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Israeli and palestinian postcards: Presentations of national self
Abstract
Searing images of suicide bombings and retaliatory strikes now define the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many Westerners, but television and print media are not the only visual realms in which the conflict is playing out. Even tourist postcards and greeting cards have been pressed into service as vehicles through which Israelis and Palestinians present competing visions of national selfhood and conflicting claims to their common homeland. In this book, Tim Jon Semmerling explores how Israelis and Palestinians have recently used postcards and greeting cards to present images of the national self, to build national awareness and reinforce nationalist ideologies, and to gain international acceptance. He discusses and displays the works of numerous postcard/greeting card manufacturers, artists, and photographers and identifies the symbolic choices in their postcards, how the choices are arranged into messages, what the messages convey and to whom, and who benefits and loses in these presentations of national self. Semmerling convincingly demonstrates that, far from being ephemeral, Israeli and Palestinian postcards constitute an important arena of struggle over visual signs and the power to produce reality.
... Often, the narrative of religious figures tended to fall into what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett called, distory, "wherein only the best of the best, the most attractive" exemplary to be presented in. [11] Hence, not much room for critical inquiry. The analysis of Christian comics owed from different approaches notably, the visual rhetoric criticism. ...
Comics culture has a long precedence in Indonesian art tradition. Earlier visual art appeared in the Hindu-Buddhist temples and in the colonial period. Once, Indonesian comics enjoyed the golden age in the 1970s and 1980s in which the comics sought inspiration from local legends and wayang themes. However, the flood of Western and Japanese comics eroded the supremacy of Indonesian comics. For the latter, it is part of the Japanophile, which later followed by Koreaphile as two global cultural forces overwhelmed Indonesia presently. Manga comics, for example, has become a dominant visual art in the comics market in Indonesia and influencing the style of Indonesian visual art production. Religion is another socio-cultural terrain affected by this cultural development. The present article is an exploration of the comics as a visual art in the religious landscape of Indonesia, especially among the Christians. Comics as the locus of the technology of enchantment renders the trace of religious shift among the average religionists. Employing visual rhetoric criticism, the article will look at the ideological and rhetorical elements of the visual production, and the cultural shifting in the Indonesian Christianity. It further touches upon the notion of cuteness (chibi) and gender as examples of religious rhetoric maintaining a certain ideological position.
... Often, the narrative of religious figures tended to fall into what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett called, distory, "wherein only the best of the best, the most attractive" exemplary to be presented in. [11] Hence, not much room for critical inquiry. The analysis of Christian comics owed from different approaches notably, the visual rhetoric criticism. ...
Comics culture has a long precedence in Indonesian art tradition. Earlier visual art appeared in the Hindu-Buddhist temples and in the colonial period. Once, Indonesian comics enjoyed the golden age in the 1970s and 1980s in which the comics sought inspiration from local legends and wayang themes. However, the flood of Western and Japanese comics eroded the supremacy of Indonesian comics. For the latter, it is part of the Japanophile, which later followed by Koreaphile as two global cultural forces overwhelmed Indonesia presently. Manga comics, for example, has become a dominant visual art in the comics market in Indonesia and influencing the style of Indonesian visual art production. Religion is another socio-cultural terrain affected by this cultural development. The present article is an exploration of the comics as a visual art in the religious landscape of Indonesia, especially among the Christians. Comics as the locus of the technology of enchantment renders the trace of religious shift among the average religionists. Employing visual rhetoric criticism, the article will look at the ideological and rhetorical elements of the visual production, and the cultural shifting in the Indonesian Christianity. It further touches upon the notion of cuteness (chibi) and gender as examples of religious rhetoric maintaining a certain ideological position.
... This is because the formal characteristics of postcards are explicitly national; the name of the state is often inscribed on the postcard, which also bears the stamps and the cancellation marks of the national postal system when sent by mail. Moreover, postcards serve a ubiquitous nationalist aspiration to project a unique identity and authentic culture to the world (Semmerling 2004). Finally, while textbooks' credibility stems from the authority vested in the institution of education, postcards are rendered credible via the "truth value" assigned to the medium of photography itself, believed to be a window into reality (Mraz 2009, 3). ...
