"The sort of man": Politics, Clothing and Characteristics in British Propaganda Depictions of Royal Air Force Aviators, 1939-1945

<p>Throughout the Second World War, the Royal Air Force saw widespread promotion by Britain’s propagandists. RAF personnel, primarily aviators, and their work made frequent appearances across multiple propaganda media, being utilised for a wide range of purposes from recruitment to entertainment. This thesis investigates the depictions of RAF aviators in British propaganda material produced during the Second World War. The chronological changes these depictions underwent throughout the conflict are analysed and compared to broader strategic and propaganda trends. Additionally, it examines the repeated use of clothing and characteristics as identifying symbols in these representations, alongside their appearances in commercial advertisements, cartoons and personal testimony. Material produced or influenced by the Ministry of Information, Air Ministry and other parties within Britain’s propaganda machine across multiple media are examined using close textual analysis. Through this examination, these parties’ influences on RAF aviators’ propaganda depictions are revealed, and these representations are compared to reality as described by real aviators in post-war accounts. While comparing reality to propaganda, the traits unique to, or excessively promoted in, propaganda are identified, and condensed into a specific set of visual symbols and characteristics used repeatedly in propaganda depictions of RAF aviators. Examples of these traits from across multiple media are identified and analysed, revealing their systematic use as aids for audience recognition and appreciation.</p>

"The sort of man": Politics, Clothing and Characteristics in British Propaganda Depictions of Royal Air Force Aviators, 1939-1945

<p>Throughout the Second World War, the Royal Air Force saw widespread promotion by Britain’s propagandists. RAF personnel, primarily aviators, and their work made frequent appearances across multiple propaganda media, being utilised for a wide range of purposes from recruitment to entertainment. This thesis investigates the depictions of RAF aviators in British propaganda material produced during the Second World War. The chronological changes these depictions underwent throughout the conflict are analysed and compared to broader strategic and propaganda trends. Additionally, it examines the repeated use of clothing and characteristics as identifying symbols in these representations, alongside their appearances in commercial advertisements, cartoons and personal testimony. Material produced or influenced by the Ministry of Information, Air Ministry and other parties within Britain’s propaganda machine across multiple media are examined using close textual analysis. Through this examination, these parties’ influences on RAF aviators’ propaganda depictions are revealed, and these representations are compared to reality as described by real aviators in post-war accounts. While comparing reality to propaganda, the traits unique to, or excessively promoted in, propaganda are identified, and condensed into a specific set of visual symbols and characteristics used repeatedly in propaganda depictions of RAF aviators. Examples of these traits from across multiple media are identified and analysed, revealing their systematic use as aids for audience recognition and appreciation.</p>

Gender and Literature – Is Gender Gendered? Female Protagonists in Macbeth (1606), Thelma and Louise (1991) and A Doll’s House (1879) – Three Different Genres of Literature across Centuries

This paper examines how men and women have been conventionally portrayed in gender stereotypes in various genres among different cultures through centuries in world literature, with reference to the classical Shakespearean play Macbeth (1606) by the British playwright William Shakespeare, the Hollywood road movie Thelma and Louise (1991) directed by Ridley Scott and A Doll’s House (1879) written by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. The research will explore the common themes embodied by the notion of gender almost in all literature work in the world which include patriarchy and order, masculinity and femininity, fabrication of identities, and binary opposition with the close textual analysis of the process of self-discovery and empowerment by the female protagonists, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Thelma and Louise in Thelma and Louise and Nora in A Doll’s House through the eyes of the male authors, namely playwrights and film director. By comparing the fates of aforementioned female protagonists in the three endings, the actual autonomy that women can take the lead in their life or act outside the normalized gender binaries is further studied. With the analysis of the literary devices and the depiction of the female characters’ psychological change with the visualization of symbols and attires in the texts, the relationship between form and content is also investigated. There is also the discourse analysis on the use of gendered language through soliloquies and dialogues, implication of gender roles in society and culture and the consequences of these females in transcending the gendered roles.

Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking

This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explores the extent to which Noah’s comic treatment of race has shifted between the two contexts. In particular, attention is paid to how Noah incites, navigates and mitigates potential sources of offence surrounding racial anxieties in the two contexts, and how he evokes his own “mixed-race” status in order to open up spaces of permission that allow him to joke about otherwise taboo subjects. Rejecting the claim that the politics of Noah’s comedy is emancipatory or progressive in any straightforward way, by means of formal analyses we argue that his comic treatment of race does not enact any singular politics, but rather that the political work of his racial humour shifts relative to its wider political contexts. Thus, rather than drawing a clear line between light entertainment and politically meaningful humour, this article argues that the political valence of racial joking can be understood as contingent upon wider discourses of race that circulate in national-cultural contexts.

