No Caption Needed

Recently we at The Atlantic Community have been honored by a bit of attention from the excellent photo journalism and public culture blog No Caption Needed. NCN is run by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites who authored one of the only sustained books charting the emergent field of cultural iconology, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy. Hariman is a professor in the Dept. of Communication Studies at Northwestern U.; Lucaites is a professor of rhetoric and public culture at Indiana U. Together they have created an indispensable volume for anyone interested in the functions and construction of iconic images in the public sphere. Here is a reproduction of the table of contents:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION

2 PUBLIC CULTURE, ICONS, AND ICONOCLASTS

3 THE BORDERS OF THE GENRE Migrant Mother and the Times Square Kiss

4 PERFORMING CIVIC IDENTITY Flag Raisings at Iwo Jima and Ground Zero

5 DISSENT AND EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT Kent State

6 TRAUMA AND PUBLIC MEMORY Accidental Napalm

7 LIBERAL REPRESENTATION AND GLOBAL ORDER Tiananmen Square

8 RITUALIZING MODERNITY’S GAMBLE The Hindenburg and Challenger Explosions

9 CONCLUSION Visual Democracy

The blog version of NCN constantly challenges us with new images from a wide range of fields (political culture, for instance the uses and abuses of the US flag; pop culture; sports; cultural geography etc.) The two authors post regularly Monday to Thursday most weeks, and on many weekends the put other, often humorous stuff up, such as their on-going collection of 'sight gags'.

I guess The Atlantic Community is stepping into similar territory with our many recent posts on political iconography in connection with the Presidential election campaign, and also with our research into the function of historically specific icons, such as my work on icons of transgression. Indeed, we are happy to link to NCN in our blog roll, and honored that they have included us in theirs.

Texas Democratic Party State Convention Tribute to Ann Richards

via Sivacracy

I looked at some of the images from this montage in this post here if you're interested. One of the things that seems pretty apparent across the US political landscape, is that Democrats are actively reclaiming historical and cultural narratives and effectively appropriating them into their political campaigns.

The Wiki Way

Noam Cohen has an interesting piece, The Wiki-Way to the Nomination, at the NY Times on the online activism behind the Obama campaign. It's a bit simplistic but it provides some good background if you haven't been following all the online activity. Doesn't everything happen online today?

It's also interesting how techno jargon is becoming more mainstream. The Wiki-Way. I guess terms like grass-roots activism just sounds too analogue.

The Ninth Annual Honora Rankine-Galloway Address

“Will Race Survive in the US? The Possibilities and Impossibilities of the Obama Phenomena”

By Professor David Roediger,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sponsored by the Embassy of the United States, Copenhagen

Center for American Studies

University of Southern Denmark, Odense

Thursday, September 25, 2008

14:15-16:00, Room 100

This lecture, based on David Roediger’s shortly forthcoming How Race Survived United States History (Verso), sets the historic presidential candidacy of Barack Obama within longer patterns of white supremacy in the U. S. past. It argues that the successes of Obama’s candidacy register important, though contradictory, changes in racial attitudes in the post-1965 U.S. At the same time, the “Obama Phenomenon” also obscures the extent to which the structural factors leading to race-thinking persist and raises critical questions regarding the political challenges of moving past a view of race predicated on the simple dualism of black and white.

Professor Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class, and Politics (London and New York: Verso Books, 1994); and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso Books, 1999).

All Welcome!

For further information, please contact Dr. Benita Heiskanen, Center for American Studies, SDU-Odense, email benita@hist.sdu.dk, tel. +45-6550 3133.

Working in the Coal Mine

Whatever metaphor we may use, this is "crunch time" for many of us writing, editing, and grading papers, preparing for exams, getting out those last minute proposals, dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

In the weeds, the jungle, buried in paperwork, up against the clock, 4th and goal. Well, you get the idea.

I always liked Devo's cover of Allen Toussaint's "Working In The Coal Mine" from their 1981 album New Traditionalists and thought this as good a metaphor as any. Perhaps some of you may vaguely remember this track from the soundtrack of the animated movie, Heavy Metal.

This is dedicated to all the summer slaves of academe.



"When my work day is over I'm too tired for having fun........."

Obama Clinches

See the Agonist for more.

Rock Pioneer Bo Diddley Dies at 79

NPR.org, June 2, 2008 - One of the fathers of rock 'n' roll died Monday at the age of 79. Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago, where he played guitar on street corners before being discovered by Chess Records. He leaves behind a sound that helped build a musical movement.

What made Bo's music so unique? I don't know exactly but if I had to assign to it just one adjective it would be, crunchy. Yeah, what a wonderful crunchy sound.