scholarly journals Iconography of the corpse in the public sphere. Presence and absence of the dead body in times of pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 433-447
Author(s):  
Fran Benavente-Burian ◽  
Santiago Fillol ◽  
Glòria Salvadó-Corretger
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Dead ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Visual Motif

In this article, we examine the visual motif of the corpse and its presence in the public sphere in times of pandemic from an iconographic, political and anthropological perspective. Through the analysis of the representation of the dead body in images presented by modern media, we reflect on how the formal and iconographic schemes of presentation of death were transformed following the irruption of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic scheme, which is unusual from a political and anthropological perspective, assumes a particular approach to the problem of the representation of the dead body (anonymous body, carrier of a virus), encrypted in a dialectic between systematic omission and censorship and displacement of the representation of death towards the cumulative symmetry of empty pits or coffins that prefigure the corpse to come. Pandemic iconography, often based on science fiction imagery, outlines the dehumanized restlessness of a dystopian future. Under these exceptional conditions, some corpses, which are a priori anonymous, stand out, showing, even in the suspended space of Covid-19, the permanence of structural schemes of violence that must be denounced and fought in the present. With that in mind, we also examine the corpses claimed by Black Lives Matter and their distinctive representations, which are very different from those of the victims of the epidemic. Finally, through these references and based on the media treatment of Diego Armando Maradona’s body, we consider the significance of the return of the iconic corpse to the center of the public sphere, which imposes a regime of extreme visibility and goes beyond the representative limits of pandemic exceptionality.

scholarly journals A lost war in living memory: Japan’s Second World War

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARUKO TAYA COOK ◽  
THEODORE F. COOK
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World

We examine the strata of memory in Japan’s recollections of the wartime experience and explore the shaping and releasing of memory in Japan, seeking to penetrate and recover individual Japanese experience. Individual memories that seemed tightly contained, when released were told with great emotional intensity and authenticity. That there has been little public discourse does not mean that individual Japanese have forgotten that war, but that the conflict – a war with no generally accepted name or firmly fixed start or end – seems disconnected from the private memories of the wartime generation. Japan was defeated thoroughly and completely, and in the history of memory we see no well-established narrative form for telling the tale of the defeated. In Japan's public memory of the war, War itself is often the enemy, and the Japanese its victims. Such a view is ahistorical and unsatisfactory to nations and peoples throughout Asia and the Pacific. The prevailing myths during Japan's war, developed and fostered over 15 years of conflict, and the overwhelming weight of more than three million war dead on the memories of the living forged a link between a desire to honour and cherish those lost and the ways the war is recalled in the public sphere. Enforced and encouraged by government policies and private associations, protecting the dead has become a means of avoiding a full discussion of the war. The memorials and monuments to the Dead that have been created throughout Japan, Asia, and the Pacific stand silent sentry to a Legend of the war. This must be challenged by the release into the public sphere of living memories of the War in all their ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction without which Japan’s Memory can have no historical veracity. Moreover, the memories of the Second World War of other peoples can never be complete without Japan’s story.

scholarly journals The Rise and Fall of the New Arab Public Sphere

2015 ◽  
Vol 114 (776) ◽  
pp. 331-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Power ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Arab Politics ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

“Arab politics will be torn for many years to come between the restless, critical power of the public sphere and the determined efforts of regimes, states, and old elites to maintain their domination.” Third in a series on public spheres around the world.

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (8) ◽  
pp. 1048-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penelope Papailias
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
The Public ◽  
Syrian Refugee ◽  
Political Border ◽  
The Public Sphere

This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.

Shamans watching shamans : The dialectic of identity in northeast China

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 405-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorne Holyoak
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Northeast China ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Methods ◽  
Government Propaganda ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

The present regime in China is actively engaged in attempting to reduce minority cultures to a contrived set of costumes and festivals. At the same time that the Chinese government uses modern methods of mass communication to carry out this programme, the Manzu minority is using the same technology to counteract government propaganda. This essay analyzes two videotaped performances, one a government program, the other an underground tape of a shamanic ritual, to argue that they present competing tropes of national and ethnic identity. These competing tropes in turn reveal tensions in the public sphere that keep Chinese identity fluid. To come to an understanding of these tropes, the essay considers the reactions of shamans and other members of the community in the context of a Manzu village. The analysis demonstrates the role shamanic ritual plays in maintaining a sense of Manzu identity.

Sitting Closer to the Screen: Early Televisual Address, the Unsettling of the Domestic Sphere, and Close Reading Historical TV

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Josie Torres Barth
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Twilight Zone ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
Program Content ◽  
The Public Sphere

This article makes a case for formal analysis of historical TV through close readings that demonstrate the ways in which postwar television unsettled the domestic sphere. While scholars of historical television have dismissed formal criticism for its ignorance of contexts of production and reception, I argue that the content and form of TV in its developmental years directly contextualize industry and society. In its first decades of mass use, television refigured spatial relationships by creating an uncanny liminality between the public sphere of commerce and entertainment and the private sphere of the home. These newly blurred boundaries had profound implications for postwar conceptions of gender, home, and family. Through both form and content, programs as wide-ranging as the science-fiction anthology The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64) and domestic sitcoms The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (CBS, 1950–58) and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952–66) developed modes of address to articulate and work through their viewers’ anxieties. In order to probe the wide-reaching implications of the new medium’s intimate address, I argue that scholars of historical television must be as attentive to program content, textuality, and form as they are to technological and industrial developments.

