Appropriating Iconicity: Why Tank Man Still Matters

Hubbert, Jennifer

doi:10.1111/var.12042

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(20 reference statements)

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“…This is especially evident in the memes superimposing rubber duck heads onto stills from ISIS’ execution videos. They draw on humor to ‘appropriate and interrogate’ (Hubbert, 2014: 123–124) the spectacles of fear created in the original photographs. On one hand, this mocking humor serves to curb ISIS’ spectacles of fear, reclaiming and remixing the violence, while ridiculing the terrorists.…”

Section: Caught In the Binary Of Fun And Fearmentioning

confidence: 99%

Countering spectacles of fear: Anonymous’ meme ‘war’ against ISIS

McCrow-Young

Mortensen

2021

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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In recent years, the terrorist network Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has generated what might be referred to as a ‘spectacle of fear’ through strategic dissemination of execution videos and other graphic material. In response, social media users, activists and others circulate ‘counter-spectacles’, attempting to circumvent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s spectacle of fear. An important case in point is the global hacking network Anonymous declaring ‘war’ against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, including a global call for a ‘Troll ISIS Day’. This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the spectacle of fear generated by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the counter-spectacle created through Anonymous’ trolling practices and explores empirically how Anonymous uses humor to combat fear through the memes produced on ‘Troll ISIS Day’. Bottom-up, cultural forms such as memes are increasingly woven into strategies for countering the fear associated with terrorism, and they represent the potential for humor to generate public engagement. However, as these memetic counter-spectacles draw on the incongruent humor characteristic of meme culture, they both contest and adopt strategies of fear, pointing to ethical challenges inherent in the counter-spectacle.

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Section: Caught In the Binary Of Fun And Fearmentioning

confidence: 99%

Countering spectacles of fear: Anonymous’ meme ‘war’ against ISIS

McCrow-Young

Mortensen

2021

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Returning to Hubbert’s observations on the image of the Tank Man, she argues that “the photo as commonly cropped and available to us largely in still rather than video form deletes all traces of mass involvement” (Hubbert 2014, 116). In other words, there is an epistemic violence in the act of photographic representation, which regulates what stays in and falls out of its still frame.…”

Section: Representation Without Capture?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Picture as a Moving Image

Su¹

2021

Visual Anthropology Review

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For some longtime locals in Shanghai, China, street propaganda’s periodic renovations muddle the distinction between still and moving images. When the cyclic changing of propaganda pieces began to acquire filmic qualities for those who bore witness, they made recourse to these narrative and episodic properties to critique their experiences of political instability. Their discourses implicate media forms as genres of experiencing political transformation. Moreover, their refusal of still images in favor of fungible, overlapping filmic sequences lends ethnographic texture to ongoing scholarly debates about how to historicize the nonlinear development of contemporary Chinese politics, especially under the analytic of “postsocialism.”

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“…The literature on Tiananmen memory mirrors reality. Important work on Tiananmen memory has been carried out outside of mainland China, including the iconicity of Tank Man, 6 the life stories of political exiles, 7 Tiananmen commemorations in Hong Kong, 8 and portrayals of the event by the foreign media. 9 In contrast, studies of Tiananmen memory within China are relatively few, less detailed, and focus on memories at the margins, such as encrypted symbols and digital arts on social media.…”

Section: Problems With Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 6. Jennifer Hubbert, Appropriating iconicity: Why Tank Man still matters, Visual Anthropology Review 30(2), 2014: 114–26. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to thunder in the silence on Tiananmen: Politics and ethics of the memory of the June Fourth Movement

Bin

2020

China Information

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‘Forgetting’ has been widely used in academic and public discourses of the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. The term, however, is conceptually unclear, empirically ineffective, and ethically problematic. Conceptually, it relies on a problematic assumption that silence means forgetting. Empirically, it lumps together different states of memory: ‘don’t remember, don’t talk about, don’t know, and don’t care.’ Ethically, it allows a broad, unjust moral accusation of those who remember but remain silent for various reasons. I argue that ‘silence’ provides greater conceptual precision, more analytical subtlety, and less ethical liability. Silence does not mean forgetting. Nor does it always mean the complete absence of sound. Rather, it refers to the absence of certain discourses about the past. I propose a perspective based on different forms of silence – ‘silencing, silenced, and silent’ – and illustrate it in an analysis of the memory of Tiananmen. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the analysis shows that the Chinese state initially intended to create a ‘covert silence’ – forcing people to remember rather than forget the official stories and silencing other narratives – and then an ‘overt silence’ in which all mention of the event was absent. Even underneath overt silence, however, are various experiences with ambiguities and nuances. The term silence also recognizes individuals’ ethical-political dilemmas under a repressive regime and aims to provide a language for an equal and inclusive truth-and-reconciliation process in the future.

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Appropriating Iconicity: Why Tank Man Still Matters

Cited by 16 publications

References 22 publications

Countering spectacles of fear: Anonymous’ meme ‘war’ against ISIS

Countering spectacles of fear: Anonymous’ meme ‘war’ against ISIS

The Picture as a Moving Image

Listening to thunder in the silence on Tiananmen: Politics and ethics of the memory of the June Fourth Movement

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