefining Taiwan as a part of China.     

Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss race relations and power-building in Brazil. It is well known that the Iberian colonizers developed special ways of imposing their supremacy, dissimulating the skin color standards to provoke some type of beliefs about shade stratification among African descendents, indigenous and mixed-race people. For the first time in South America there are deconstructive projects of that colonial paradigm still alive and strongly embedded in the media landscape. However, new identity politics and attitudes have been emerging amidst this old social cognition. This paper will discuss some speculative thoughts and power-building scenarios on new representations and struggles derived from these lived forms that are emerging in the new racial formations in Latin America. The question is: what will nation-building in the midst of this changing imagery be like? This paper proposes that a civic pedagogy is the only answer to rendering this phenomenon visible.     

Trafficking in pain: genealogies of witnessing slavery in Francesco Bartolozzi and concluding with Lalla Essaydi

Abstract

This paper examines the ways that slave bodies have been rendered visible in visual representation. I argue that African diasporic slave bodies are firmly located in a history of viewing imbued with a sentimental erotics of pain. Through a careful examination of the engravings by Francesco Bartolozi that accompany John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, I argue that even abolitionist images of slaves traffic in pain, exploiting the wounded captive body through a sexualized identification that reinscribes black subjugation. I suggest that contemporary African diasporic artists such as Lalla Essaydi can navigate this genealogy of viewing by strategically moving through hurtful images in order to resituate and recite them. Such a re-citation as Essaydi accomplishes in her painting Duty Free allows for an ethical viewership that does not simply ignore or repress a painful legacy of visual representation but that rethinks it in the name of redress.     

The cultural labor of surveillance: video forensics,computational objectivity,and the production of visual evidence

This essay argues that the status of video evidence as an index of real events—a sign or representation that offers a direct, empirical connection to material reality—is the result of an intentional process of production. This process involves the repurposing of new technologies borrowed from the domain of creative media production in order to transform a chaotic field of raw surveillance video into useable evidence. In addition to the exchange in technologies, an unavoidable epistemological and interpretive exchange takes place between evidentiary uses of surveillance video on the one hand, and the now prevalent forms of surveillant narration found in both fictional and reality-based storytelling. But despite this exchange in meanings and technical systems, considerable effort has gone in to establish formal standards for the evidentiary uses of surveillance video that distinguish the discovery of video evidence from the production of creative content. Building on Daston and Gallison's historical study of the prevailing “epistemic virtues” that have defined objectivity over time, I argue that what we see emerging in the field of forensic video analysis, as a means of establishing its scientific and legal status, is a commitment to a new epistemic virtue of “computational objectivity.”     

All Tögethé® now: the recontextualization of branding and the stylization of diversity in EU public communication

This article examines the EU Birthday Logo Competition, which was launched jointly by the major European Union (EU) institutions to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2007. As the first public communication initiative by the European Commission's newly restructured Directorate General for Communication, the logo competition is a particularly rich micro-textual “site” for a critical investigation of the recontextualization of corporate communication discourses and practices into institutional approaches to the communication of EU identity. Through an analysis of policy documents, on-site observations, textual artifacts, and in-depth interviews with policy-makers and design professionals I argue that the tensions and challenges that characterized the EU Birthday Logo Competition and related EU communication policy as a site of recontextualization may have led to the communication of a much more stylized, rather than complex and nuanced, version of European identity. In particular, I argue that the dialectic between the “professional/corporate” and “institutional/political” cultures that interacted in the selection, production and implementation of the anniversary logo may have contributed to obscuring key principles of corporate branding at work in the design, and may have in fact worked to produce a highly generic, decontextualized and ultimately also bland, although certainly problematic, “vision” of EU diversity.     

Postcards and Propaganda: Cartographic Postcards as Soft News Images of the Russo-Japanese War

Postcards are an important resource that has been largely overlooked in mainstream research on historical events, political attitudes, perceptions, propaganda, and communication. Accordingly, this article expands the relevance of the postcard from social artifact to historical document embodying social and political messages. In particular, the article examines the images and representations used in cartographic postcards during and after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Not only is this relevant to the study of political propaganda, but also for the study of historic media, popular consumption of political messaging, and as an additional tool with which to study the history of international politics and communication. The political history leading up to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War is briefly covered. Images of cartographic postcards are examined in context of the conflict, with the goal of gaining a greater appreciation for postcards as a form of early “soft news” visual mass media. As such, this is a means by which imperial attitudes and public opinion were shaped. Recommendations are made to broaden the use of postcards as primary documents, especially as these cards are enjoying an online renaissance (e.g., collecting, displaying, discussing). They are valuable in augmenting a variety of research agendas and are fruitful for the study of early modern mass media, social history, public discourse, and political messaging with regard to soft news and public opinion.     

Know Me,Love Me,Fear Me: The Anatomy of Candidate Poster Designs in the 2007 French Legislative Elections

Candidates in many elections spend a significant amount of their budget on posters, yet we know virtually nothing about their communication roles. Based on party strategy and visual communication research, this article argues that poster content is the result of strategic choices by candidates, with major and niche candidates using significantly different poster designs in an effort to influence voters' evaluations. Using an original database of 256 candidate posters from the 2007 French legislative elections and content analysis computer software, I show that niche party candidates consistently emphasize partisan and factual information cues (through size and placement on posters), while major party candidates rely heavily on candidate-oriented visuals and on nonverbal cues (e.g., eye contact) to persuade voters. Preliminary analyses indicate that poster visual design strategies are significantly associated with both major and niche party candidates' electoral performance.     

节约型机关建设研究之文献检视——基于CiteSpace的可视化分析

节约型机关建设是推进机关事务管理现代化和落实政府"过紧日子"要求的重要举措.本文以中国知网(CNKI)收录的关于节约型机关建设研究的644篇期刊文献为样本,以CitrSpacr软件为分析工具,从年度发文量、研究力量、高被引文献、高频关键词等方面对节约型机关建设研究的现状进行文献计量及可视化分析.既有研究成果主要聚焦于节...