Dialogue and Public Space: An Exploration of Radio and Information Communications Technologies

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Dale ◽  
Ted Naylor
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Physical Geography ◽  
Internet Technologies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Radio Technology ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Use Of Internet ◽  
Diverse Groups

Abstract.The use of internet technologies, specifically interactive electronic dialogues, has the potential to revive the shrinking Canadian public sphere. Precedent for this assertion can be found in the historical effect of radio technology. The development of Canadian radio forums in the twentieth century such as the National Farm Radio Forum and the Citizen's Forum provided a crude two way interactive medium that helped to shape collective Canadian norms and values. The internet holds the potential to reintroduce national dialogues and reinvigorate the public sphere at a time when Canadians both need and want to address national issues such as environmental concerns and sustainable development. As such dialogue occurs in a “cyberspace” removed from the limitations of physical geography, internet dialogues allow participants from widely diverse groups to come together, surmounting traditional barriers to interaction. Though the danger exists that internet technologies will be abused to reinforce passive static forms of communication, the potential for highly interactive two way dialogue holds the promise of bringing the public into timely and necessary debates on public policy.Résumé.L'utilisation des technologies de l'Internet, spécifiquement les dialogues électroniques interactifs, a la capacité de ranimer le public canadien. Cette affirmation peut être prouvée en constatant l'effet historique de la technologie de la radio : au vingtième siècle, le développement canadien des tribunes radiophoniques tels que le forum de la ferme nationale et celui des citoyens ont aidé à mettre sur pied un média permettant un dialogue direct entre les participants sur les normes et les valeurs canadiennes collectives. L'Internet a la capacité de réintroduire les dialogues et de revigorer le public national à un moment où les Canadiens ont besoin et veulent discuter des problèmes nationaux tels que l'environnement et le développement durable. Lorsqu'un tel dialogue se produit dans un “ Cyberespace ”, les limites géographiques sont éliminées et ceci permet à des groupes de divers participants de s'unir, surmontant les barrières de communication traditionnelles. Bien que le danger existe où les technologies de l'Internet pourraient être abusées pour ainsi renforcer les formes passives et statiques de communication, le potentiel pour un média permettant un dialogue direct promet de rassembler le public pour des discussions nécessaires sur l'ordre public.

scholarly journals Corruption and Public Values in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An Introduction

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
James Kennedy ◽  
Pieter Wagenaar ◽  
Mark Rutgers ◽  
Joris Van Eijnatten
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Public Values ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The Public ◽  
Signal Changes ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

What are our public values? That question can perhaps best be answered by considering it in a deeper historical perspective. It is only through in-depth, case-by-case studies that we can hope to comprehend the meaning of public values and their change over time.In this regard, episodes of conflict are extremely important in discerning which public values are really salient, and how such values change as a result of such conflicts. We argue that public values, as they relate to corruption or other matters, are often only visible in moments of crisis or in moments of scandal.That is why we have focused on corruption cases that signal changes in the development of public values. These cases are almost always, by definition, “scandals,” states of affairs which generated public emotion and vigorous debate. “Scandals,” in contrast to “normal” corruption cases, are often indications of a changing mindset among key actors in the public sphere about the moral (un)acceptability of certain public practices. Most typically, scandals signal public moral opposition to practices to which hitherto had been considered acceptable or at least condoned. By analyzing such cases, and historically contextualizing them, we hope to come to better historical understanding of how the public values of the present day found their “genesis.”

The limits of remembrance during the Spanish Transition: Questioning the ‘Pact of Oblivion’ through the analysis of a censored film and a mass-grave exhumation

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1144-1165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lidia Mateo Leivas ◽  
Zoé de Kerangat
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Mass Grave ◽  
Spanish Transition ◽  
The Public ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Truth

The corpses of those who were defeated in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) first emerged in the public sphere during the country’s Transition to democracy (1973–1982). For many, the end of the dictatorship was an opportunity to come to terms with memories of the conflict through cultural and social practices. However, the memories of the defeated could not be retrieved. This state of amnesia became known as the ‘Pact of Oblivion’, a supposed tacit agreement that eventually became an assumed ‘historical truth’. In our view, no such pact of oblivion ever actually existed. We suggest that, although there were indeed initiatives of remembrance, these were contained. In this way, the so-called ‘Pact of Oblivion’ was more of an imposition than a ‘social contract’. To show this, we undertake a comparative analysis of two cases from very different fields: the documentary Rocío (1980) and a mass-grave exhumation in the small village of Casas de Don Pedro (1978). Both share clear similarities regarding the limits of remembrance during the Spanish Transition. They also indicate how subtle power relations and structural power mechanisms prevented memory from entering into the regime of visibility.

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