Introduction to Anglophone Cultural Studies

1. Introduction to Anglophone Cultural Studies Session 13: Cultural Icons/Iconology

2. Outline of today’s lecture: Part I: Icons – Terminological Clarification Part II: Cultural Icons – Examples Part III: The Civil Rights Movement – A Walk through History

4. Part I: IconsTerminological Clarification

5. Icons, Icons, Icons • Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Jackie “O” … icons of style • Icon of pop music... • Icon of rock music… • Icons of a decade, or a generation • Icons of sports… • Icons of a social movement… • Iconic hairstyles… • Iconic brides… • Icons, Icons, Icons… • There are “icons“ on the Apple iPhone • are icons and iconic images a 20th century cultural phenomenon?

6. Definition Etymology: • Greek: eikōn, from eikenai, to be like, seem, “image“ • Byzantine religious paintings; you may want to take a look at: • Weitzmann, Kurt. The Icon: Holy Images- Sixth to Fourteenth Century. New York: George Braziller, 1978. • Onasch, Konrad, and Schneiper, Annemarie. Icons: The Fascination and the Reality. New York: Riverside Book Company, 1995. • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon • usually depicting Jesus or Mary but also sometimes saints, • function of icons/ iconic images: e.g. tool for instruction; object of veneration (worship); becoming aware of God’s presence through the senses (e.g. the visual) • Icon = sign?!

7. In Need of Signs... • we make meanings through the creation and interpretation of “signs“ • Signs take the form of • words, • Images • sounds, • objects, “but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning.“ (Semiotics for Beginners)

8. Charles Sanders Pierce symbolic: arbitrary and (or) conventional; relationship must be learned, example: traffic lights or traffic signs indexical: (“causal“) relationship or connection between signifier and signified; example natural indexical signs: e.g. smoke: index of fire "Signs and their Objects“ (1910): “If the Sign be an Icon, a scholastic might say that the "species" of the Object emanating from it found its matter in the Icon. If the Sign be an Index, we may think of it as a fragment torn away from the Object, the two in their Existence being one whole or a part of such whole. If the Sign is a Symbol, we may think of it as embodying the "ratio", or reason, of the Object that has emanated from it. These, of course, are mere figures of speech; but that does not render them useless.) iconic: signifier perceived as resembling signified – looking, sounding, tasting, feeling, smelling like it – e.g. a portrait iconic signs, indexical signs, symbolic signs an icon is any sign that “may represent its object mainly by its similarity”

9. Part II: “Cultural” Icons“Cultural icons dominate our world.” (Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons)

10. 2.1 Iconic Events… Iconic image: “a visual image resembles in appearance that of which it is a likeness.”

11. Reflections on Iconic Events... • Something which is readily recognized • Something with significance • Repetition (and proliferation) – e.g. the crashing planes and the cascading towers of the terrorist attacks in September 2001 – in different formats: • in the news, • visual and other media, • in popular culture […] • Dangers (sth. to reflect on…) • Commodification – turning an event into a good-selling commodity • De-contextualization of an event/person • Instrumentalization of certain images; e.g. white-washing (re-inventing a story/event/tragedy…) • Influencing perceptions and receptions; thereby also: influencing processes of memorization • Creating a “visual” – cultural or even global – memory • Creating a – hegemonic – discourse

12. 2.2 Iconic Figures • “people identify with cultural icons and often rely on [them] in their everyday lives.” (Holt) • “anchors of meaning“ (Holt) • Replication – cultivating and monetizing icons (marketing strategies) • e.g. Che Guevara (advertisement/marketing strategies); Mona Lisa • Assigning a story to a certain figure: .g. James Dean = rebel of the 1950s • “cultural texts” – films, newspapers, magazine articles and ads, political speeches, photographic images…– help build (“stitch”) a story • As an aside: early death is good for making and selling a legend:e.g. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, JFK, Lady Di...

