Présentation de l'éditeur
The book deals with the identification of “identity” based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as “the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances”. While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways.
The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time.
Winner of the 2021 Gherardi Davis Prize of the Flag Research Center
Sommaire
Front Matter
Building Narratives of Color-Coded Values
Colors Like Words
Jan M. Broekman
Dislocations. Light and Colour, Flags and Identifications
Claudius Messner
The Semiotics of Flags
Massimo Leone
Semiotics, Symbols and Politics: Between Flags, Crises and Disputes in National States
Eduardo C. B. Bittar
Fluttering the Past in the Present. The Role of Flags in the Contemporary Society: Law, Politics, Identity and Memory
Mirosław M. Sadowski
Fraternity Red and Revolution Red
Lung-Lung Hu
Divided Yet Shared Emotions on Semiotic Colours and Shapes Between the Flags of South Korea, North Korea, and Korea Unification
Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja
Flagging Exclusionary Nationalism
Farida Fozdar
Telling the History of a Nation Through the Color Coding of Flags
Flags, Identity, Memory: From Nationalisms to the Post-truth Uses of Collective Symbols
Kristian Bankov
Flags and Nation in Hungary
Miklós Könczöl, Gábor Schweitzer
Historically Conditioned Identity Protection in Poland: A Case Study of Colours as Well as Legal Language Protection and Restitution
Aleksandra Matulewska, Marek Mikołajczyk
Flag Regimes, Nationality Types and Law’s ‘Place’
José Manuel Aroso Linhares
Le drapeau dans les Constitutions de la France
Pierre-André Lecocq
Scotland and the Saltire: Symbol of a Nation Carved in the Clouds
James MacLean
The European Flag in Non-EU Countries: “United in Diversity”?
Alexandr Svetlicinii
The Antisocial Fabric: German and American Approaches to Flags As Hate Speech in Public Demonstration
Christopher Wood Eckels
Semiotic and Legal Analysis of Flags in Russia: Belonging to a Multi-National Federal State Through Color, Form, Space and Time
Yulia Erokhina, Anita Soboleva
Telling the History of a Nation Through the Color Coding of Flags
The Sun Also Rises: Flying the Japanese Flag Amid Contested National Narratives
Richard Powell
India’s Tiraṅgā at the Confluence of Postcolonial Nationalism, Cosmopolitan Aspirations, and Chromatic Social Cognition: “Saffronising” Democracy?
Riccardo Vecellio Segate
Indian National Flag: Carving the National Identity
Parineet Kaur
The Regional Flag of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China: A Synaesthetic Exploration
Rostam J. Neuwirth
Unity, Harmony and Stability: A Sociosemiotic Analysis of the Five-Star Red Flag in the People’s Republic of China
Youping Xu
Recreating Flags Under Other Scenarios
Flag As Fetish: Urbanizing the Color of a Nation
Anne Wagner, Sarah Marusek, Wei Yu
The Multi-Sited/Synesthetic Taste of the Italian ‘Tricolore’: Time-Space Transmutations of the Italian Flag’s Colors Through the Ingredients of Pizza Margherita
Mario Ricca
The Rainbow Flag as Signal, Icon, Index and Symbol of Collective and Individual Gay Identity
Nathalie Hauksson-Tresch
Flag of Compassion: Public Declaration, Manifesto and Afterword by the Artist
Rini Hurkmans
Harms of the Stolen Generations Claimed Under the Flag: Contesting National World-Making Through Literature
Honni van Rijswijk
Art, Ritual, and Law in the Life of Heraldic Flags in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy
Pascale Rihouet
The Politics of Jasper Johns’s Gray American Flags
Frances Guerin
Marcel Duchamp, the Bride and the French Flag on the Great War Battlefield
Christine Vial Kayser
National Identity and the Politics of Belonging in Greek Cypriot Visual Culture
Maria Photiou
Afterword: From the Battlefield to the Computer Screen, Deciphering the Language of Flags
Olivier Moréteau
Back matter
