Radical History Review current issue

Editors' Introduction

Brock, L., McGrady, C., Meade, T. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

Reclaiming the Nation through Public Murals: Maya Resistance and the Reinterpretation of History

Carey, D., Little, W. E. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

In a nation that often silences them, Maya in Guatemala are increasingly expressing themselves through public murals. When teachers, artists, students, and other residents of San Juan Comalapa painted the history of their nation, town, and people, they portrayed resistance, accommodation, and collaboration. The persistence of Mayan markers throughout the images stands as a reminder that Maya-Kaqchikel are not simply reinventing a sense of nation with murals; rather, they have been reclaiming the nation at every step in its long, often harsh history. For the recent past, the images depict Guatemala's civil war (1960-96), the poverty and racism that were among its causes, and Kaqchikel responses to violence and economic injustice. Based on local Kaqchikel interpretations of history, the murals serve multiple purposes for Comalapenses: local historical representations of the past, critiques of the government and of themselves, expressions of community creativity, mobilizations of development aid funds, and a source of civic pride. This essay considers these multiple purposes: first, by culturally and historically contextualizing the murals as a distinct Comalapa tradition; and second, by placing the murals in dialogue with the state and with Comalapenses who think about the past and critique the murals themselves.

History and the Challenge of Photography in Bertolt Brecht's Kriegsfibel

Imbrigotta, K. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

With the onset and proliferation of today's twenty-four-hour mass media culture, war in particular has become—and will continue to be—very photogenic. But can we rely on what we see? What is missing from that message? Strictly speaking, Marxist thinkers and critics have been skeptical of images and their ability to faithfully convey the realities of class, power, and truth; and to a certain extent, Bertolt Brecht was no different. However, such a blanket statement does not fully capture the often tenuous working relationship that Brecht and photography share. This statement prompts many questions: Does photography uncover truth or cover up societal relations? How does Brecht employ photographs to expose contradictions? Can we continue to read contemporary images of war as Brecht sought to read/use them more than fifty years ago in his works? This essay will briefly outline how Brecht juxtaposed appropriated press photographs and poetic commentary to help us rethink our approach to history, war, and visual representation and will then argue for photography's continued critical relevance to our current relationship with and assessment of the causes and effects of global conflict.

Representations of Conflict: Images of War, Resistance, and Identity in Palestinian Art

Gandolfo, K. L. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

Since 1948 the Palestine-Israel conflict has provided a source of inspiration for writers and photographers both within and outside the region. As the years of war have worn inexorably on, the changes wrought by events in the region have been rendered by Palestinian artists. This article focuses on the Palestinian art scene from 1948 onward, tracing the evolution of Palestinian art and symbols of war, resistance, and national identity in the works of artists such as Sliman Mansour and Naji Al-Ali. The article also assesses the representation of the female form and the significance of identity in artistic works during times of conflict.

Filming Resistance: A Hezbollah Strategy

el Houri, W., Saber, D. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

The article focuses on Hezbollah's filmed operations as key media texts in the group's discourse of resistance. In 1986 Hezbollah surprised the public with an innovation in their strategies of resistance: their fighters filmed one of their armed operations in the occupied southern Lebanon and broadcast it to the public. This video, followed by numerous others, had an impact on the growing popularity of the movement and, even more so, on the construction of their image in the minds of both their public and the Israeli one.

First broadcast by national media, these videos are now in online archives accessible to anyone at any time through Hezbollah's Internet sites. Stemming from Michel Foucault's and Edward Said's notions of power and knowledge, the article reads these videos as a strategy of resistance and as an attempt at self-representation that defies and inverts the prevalent relation of power and domination. The videos act as a metaphor of empowerment of a dominated self being presented as the "one who sees," the "one who allows to see," and the "one who is seen." Thus they become what Daniel Dayan calls "monstration": a reality that exists only through the way it is shown.

Imagining Militarism: Art Young and The Masses Face the Enemy

Cohen, M. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

In 1915 Art Young, the most important radical cartoonist of the Haymarket Generation, drew a simple image for The Masses of a gigantic man laden with weapons striding across the earth, captioned "Looking for Peace." This image, appearing between the Ludlow massacre, the U.S. military intervention in the Mexican Revolution, and the growth of Preparedness campaigns before the U.S. entry into World War I, represents a new character in the visual culture of American popular radicalism: the figure of the Militarist. Far from being reductive or simplistic, this cartoon represents a complex critique of American militarism as it appeared to Young, Jack Reed, and the artists and intellectuals associated with The Masses, who rose in opposition to this violent new political enemy. Through a close reading of this image and its place in the visual culture of early-twentieth-century radicalism, I argue that by combining the corpulent physicality of J. P. Morgan the Plutocrat, the aggressive gesture of the Rooseveltian Imperialist, and the costume of Uncle Sam, Young's Militarist mapped the emergent political economy behind American militarism. This gave a visual, allegorical, and highly influential presence to the anticapitalist Left's newest and greatest enemy in the early twentieth century.