13. 2.3 Iconic Brands & Logos, Labels... • Coke, Budweiser, Nike, Adidas, Barbie, Jack Daniel‘s, Harley, Marlboro, Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, [...] • Advertisement strategies (e.g. sponsoring, sporting events, films... • Spinning a compelling myth • “Most iconic brands have been built through mass media” (Holt) • Audience: learns to recognize, for example, a Marlboro ad or Nike spot by how the ad is composed

14. 2.4 Icons of Style – Grace Kelly the “epitome” of “simple, natural elegance”…; her “unpretentious” style; her “sophisticated” look Hollywood film industry; e.g.: Rear Window (1954), wardrobe for the film; concatenating of stardom and fashion (common strategy today) Oscar winning actress – celebrated as the “fresh type of natural glamour” the “original fairy-tale” (climax: the wedding 1956) Merchandising (strategic proliferation of a “sign”); the “Kelly” bag (Hermès); the Kelly “gloves” selling a product, selling a lifestyle and story, selling an image, selling a value, selling a (sexual) identity – in short: the icon-production business… Cover of Time magazine, 31. Jan. 1955 Titled: “Grace Kelly: Gentlemen prefer ladies”

15. 2.5 Icons & the Political Sphere?

16. JFK and Camelot… • In office: January 20, 1961 – November 22, 1963 • “We stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” (John F. Kennedy) • “charismatic” • early death, the mystery, the conspiracy… tales of intrigue • His widow Jackie Kennedy: “There’llbe great presidents again […] but there’ll never be another Camelot.“ • The myth: JFK, the shining knight, and lone hero, promising peace; Americans robbed of a great president by assassins; the common belief: he would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived • Icon of political freedom? Critical Assessments: Noam Chomsky‘s Rethinking Camelot John Hellmann‘sThe Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK

17. Barack and Michelle Obama – Icons? “The crux of iconicity is that the person or the thing is widely regarded as the most compelling symbol of a set of ideas or values that a society deems important.” (Holt) OED: cultural icon can be “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, especially of a culture or a movement [...]“ The role of the media… “Who will dress Michelle Obama for the inauguration?” “First ladies' inaugural dresses set the tone for presidency” “The Michelle Obama inaugural dress secrecy: What will she wear?” “Obama girls, style icons in the making” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2008/12/19/GA2008121902831.html?sid=ST2009011603043

18. Presidential Wives...

19. JFK and Barack Obama?!? • The “icon“ Barack Obama • JFK and Barack Obama? • “Obama's election: a turning point in the perception of blacks?” (LATimes) • Barack Obama: the culmination of Civil Rights Movement? Titled „Obama lässt den Geist von John F. Kennedy aufleben“

20. PART III: The Civil Rights Movement – A Walk through History

21. The Civil Rights Movement • Civil Rights…Where to start? 1215: Magna Carta recognizes the right to liberty in England ... 1) • Civil Rights movement commonly associated with the movement of the 1960s, in particular with the African-American experience and history in the US. • “Textbooks traditionally designate the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education as the beginning of the civil rights movement.” (Birnbaum/Talyor 1) • Yet: why then 1954, and not 1934 or 1904? • Historical time frame

22. The Civil Rights Movement 2) • Images, people, symbols, events… • “Ask any American what image the words civil rights movement conjure up, and she or he will probably answer with a statement about Martin Luther King Jr. leading a march in the 1950s and 1960s” (Schneider 3) • What else? • “The story of the civil rights movement is not over.” • Segregation and discrimination prevented African Americans from enjoying the same life chances as whites. (see Ling/Monteith 1)

23. The Struggle for Civil Rights “Should States Apologize for Slavery?“ By Jeninne Lee-St. John Tuesday, Mar. 27, 2007 Time.Inc 2009 Initial Considerations: • How define the “Black experience”? • Time frame • Who are the primary “actors”? • Participants and opponents… • Objectives – key concerns/issues • Textbooks and historians • “Black experience” – knowledge formation: • race, racism, • racist historiographies • developments; revisions • Diaspora studies…

24. Academia... Overview: • interest in race: “grown in popularity in the United States following the success of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.” • Franz Boas’ The Mind of the Primitive Man (1911) • Margaret Mead (1928) • Ruth Benedict: Race: Science and Politics (1940) • Asd • Elton, Anderson Jeffrey. “Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race in Colonial America.” A Companion to African American History. Ed. Alton Hornsby, Jr. Malden, MA et al.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 89-104.

