Announcing Publication of "Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative Public Memory, Identity, and Critique" (Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek, eds, Springer 2021)

 

I am delighted to share the announcement of the publication of Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique. It will be published by Springer ad available in hardback in 2021 (ISBN )

The collection of essays provides a quite compelling approach on color-coded sign systems in flags, presenting a well developed cultural legal studies approach to the meaning of flags in the collective imaginary that cements a nation, and examining flags as a sense of uniqueness.

A brief summary of the work, short bios of the editors, plus a list of authors and essays follows. All may be accessed on line HERE.

About the Book:

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.

About the Editors  

Anne Wagner is Associate Professor at the Université Lille – Nord de France. She is a research member at the Centre de Recherche Droits et Perspectives du Droit, équipe René Demogue as well as a Research and Adjunct Professor at China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing). She is also President of the International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law and Vice President of the Multicultural Association of Law and Language. Anne Wagner has been granted the French National Award of Scientific Excellence. She has lectured in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America and extensively published research papers in the area of Legal Cultural Studies, Law and Semiotics, Legal Discourse Analyses.  
Sarah Marusek  is Professor of Public Law in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i Hilo on Hawai‘i Island. Her research interests in jurisprudence focus on exploring how law works in everyday life. She has published research articles in the areas of legal semiotics and legal geography. Sarah Marusek is the 2011 recipient of the University of Hawai‘i Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and teaches courses in legal geography, constitutive legal theory, and constitutional law.