Social Violence, Political Conflict, and Latin American Film: The Politics of Place in the "Cinema of Allende"

Trumper, C. D. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

This article examines the political role of documentary film in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Based on a careful study of two influential films, Pedro Chaskel and Hector Ríos's Venceremos and Patricio Guzman's The Battle of Chile, the author argues that documentary filmmakers engaged, analyzed, and sought to inform the political trajectory of Allende's peaceful road to socialism, highlighting the revolutionary potential of film while experimenting with aesthetic and formal languages appropriate to the political context of the time. Turning their attention to the ways in which everyday experience was politicized, and paying special attention to the political struggle played out in city streets, these filmmakers were able to explore the relationship between political change, social inequality, and everyday and state violence. These films are, in short, important documents for the writing of a cultural history of political change in the late twentieth century.

Facing Off: Photography, Physiognomy, and National Identity in the Modern German Photobook

Rittelmann, L. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

In 1926 Weimar photographer László Moholy-Nagy predicted that the illiteracy of the future would be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography. Five years later theorist Walter Benjamin described the ability to compare facial types via portrait photobooks as a vitally important skill. As Germany endured an interregnum identity crisis, the photographic book proved an effective alternative to what were perceived to be the more subjective, traditional "fine arts" of painting and sculpture. More than innocuous collections of fine art photography, these books functioned as physiognomic guidelines for the representation of national identity during Germany's turbulent transition from unstable democracy to totalitarian state. As conservative writer Ernst Jünger observed in 1934, portrait photobooks offered "a particularly effective means of tracking down the enemy's individual character," because it is "easier to change one's views than one's face." This essay charts portrait photography's exploitation as evidentiary support for nineteenth-century physiognomic theory and examines a resurgent interest in this outmoded "pseudoscience" in 1920s Germany. My analysis of the production and reception of two popular photobooks, one by Weimar photographer August Sander (The Face of Our Time), and the other by Nazi photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (German Folk Faces), reveals the degree to which both progressive and reactionary factions relied on photography and physiognomy to help redefine a stable or "authentic" face of the nation in an otherwise unstable time. While Hitler's devotion to both photographic propaganda and biological determinism is well known, the fact that progressive Weimar photographers like Sander also believed in the medium's power to lay bare the nation's "true" character and corporeal countenance indicates a surprising cultural continuity between the two regimes downplayed by art history's focus on the Führer's repudiation of modern art. By exploring the way that two ideologically opposed photographers shared a reliance on physiognomic theory, this research demonstrates portrait photography's central importance within the discourse of modern German visual culture and challenges art history's persistent emphasis on aesthetic rupture, rather than cultural continuity, between Weimar and the Third Reich.

Unbowed and Unbroken: A Conversation with Irish republican visual Artist Danny Devenny

Conway, J. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

This article is an interview with former Provisional Irish Republican Army active service volunteer and current Sinn Féin activist and visual artist Danny Devenny. Culled from interviews conducted in Belfast between 1998 and 2000, during the Northern Ireland peace process, Danny Devenny reflects on the role of visual arts in the republican movement and discusses how public images framed the IRA prison struggle, connected republican communities to their history and traditions, and helped lay the groundwork for the successful politicization of Sinn Féin.

Meir Gal

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

Meir (Miro) Gal is an artist who lives and works in New York. He left Israel in 1981 and settled in New York City in 1987. His photographs, installations, and interventions challenge the cultural, historical, political, and militaristic nature of the Israeli state. In Gal's work, the myths that have shaped Israeli identity, perceptions, and memory are interrogated and often demolished, and the body politic's dangerous internalization of the state's explicit military ethos is exposed.

Let Us Not Call Them Graphic Novels: Comic Books as Biography and History

Gordon, I. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

This article examines some recent graphic novels and argues that they should be called comic books. Gordon evaluates the success of different artists at matching the style of art to the subject represented, discusses the representational and narrative possibilities of the comic form, and points to some flat moments in otherwise fine historical works.

Unexpected Concatenations

Ogawa, D. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

The convergence of the commodification of art and the discursive authority of the art museum seem to have left little space for politically motivated practices in both art and criticism. This review essay considers two books that offer potential alternatives. One proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of historical situations in which art and revolution overlapped one another; the other brings together texts by practicing artists, critics, and art historians to explore the space between art-making and art-writing.

Art on the Front Lines: Contemporary Artists and Politics

Gosse, J. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

In November 2008, a symposium titled "On the Limits and Possibilities of Politics in Art" was held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. The event was organized in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition for the American painter Peter Saul, who was one of seven noted artists invited to speak on the role of politics in their work. This essay uses the PAFA symposium as a point of entry into an exploration of the theoretical contradictions surrounding art's engagement with politics and offers a challenge to the notion of "political art" as a discrete category with definable "limits and possibilities."

Cecil Skotnes, 1926-2009

Skotnes, A. — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:27:35 PST