The existing macro-historical scholarship tends to assert rather than demonstrate the wider impact of nationalism. Yet, state-sponsored national ideologies permeate the broader reaches of society to varying degrees. To investigate variations in the consolidation of official nationalism, this paper combines the content analysis of school textbooks as state-regulated and picture postcards as primarily market-driven sources. Building on this novel methodological approach, we find that textbooks published in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru promoted a similar popular nationalism that portrayed the lower classes as “true” national subjects. However, picture postcards from the same period demonstrate that the consolidation of this official national ideology varied. In Mexico and Peru, the new state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood gained presence in public life, but they did not to take hold in Argentina. We conclude that studying the top-down nationalist messages promoted by states should not be equated with studying their ideological impact in public life.
... Like most of us, Palestinian Islamists are living yber Helga Tawil-Souri in a globalized visual world and they don't hesitate to use visual symbols rooted in a western visual context, but transform it into a messenger serving their Islamist ideology ( fig. 16, 35). Commercial visual symbols such as geographical maps, postcards (Semmerling 2004), Hollywood movies, etc. can be used for this purpose. genealogy, as well as the organizing structure of the movement ( fig. 1 and 2). ...
The article analyzes the changing position of the visual representation in the context of Islam from the starting point set up in the Qur'an and more specifically in the prophetic tradition to the theoretical positions of Islamic reformism and radicalism and the practice of Islamism movements. To understand this changing relationship is crucial for the research of ideology and propaganda of the contemporary Islamist movement. In the second part, the article illustrates this new position of images in the visual representations
... Furthermore, existing studies tend to focus on the use of cards for visualizing the conflicts from the beginning of the 20th century such as the First World War (Doyle, 2010). Only a few works discuss greeting cards in the context of more recent conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict (Roei, 2012;Semmerling, 2004) and the War on Terror (Jackson, 2005). ...
This article discusses how popular culture products – digital greeting cards – interact with hegemonic historical narratives in the context of war remembrance. It employs the Foucauldian concept of counter-memory to analyse how user-generated mnemonic content interacts with historical power relations. Using content analysis to examine a sample of amateur greeting cards, the authors investigate how these cultural products engage with official and counter-official memory practices in Russia related to the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Specifically, the article explores how different visual elements are employed to (de)construct specific narratives about the Soviet victory and it discusses how the use of computer graphics, in particular animation, influences the potential role of greeting cards as a means of resurrecting the subjugated past.
... Las posibilidades de obtener más aportes de las postales son pocas veces atendidas, pese a la riqueza que ellas contienen. Hay mucho que aprender y mucho que decir de ellas; de lo que su contenido encierra y de lo que representa su existencia, habiéndose llegado a desarrollar una historiografía especializada al respecto (Semmerling, 2004;Stevens, 2005;Fernández, 1994). No obstante, aunque una gran cantidad de las postales latinoamericanas raramente han sido motivo de estudio, habría que consignar que entre los casos existentes muchos sobresalen por su calidad y aportes dentro del proceso de conocimiento histórico y social. ...
El objetivo de este texto es analizar algunos vestigios visuales, tales como lo son las tarjetas postales vinculadas al tema de las plantaciones circuncaribeñas del banano, atendiendo de manera particular el caso costarricense. Luego de realizar una lectura iconológica, presentar el tipo de discurso que de ellas emana, sosteniendo como tesis que, a través de las imágenes en las que se destaca el adelanto tecnológico mediante la iconografía de barcos y ferrocarriles, se construye un imaginario de prosperidad y bonanza, que sería la propuesta/el objetivo de las compañías bananeras, instaladas en una extensa región bañada por el Mar Caribe, entre finales del siglo XIX y principios del siglo XX.
... Scholars in a variety of disciplines have been analyzing postcards. These studies have been from such diverse fields as the study of linguistic landscapes (e.g., Jaworski 2010); social and cultural history (e.g., Gillen 2013, Rowley 2013; competing political narratives (Semmerling 2004); art and propaganda (Özen 2008); postcards and orientalism (Mazower 2002); and tourism and changing views of the environment (Youngs 2011), to name just some of the many approaches. The current article draws on a larger project concerning Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia, as seen through the postcard frame since the beginning of the 20th century. ...
Thanks to Balkanistica for allowing me to publish on the site.
