Download or read book Post Communist Visual Rhetorics of Power and Resistance written by Adriana Cordelia Gradea and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I theorize a post/communist visual rhetorical methodology (to include references to both communism and post-communism), situated at the intersection of rhetorical theories, visual rhetorical and cultural studies, biopolitics and embodied rhetorics, post-totalitarian and post-colonial studies, and feminism. By differentiating between various kinds of rhetorics along lines of political and institutional power in society, this dissertation helps explicate communist rhetorical practices, in general, and their visual rhetorics, as well as the embodied rhetorics of resistance and their existence within a restrictive and reductionist totalitarian sociopolitical system.Methodologically, I review theoretical perspectives that have extended visual rhetorics to various geographical, historical, and cultural spaces in the wake of the so-called digital, pictorial, social justice, and material turns. Subsequently, the first case study in this dissertation provides visual rhetorical analyses of propaganda materials in Communist Romania in order to lay bare the parameters within which rhetorical practices were supposed to exist. At the same time, this first case study illustrates the background on which rhetorics of resistance were predicated. The various rhetorics of power and resistance should be seen in a kind of dialog-albeit distorted given the unequal balance of power at play. Then, in the second case study, I showcase the rhetorics of survivance (survival + resistance) in Communist Romania, which in totalitarianism are often subtle, subdued, nondiscursive, and indeed embodied. The film I analyze is Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4,3,2), which was made in post-communism looking back at the communist times-a necessary redirecting of the collective gaze in the aftermath of that long-lasting regime. Through its cinematography, this film brings to the visible spectrum the resistance and survival of women as a population group in face of totalitarian biopolitics; recuperates post/communist memory; and employs a visual rhetoric that makes the epistemic and biopolitical violence visible to both those familiar with it and those who learn about it for the first time. In other words, the film is both remembrance and lesson, and is therefore a kind of necessary public pedagogy.The project's exigency emerges from the growing interest in merging visual rhetoric and visual culture studies in both rhetoric and composition and technical communication studies-as well as a dearth of inquiry into communist rhetorics, much less visual communist rhetorics, almost three decades after the dissolution of the communist states in Eastern Europe. It is a redirecting of the collective gaze to less investigated areas in order to recuperate lessons that can still be relevant to the present. Pedagogically, this methodology helps rhetoric and composition scholars contextualize past and present, foreign and domestic political matters, in relation to the so-called "Second World" of the post/communist regimes. Finally, this dissertation proposes a more robust presence of post/communist pedagogy in the U.S. higher education at the same time as it also aims at contributing to shaping public rhetorics in general.

Download or read book Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania written by Adriana Cordali and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life under the Totalitarian Gaze offers personal accounts and theoretical insight into the Cold War era when little information about life beyond the Iron Curtain could transpire to the West. Adriana Cordali develops a unique visual rhetorical theory for analyzing communist totalitarian propaganda and the resistance to it, and reveals the deliberate, strategic in/visibilities the rhetoric of power engaged in. Building upon the local history, ideology, and politics of the regime imposed after WWII, she identifies propaganda’s rhetorical features, visual tropes, and symbols and examines striking photographs and print materials from Ceaușescu’s regime (1966-1989) and the time of regime change (1989-1990), as well as an award-winning Romanian film that depicts women’s life at the time. Converging visual rhetoric and culture with history and politics, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania is a first book of this kind and will interest readers of rhetoric and communication, visual rhetoric, and political discourse in the region.

Download or read book Posters for Peace written by Thomas W. Benson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians—including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon—exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy—even in a time of war.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures written by Aga Skrodzka and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.

Download or read book Communism s Shadow written by Grigore Pop-Eleches and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.

Download or read book Art Religion and Resistance in Post Communist Romania written by Maria Alina Asavei and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious ‘affair’ in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.

Download or read book One Hundred Years of Communist Experiments written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has communism’s humanist quest for freedom and social justice without exception resulted in the reign of terror and lies? The authors of this collective volume address this urgent question covering the one hundred years since Lenin’s coup brought the first communist regime to power in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 1917. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the varieties of communist fantasies of salvation, and the remaining three consider how communist experiments over many different times and regions attempted to manage economics, politics, as well as society and culture. Although each communist project was adapted to the situation of the country where it operated, the studies in this volume find that because of its ideological nature, communism had a consistent penchant for totalitarianism in all of its manifestations. This book is also concerned with the future. As the world witnesses a new wave of ideological authoritarianism and collectivistic projects, the authors of the nineteen essays suggest lessons from their analyses of communism’s past to help better resist totalitarian projects in the future.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Social Movements written by Nathan Crick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides an accessible yet rigorous survey of the rhetorical study of historical and contemporary social movements and promotes the study of relations between strategy, symbolic action, and social assemblage. Offering a comprehensive collection of the latest research in the field, The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media suggests a framework for the study of social movements grounded in a methodology of "slow inquiry" and the interconnectedness of these imminent phenomena. Chapters address the rhetorical tactics that social movements use to gain attention and challenge power; the centrality of traditional and new media in social movements; the operations of power in movement organization, leadership, and local and global networking; and emerging contents and environments for social movements in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is framed by case studies (drawn from movements across the world, ranging from Black Lives Matter and Occupy to Greek anarchism and indigenous land protests) that ground conceptual characteristics of social movements in their continuously unfolding reality, furnishing readers with both practical and theoretical insights. The Rhetoric of Social Movements will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of rhetoric, communication, media studies, cultural studies, social protest and activism, and political science.

Download or read book Post communism written by Greta Slobin and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Red Plenty written by Francis Spufford and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Rule and Resistance written by Lisa Bogerts and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Effective visual communication has become an essential strategy for grassroots political activists, who use images to publicly express resistance and make their claims visible in the struggle for political power. However, this “aesthetics of resistance” is also employed by political and economic elites for their own purposes, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish from the “aesthetics of rule.” Through illuminating case studies of street art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Caracas, and Mexico City, The Aesthetics of Rule and Resistance explores the visual strategies of persuasion and meaning-making employed by both rulers and resisters to foster self-legitimization, identification, and mobilization.

Download or read book The Anatomy of Post Communist Regimes written by Bálint Magyar and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-20 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

Download or read book Post Communist Democratization written by John S. Dryzek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-13 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the way democracy is thought about and lived by people in the post-communist world.

Download or read book Post Communist Mafia State written by B lint Magyar and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ

Download or read book American Girls in Red Russia written by Julia L. Mickenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

Download or read book The Nature of Soviet Power written by Andy Bruno and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.

Download or read book Families of a New World written by Lynne Haney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Prague to Tennessee to Brazil, it's hard to find a consensus on what constitutes an average family. In today's world, the nuclear family is rarely the standard family structure, if it ever was. Families of a New World brings together an important collection of original works to examine our understanding of family around the world and how that understanding is shaped by state policy. Using examples from both historical and modern countries around the world, essays demonstrate not only how state policies shape what the family should look and act like, but also how governments have appropriated and regulated an approved ideal of the family to further their own agendas.