Monday, May 24, 2021

Now Published: " Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique" (Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek Editors)

 


 

I am delighted to announce the publication of Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Anne Wagner and Sarah Marusek Editors; Switzerland: Springer Nature).  The book brings together a remarkable group of scholars who use the lens of color, and of the banners, to examine closely "culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. . . [which] stages a trichotomy of meaning through the way in which a people knows, thinks and dreams in colors and flags. Therefore, it is a question (1) of seeing how relations between peoples work, (2) how the relationship between ideology and pragmatism is the repository of an identity, knowledge and history, and (3) how a people appropriates through other artifices the concepts underlying flags and their respective colors." ("A Trichotomy of Meanings: To Know, to Think, to Dream in Colors and Flags," Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative, pp. xxix).

The book's 33 chapters (almost 700 pages) plus its foreword (Larry Catá Backer) and afterword (Olivier Moréteau) dig deep onto the visualization of color symbols that represent and are represented by the ensign. "Flags, with their movement, their materiality, their visual reminder of belonging, and their fluidity in adapting to changing cultural, political, and historical realities, (con)textualize the flag as legal semiotics for peoples and nations in accepted as well as contested ways" (Ibid., pp. xxxvii). 

The publisher's "About the Book" nicely captures the essence of the essays and their objectives:

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 Book).

The Table of Contents with links to chapter summaries follows.  The front matter--including the my Foreword and the Editors' Introduction may be accessed free HERE or via this pdf link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-3-030-32865-8%2F1.pdf.



Front Matter
Pages i-xlviii
PDF



Building Narratives of Color-Coded Values


Front Matter
Pages 1-1
PDF





Colors Like Words
Jan M. Broekman
Pages 3-28


Dislocations. Light and Colour, Flags and Identifications
Claudius Messner
Pages 29-51


The Semiotics of Flags
Massimo Leone
Pages 53-63


Semiotics, Symbols and Politics: Between Flags, Crises and Disputes in National States
Eduardo C. B. Bittar
Pages 65-84


Fluttering the Past in the Present. The Role of Flags in the Contemporary Society: Law, Politics, Identity and Memory
Mirosław M. Sadowski
Pages 85-101


Fraternity Red and Revolution Red
Lung-Lung Hu
Pages 103-121


Divided Yet Shared Emotions on Semiotic Colours and Shapes Between the Flags of South Korea, North Korea, and Korea Unification
Hee Sook Lee-Niinioja
Pages 123-143


Flagging Exclusionary Nationalism
Farida Fozdar
Pages 145-169

Telling the History of a Nation Through the Color Coding of Flags


Front Matter
Pages 171-171
PDF




Flags, Identity, Memory: From Nationalisms to the Post-truth Uses of Collective Symbols
Kristian Bankov
Pages 173-189


Flags and Nation in Hungary
Miklós Könczöl, Gábor Schweitzer
Pages 191-210


Historically Conditioned Identity Protection in Poland: A Case Study of Colours as Well as Legal Language Protection and Restitution
Aleksandra Matulewska, Marek Mikołajczyk
Pages 211-234


Flag Regimes, Nationality Types and Law’s ‘Place’
José Manuel Aroso Linhares
Pages 235-247


Le drapeau dans les Constitutions de la France
Pierre-André Lecocq
Pages 249-261


Scotland and the Saltire: Symbol of a Nation Carved in the Clouds
James MacLean
Pages 263-283


The European Flag in Non-EU Countries: “United in Diversity”?
Alexandr Svetlicinii
Pages 285-307


The Antisocial Fabric: German and American Approaches to Flags As Hate Speech in Public Demonstration
Christopher Wood Eckels
Pages 309-331


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
Pages 333-351



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
Pages 353-383


India’s Tiraṅgā at the Confluence of Postcolonial Nationalism, Cosmopolitan Aspirations, and Chromatic Social Cognition: “Saffronising” Democracy?
Riccardo Vecellio Segate
Pages 385-436


Indian National Flag: Carving the National Identity
Parineet Kaur
Pages 437-447


The Regional Flag of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China: A Synaesthetic Exploration
Rostam J. Neuwirth
Pages 449-481


Unity, Harmony and Stability: A Sociosemiotic Analysis of the Five-Star Red Flag in the People’s Republic of China
Youping Xu
Pages 483-506

Recreating Flags Under Other Scenarios


Front Matter
Pages 507-507
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Flag As Fetish: Urbanizing the Color of a Nation
Anne Wagner, Sarah Marusek, Wei Yu
Pages 509-529


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
Pages 531-551


The Rainbow Flag as Signal, Icon, Index and Symbol of Collective and Individual Gay Identity
Nathalie Hauksson-Tresch
Pages 553-571


Flag of Compassion: Public Declaration, Manifesto and Afterword by the Artist
Rini Hurkmans
Pages 573-591


Harms of the Stolen Generations Claimed Under the Flag: Contesting National World-Making Through Literature
Honni van Rijswijk
Pages 593-603


Art, Ritual, and Law in the Life of Heraldic Flags in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy
Pascale Rihouet
Pages 605-620


The Politics of Jasper Johns’s Gray American Flags
Frances Guerin
Pages 621-636


Marcel Duchamp, the Bride and the French Flag on the Great War Battlefield
Christine Vial Kayser
Pages 637-667


National Identity and the Politics of Belonging in Greek Cypriot Visual Culture
Maria Photiou
Pages 669-684


Afterword: From the Battlefield to the Computer Screen, Deciphering the Language of Flags
Olivier Moréteau
Pages 685-688

Back Matter
Pages 689-697
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