... com/index.php/the-center). Although there are no mannequins in these exhibits, the centre produces postcards and posters featuring Palestinian women posed in this and other settings (Moors 2000;Semmerling 2004). In this image, labelled 'Palestinian women practicing traditional Palestinian activities,' a group of young women in traditional embroidered dresses pose with numerous elements of Palestinian heritage, including what appears to be the same rotary quern that is on display in the centre (Fig. 8). ...
This paper explores the place of the rotary quern in contemporary Middle Eastern culture and some of the issues involved in using unprovenanced, and thus undated, ground stone artefacts to illustrate women’s daily life activities in the recent past. Grinding stones have specific cultural meanings in the present and are valued, regardless of their date and provenance, as symbols of traditional women’s work that resonate with local audiences and tourists. Since archaeologists working in the southern Levant have generally overlooked these artefacts as a topic of serious study, there exists no typology; as a result, their value as artefacts that can inform about daily life from the Roman period through the nineteenth century in the region is currently limited. However, rotary querns persist in illustrations of traditional daily life activities and represent a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.
... An example of this can be seen in one of Israel's most recognised postcards, sent by thousands of tourists every year to their friends and family back home (Semmerling, 2004). The postcard depicts a portion of pita bread with falafel with an Israeli flag stuck on the peak of the pita, titled 'Falafel: Israel's national snack' (see Figure 1). ...
This article sets out to study the role that Palestine and the Arab-Palestinians have had on Israeli national identity through the examination of Israeli food culture. Food culture played an important part not only in the emancipation of European Zionist-Jews who immigrated to Palestine before 1948 but also in the creation of the Israeli national identity, including its collective memory, national psyche and desired political aspirations. However, it is impossible to understand Israeli food culture, and Israeli identity and popular culture, without taking into account the environment in which and the people among whom it developed. In that respect, and as argued hereafter, for political and ideological reasons the Palestinian direct contribution to Israeli food culture, and by extension national identity, has been expunged or overlooked. Early Zionist encounter with the Arab-Palestinian people and their culture contained a mixture of romanticisation, admiration and imitation. However, with the Zionist aim of substituting the Arab-Palestinian people by creating a separate political and economic society, the process of encounter changed to replacement, appropriation and deliberate forgetting and rewriting of the past. In relation to Israeli food culture, the Arab-Palestinian food element was marginalised, blurred and reinterpreted as belonging to the Zionist settlers, or as being brought to Israel by the Mizrahi-Jews. In other words, Israeli food culture 'needed' the Arab-Palestinian culture as a source of imitation and localisation, but at the same time desired its de-Palestinianisation, together with the general idea of a separate Jewish state. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
... (p. 30) The images portrayed in the first three postcards are of Arab men (Figures 1-3) and follow an unsavoury tradition of portraying them either as harmless symbols of history ('picture postcards of pre-1948 Palestine were made for the Euro-American audiences to promote imperialism, Jews and Palestinians were presented degradingly in order to support and rationalize imperialist ideologies' (Semmerling, 2004: 3)), mystics (whose 'cultural validity is derived from other sciences and systems of thought' (Said, 1978: 206)) or simply as indolent, apathetic demi-merchants willing to let fate take its hand over trade ('the complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial relation' (Bhabha, 1986: xx)). ...
As mechanical reproductions, postcards fall into the category of what Walter Benjamin thought of as life’s ephemera or detritus that play an important part in constructing and reconstructing our understanding of the past. Postcards from the colonial era can be analysed to provide a visual discourse on power and the interrelationship between history and politics. The way in which we acquire historical knowledge and make something of it has undergone changes that are well illustrated by the six postcards featured herein. The seemingly unambiguous, surface-level presentations of the images reveal ambiguous, multiple meanings: exemplars of Said’s notion of ‘exteriority’. These seemingly naïve objects framed by the Zeitgeist of the colonial era tell us about the voyeuristic economy of the colonial gaze and how such images, when set within the milieux of the travel writing, Orientalist art, and the colonial tendency for transforming other cultures into objects for analysis, shaped and cast our purview of colonial subjects.
In Lebanon, there has never existed a true film industry. Lebanese filmmakers and producers have always struggled unsuccessfully against foreign films to attract a share of the small number of moviegoers. Today, despite the recent growth in film production, Lebanese cinema remains highly dependent upon international funding as well as upon Western film festivals. In this context, a number of questions arise: What proportion of contemporary Lebanese films is financed by international institutions? Are “transnationally” and nationally funded Lebanese films similarly valued by international film festivals? Do “transnationally” funded Lebanese films really express and reflect local concerns, or do they comply with expectations predefined by European funders? And to what extent do transnational production and distribution conditions lead to a codified representation based on stereotypical views of the country, views that may be described by the term “cinematic postcard”?