25. 3.1 Slavery – Atlantic Slave Trade • West Africa and slavery system • Slavery – as a form of forced labor • Purchase of Africans – transport to the “New World”, forced labor in the fields, manufactories, and homes • transatlantic slave trade • Differences between slavery in Africa and European/ American slavery Paul Finkelman & Joseph C. Miller eds. MacMillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery: Volume II (Macmillan Reference USA - Simon and Schuster Macmillan New York, 1998), p. xiii.

26. Post-Columbian Transatlantic Passages… • English migration across the Atlantic • 1584: Walter Raleigh founded Virginia • 1607: first English settlement in America (Jamestown) • 1619: first Africans appear in North America – slavery from the beginning? • 1620: Puritans journey to Massachusetts (“Mayflower”) • Colonists struggle to develop social and economic institutions

27. Institutionalizing Slavery in the US, I • Planters gradually substituted black slaves for white indentured servants • 1640 in Virginia – Africans were not allowed to carry arms • 1661: Virginia legally instituted the condition of slavery on Africans; other colonies followed suit • Colonial Laws prohibited interracial marriage; early discrimination against Africans • skin color becoming the marker for difference; alleged inferiority – explanation/justification: race, and also religion • Frantz Fanon (1952), Black Skins, White Masks: • “[W]hen European civilization came in contact with the black world, with those savage people, everyone agreed that the Negroes were the principle of evil symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul.”

28. Institutionalizing Slavery in the US, II • “Europeans tended to set the African apart as a foil, conceiving of themselves as the perfect epitome of civility, Christianity, and morality, as they posited the African as barbaric, heathen, and lascivious.” (Young 149) • Slavery: system for blacks and Indians (children inherited status) • In 1696: SC adopted restriction of Barbados slave code • By 1705 strict legal codes defined the place of salves in society (see Boyer) • 1724: Code Noir issued (techniques of racial control in the English West Indies – adopted in the mainland colonies’ plantation societies (see Boyer)

29. Code Noir • Code Noir took shape in Louis XIV edict of 1685: • Article I. We desire and we expect that the Edict […] be executed in our islands. […] • Article II. All slaves that shall be in our islands shall be baptized and instructed in the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith. […]. • Article XII. Children born from marriages between slaves shall be slaves, […]. • Article XXXVIII. The fugitive slave who has been on the run for one month from the day his master reported him to the police, shall have his ears cut off and shall be branded […]. The third time, he shall be put to death. • Article XXXIX. The masters […] who have given refuge to fugitive slaves in their homes shall be punished by a fine of three hundred pounds of sugar for each day of refuge.

30. Slavery System in the 18th Century • 1735: law imposed a dress code for slaves (fabrics worth less than ten shillings a yard); also: prohibited them to wear their owners’ cast-off clothes (see Boyer) • 1776: Declaration of Independence • “We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” • Thomas Jefferson owned slaves • Slavery justified on the basis of: habit, practice, and state laws • 1783 Massachusetts rules slavery illegal based on 1780 constitution • May 1790: 13 colonies finally unified to a single nation • 1793 Fugitive Slave Act

31. All but Slaves? • “About 500,000 black persons, composing one-fifth of the total population, inhabited the United States in 1776. All but 25,000 were slaves.” (Boyer) • Available avenues to freedom during the colonial era: • “manumission by will or deed” (manumit = to free); • “acts of emancipation by colonial governments”; • “conversion to Christianity” • freedom = restricted politically, economically, and socially • e.g. right to vote restricted, they lived under curfews, and lacked the guarantees of equal justice (Boyer) • “most free blacks remained poor laborers or tenant farmers” (Boyer) • Sources: e.g. colonial court records (see, for example Ross M. Kimmel, “Free Blacks in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” 1976) • Phillis Wheatley – slave in Boston; gained freedom in 1773, published poems

32. The early 19th Century • Free blacks in the North: by 1780, right to vote (for those who me property qualifications); curfews were repealed or stopped; most states guaranteed equal treatment in court • “By 1804 all the states from Pennsylvania north, except New Hampshire, had abolished slavery” (Boyer) • 1807: Slave Trade Act passed by Parliament in the UK – act abolished slave trade, in the British Empire; yet: it did not end slavery itself • By the late 1820s – slavery essentially disappeared in the North • No state south of Pennsylvania abolished slavery (Boyer)