Sugiharti Halim (2008): A Cinematic Portrayal of Chinese Indonesian's Ambiguous Identity

Sugiharti Halim (2008) provides a cinematic insight into the lives of Chinese Indonesians whose identities are perpetually labeled as liyan (other) in the eyes of the inlanders (pribumi). It narrates the story of Sugiharti Halim, a Chinese Indonesian girl, who struggles with her Indonesian sounding name which, instead of successfully assimilating her Chinese identity, makes her even more Chinese than before. This study aims to investigate the cinematic portrayal of Chinese Indonesian’s ambiguous identity as experienced by the female protagonist. The writer employs close textual analysis of the indie film and approaches the issue by the reading of cinematic codes (mise en scene) and the theoretical perspective of name giving developed by Watzlawik in 2016. The conflict highlited in this “indie” criticizes the position of Chinese filmmaker for being pigeoholed on the ground of their ethnicity as portrayed in most commercial films which put Chinese more as a marginalized group. Therefore, the study reveals that films have become a new means of politicizing the interest of certain ethnic group which somehow puts the Chinese Indonesians in their most vulnerable position. The study also concludes that independent films help the young Chinese filmmakers to reconnect with their Chinese heritage as they begin to pick up bits of their Chineseness which were previously miscontrued by the inherited ideals of the New Order regime.

The symbiosis of images and non-diegetic sound in Lynne Ramsay’s Brigitte

The article investigates the poetic and intertextual narrative structure of Lynne Ramsay’s short documentary film Brigitte. Based in a factory in London, Ramsay’s work carefully captures the well-known photographer Brigitte Lacombe in a narrative set-up, which avoids face-to-face interviews. In this postclassical storytelling structure, black-and-white still photographs and voice-over narration melt into a poetic form that narrates personal and interpersonal histories. The article analyses this very avant-garde symbiosis of images and non-diegetic narration through a close textual analysis, while it also investigates the very form of postclassical short documentary set-ups.

A Feminist Film Analysis of the Representation of Woman in Chinese Film Noir: Based on the Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful

The cinema industry has always presented female figures from a patriarchal perspective, propagandizing the men’s authority over women. The typical character “female fatale” with fatal sexual attraction in the genre film noir has already been the focus of many feminist scholars. The essay focuses on the issue of the representation of women in Chinese film noir through examining the female figures in The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (2017) by close textual analysis. Three heroines, the mom Madame Tang, the daughters Tang Ning and Tang Zhen, as the embodiment of “female fatale” drive the film’s plot and articulate their agency of resisting the masculine power. However, the study will prove that the Chinese female fatale conventionally cannot escape from the fatal tragedy and pessimism in their unsolvable dilemma.

The Pedagogy of Song

Drawing upon the author’s “Settlement in Israeli History” course, this essay argues that song can play a valuable and pedagogically economical role in Israel Studies and general humanities teaching, in both conveying meaning and initiating students in the art of close textual analysis. In particular, it showcases how the Israeli classics “Anu banu artzah” (We have come to the land), “The Ballad of Yoel Moshe Salomon,” and “Shir ha-‘emek” (Song of the Valley) can be deployed to stimulate vibrant and critical class discussions. In doing so, it also offers detailed readings of these songs and their place in Israeli culture.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1113b7–8 and Free Choice

This chapter examines with close textual analysis the philosophical question whether the two famous Aristotelian lines from the Nicomachean Ethics (EN 3.5 1113b7–8) on what is up to us (eph’shēmin) provide any evidence that Aristotle discussed free choice or freedom of the will—as is not infrequently assumed. The result is that they do not, and that the claim that they do tends to be based on a curious mistranslation of the Greek. Thus the sentence that is sometimes adduced as the main piece of evidence for the claim that Aristotle was an indeterminist with respect to choosing (prohairesis) and acting (praxeis, prattein) is no evidence for this claim at all. This chapter is a companion piece to the next one (‘Found in Translation’).

Reading the Subaltern Other: A Postcolonial Critique of Kureishi’s The Black Album

This paper aims at a postcolonial study of Kureishi's novel, The Black Album (1995). In particular, the study explores how significantly the postcolonial concepts of racism, identity crisis, double consciousness, and unhomeliness inform and influence the narrative and the characterization of the novel. The study is oriented around the research question of how the characters belonging to the Pakistani diaspora in England are turned into subalterns others of the native white inhabitants, and how this, in turn, makes them vulnerable targets of racist violence. Besides, the psychological repercussions of this racist violence on the lives and minds of the characters are investigated. Moreover, the representation of different communities and their concerns are looked into to view how their mutual tensions lead to the conflict that can be broadly categorized as a clash between two conflicting ideologies, that is, Muslim fundamentalism and British liberalism. The qualitative, descriptive methodology has been employed in this paper which relies mainly on close-textual analysis and interpretation. The research is significant as the study of racism and the othering of Muslims is highly relevant in the context of the ongoing debate on Islamophobia in the West and how adversely it affects the Muslim lives there. It is also relatable to the racist violence the black community is facing in contemporary American society.