As demonstrated by Benedict Anderson, media are powerful means in creating imagined community, and accordingly, mighty poles of both nationalism and cosmopolitanism. While the former gains much popularity in scholarly analysis, the latter needs to be considered as well, in understanding religious expression in present-day Indonesia, and both in particular with regard to the tensions of “nationalism” (often appeared in term of neo-tribalism and political populism) and religious transnationalism.
The present article takes Anderson’s insight and through it explores the rhetoric represented in the series of historical comic entitled Baladeva, published by Tantraz Comics Bali, Denpasar. The analysis sought inspiration from the notions of micro-cosmopolitanism and cosmopatriotism. A micro-cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism from below that is concerned with freedom, openness, tolerance, and respect for difference, while cosmopatriotism is a double articulation of patriotism and cosmopolitanism that grapples with the condition of territorialism and de-territorialism in the context of postmodern society. Through those conditions and framing, the analysis might reveal the complicated meaning of cosmopolitanism, beyond the popular understanding of the celebration of being the global citizen and the transcendence of traditional and national boundaries.
Taking the last period of the Medang Kingdom (Hindu-Buddhist Mataram) as the historical context of the comic’s plot, the author consciously portrayed the glory and power of the pre-Islam, pre- colonial ‘Indonesian’ past. This narrative directly and indirectly became a critical position against the present condition of Indonesia, which is presumably Westernized, modernized, and implicitly Islamicized. Balinese socio-political and religious dynamic as the immediate context for the author is also part of the equation. Hence, the analysis might touch upon where the pressing questions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, counter-transnational religious discourse, and religious minority are played out.
This paper examines the role Arab-Palestinian food plays in the construction of Israeli national identity and food culture. In particular, it sets out to understand the recent willingness in Jewish-Israeli society to acknowledge Arab, and to a lesser extent Arab-Palestinian, culture and food. This new phenomenon has resulted in the re-Arabization of Israeli food culture. For the first time Arab and Arab-Palestinian food is acknowledged, written about and celebrated. This follows a historically longer process in which the construction of Israeli identity and food culture was based on adaptation and imitation, leading to appropriation and nationalization of Arab-Palestinian food culture.
Violence is a regular occurrence at many of Jerusalem's holy sites. Ongoing civilian clashes play a role, but official modes of control through the Israeli army (IDF) and Border Police, as well as more informal private security operations are often involved. Such militarisation may keep violent upheavals in check, but it is carried out within the framework of a long and harsh occupation. The two sites considered here—the Western Wall in the Old City and Rachel's Tomb on the border of Jerusalem and Bethlehem—each have a history of war and are fixtures of the occupation. This study explores the mechanisms that embed religious and militaristic meanings at each site. In so doing, certain questions are addressed. Firstly, how are the sites being constructed and used as popular and dramatic settings for certain constituents to promote religious militarism/militarised religion in Jerusalem? In which ways do these characteristics act to intertwine with the religious and militaristic aspects of the sites, making them more extreme but also, in some circles, more attractive? And finally, how do these sites contribute to the character of Jerusalem, both in their own construction and image but also in the roles they play within the wider urban topography?
Neturei Karta is an anti-Zionism Jewish group. This article explores the nature of this group and its position against Zionism. The main focus is about their anti-Zionism ideology in connection with the notion of Jewish 'homeland' and 'diaspora'.
In this paper I examine the historical and political contingencies which have produced the city of Petra and the Bedouin as national signifiers in Jordan. The invention of a collective national memory and a utilitarian national identity are inseparable from the power-relations that operate in national contexts. Both Petra and the Bedouin have become symbols of Jordanian national identity in response to crises of legitimacy faced by the Monarchical Establishment in Jordan. Identity construction in Jordan has been based on strategies of inclusion and exclusion, re-inscribing histories, producing new forms of knowledge on groups and sites, and great fluidity and flexibility in response to political ruptures and contingencies. This paper will situate Petra and Bedouins within those contexts to contribute to a better critical understanding of the fluctuating and shifting constructions of Jordanian national identity.