33. Slavery in the 19th Century • HOWEVER: “The Revolution neither ended slavery nor brought equality to free blacks, but it did begin a process by which slavery could be extinguished.” • Continuation of slavery in the South – sectional animosities • By 1830: state of Georgia imposed fines to anyone caught teaching enslaved or free African Americans (also: public whippings, and/or imprisonments) • Segregation prevailed in northern schools, jails, and hospitals

34. Early Abolitionist Efforts… • Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) • For a thorough analysis see, for example Stanley Harrold, “Slave Rebels and Black Abolitionists,” A Companion to African American History, ed. Alton Hornsby, Jr. (Malden, MA et al.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 199-216. • e.g. 1712 in NYC: • approx. 35 Africans, some Native Americans & some white supporters gathered to protest against “hard usage” • Rev. Prince Hall (1748-1807): • advocate of black education; • 1787 petition for equal educational facilities – not granted! • 1817: American Colonization Society founded (main antislavery organization of this period) • Shipboard revolts – aboard the Spanish slave ship “Amistad” in 1839; and 1841 on the “Creole”

35. Pre-Civil War Efforts • Freedom’s Journal – 1827-1829; first black newspaper in the US; editors: John Russwurm and Rev. Samuel Cornish • William Lloyd Garrison • launched the weekly the Liberator (1831-1865) • founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society • at the 1854 Independence Day gathering in a town in Massachusetts, burned a copy of the Constitution. His words: “So perish all compromises with tyranny.” • White people leadership in such organizations as: • the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS, see above); • the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS); • the Liberty Party, or the American Missionary (AMA). • Anti-slavery political parties of the late 1840s and 1850s: the Free-Soil Party and the Republican Party!

36. Other Means of Resistance • “Underground Railroad” • Harriet Tubman; John Brown

37. Shortly Before the American Civil War • Missouri Compromise of 1820 • “Fugitive Slave Law” of 1850; declared that all runaway slaves be brought back to their masters • Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854); same year: Republican Party was formed • Dred Scott v. Stanford (1857)

38. 3.2 The Civil War and Beyond… • 1860: Abraham Lincoln elected president; • South: agrarian society, dependent on slavery system; North: industrialist-capitalist society • 1860-1861: several states seceded from the Union • Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas; • provisional constitution for the Confederate States, capital Montgomery, Alabama (later moved to Richmond, Virginia); • Jefferson Davis: provisional president; • further states seceded from the Union in the following months • Confederate forces seized control of Federal Forts • April 1861: Fort Sumter; in May: Confederate Congress declared a state of war • Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation”; went in effect Jan. 1st, 1863 • July 1863 NY anti-draft riots • 1865 Surrender at Appomattox, Virginia (April 9, 1865); Civil War ends

39. African Americans during the War… • During the first two years of the war: not allowed to enlist • Lincoln: “save the Union” • Emancipation Proclamation • “[…] all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States […] will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” (1. Jan. 1863) • Consequences: • enlistment of African Americans in the Union armed forces • regiments led by white officers; African Americans: no higher rank than sergeant (few exceptions) • Fighting a war on two fronts… against Confederacy; against fellow white soldiers and racism in policy and practice Oscar R. Williams III and Hayward ‘Woody’ Farrar, “African Americans and the American Civil War,” Hornsby 257-270.

40. Reconstruction Acts &Constitutional Amendments Consequences of the war: • Over 620,000 died • Collapse of the Confederacy; by June 1865: • offices and departments of the Confederate States were closed, • Congress dissolved, • the president imprisoned • Confederate officers fled the country • Reconstruction Era • Reconstruction Acts and Amendment… • 13th Amendment: • “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” • Yet…

41. 1865 and Beyond • in 1865: Southern states passed measure called “Black Codes”: • kept former slaves in inferior positions (economically, socially, politically); • Codes granted blacks a legal status, but they were still not allowed to vote, or the testify against white people (among other things); • New racial tensions; militant organizations were formed • often led by former Confederate Army officers • Ku Klux Klan (in Tennessee in 1865), • others: “Knights of the White Camellia”; “the White Brotherhood” or the “Palefaces” • Lynching (esp. 1880s-1960s); Jim Crow (South), and the Limits of Freedom, 1890 – • In 2005: “If Reconstruction means African American resistance to racism, it is still going on today.”(Burton/Herr/Cheney318)

42. “Equal but separate“ • Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): state-mandated segregation is legal as long as the statute or ordinance provided for “separate but equal” facilities • Civil Rights Act of 1964 = outlawed discrimination in public accommodations (e.g. restaurants, hotels, or schools) Editorial cartoon of Plessy v. Ferguson case, which established the "separate but equal" principleCover of Brook Thomas's, Plessy v. Ferguson (St. Martin's Press, 1996).

43. Education & the African American Experience • Book learning for liberation • Records: e.g. Frederick Douglass (escaped from slavery) • “It is perfectly well understood at the south, that to educate a slave is to make him discontented with slavery, and to invest him with a power which shall open to him the treasures of freedom; and since the object of the slaveholder is to maintain complete authority over his slave, his constant vigilance is exercised to prevent everything which militates against, or endangers, the stability of his authority. Education being among the menacing influences, and perhaps, the most dangerous, is, therefore, the most cautiously guarded against.” (My Bondage, My Freedom, 1855) • 1865: a Freedman’s Bureau established (closed in 1879) • to help the freed slaves (e.g. distributed food); helped blacks to find employment; set up schools and provided teachers for black people of all ages • one of the black colleges and seminaries founded after the war was Atlanta University

44. Booker T. Washington • Up From Slavery (1901) – autobiography • called for an emphasis on self-help through manual labor; argues that blacks should stay in the South, accept segregation and abandon efforts to win civil rights • stressed the need to gain wealth and education as prerequisites for equal treatment; • Interpretation: he accepted second-class political status; black survival and prosperity depended on assuming a subordinate role in society • only later recognized the need for blacks to protest against inequality; • gives Atlanta Compromise speech in 1895

45. W. E. B. Du Bois • educated in several institutions, including Harvard • Publications (selection): • PhD dissertation “The suppression of the African slave trade to the United States, 1638-1870” (1896) • Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1934; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1992). • "Strivings of the Negro People."Atlantic Monthly 80 (1897): 194-198. • "Of the Training of Black Men."Atlantic Monthly 90 (1902): 289-297. • difference/similarities to Washington: agreed on the educational issue, but argued that Washington was too agriculturally oriented in the face of industrialization • criticized Washington for ignoring the “talented tenth” of blacks who could and should enter professions (e.g. teachers)

46. Education & the Pursuit of Freedom & Equality • W.E.B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth” (excerpts): • “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. [...] • Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life. . . . • See: TeachingAmericanHistory.org • “[…] the quest for learning was part and parcel of the larger struggle for real freedom and equality.” (Span/Anderson 301)

47. 3.3 The 20th century Organizational forces: • The “black” church (institutional center of the modern civil rights movement) • NACW: National Association of Colored Women (founded 1896) • NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (founded in 1909); • NNBL: National Negro Business League (organization founded in 1900 by Booker T. Washington) • NBA: National Bar Association (founded in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1909) • [...] • The Great Migration…

48. Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1935) • Carter G. Woodson: • founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History • Journal of Negro History • “The South Lingers On” short story by Rudolph Fisher (1925) • Civic Club dinner organized by Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League • Writers, intellectuals, artists, musicians … • Alain Locke’s The New Negro • Influences and legacies: • e.g. “Négritude” (French Caribbean) Augusta Savage (1892- 1962); she was a famous African-American sculptor

49. 1950s – Organizing for “Change” • CORE (Congress of Racial Equality): a civil rights organization, founded in 1942 • Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) • Bus boycotts in Montgomery and elsewhere • Emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rosa Parks (1931-) photographed by Alabama cops following her February 1956 arrest during the Montgomery bus boycotts

50. The 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement • 1961: “Freedom Rides” • 1962: the SDS convention; Port Huron Statement • 1963: Birmingham bombings; March on Washington • 1965: Voting Rights marches – e.g. Selma (Alabama) • 1968: assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Voices of Protest & Resistance… • Sit-ins • Freedom Riders • The “Port Huron” Statement and the student movements • Anti-War movements • Women’s liberation movement • Black Panther movement (1968, summer Olympics – salute) • […]