Cultural Connections
The Significance of Multimodal Cultural Manifestations for Mexican Americans in the USA: Identity and Activism Through the Game of Lotería
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriela C. Zapata
In the USA, Mexican Americans constitute 61.7% of Hispanics, the country’s second-largest racial/ethnic group. Despite this significant presence in American society, many face discrimination due to their skin colour and heritage. To combat this discrimination and assert their rightful place in society, since the 1970s, Mexican Americans have engaged in distinct cultural practices. These practices, rooted in Mexican traditions, have become a vital means to address social issues affecting the community, preserve heritage, and celebrate contributions. This work explores one of these unique manifestations, the game of lotería, a notable yet mostly unexamined practice. Lotería is a popular Mexican game of chance, similar to bingo. The cards and boards feature images related to Mexican history, society, and culture, accompanied by textual phrases that define what is depicted. This multimodal combination has given lotería a cultural value beyond that of a simple game. Since its late 19th-century inception, lotería’s multimodal representations have been adapted to reflect contemporary events and sociocultural trends. This paper investigates how Mexican American artists and grassroots organizations in the USA have appropriated original Mexican lotería versions to express their unique experiences, histories, and identities, and to mobilize community members to participate in socio-political movements to confront discrimination and marginalization. The paper discusses the results of a comprehensive multimodal social semiotics analysis of sample contemporary lotería artifacts. This work sheds light on the significance of contemporary cultural practices for marginalized populations and how they can serve as a medium for enacting social activism and change.
Pictorial Knowledge : The Case of the 19th-Century Lantern Lectures
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonya Petersson
It was once a novelty to project large-scale still images in public. This media practice, lantern lectures, had its peak 1880–1910 and centred around a serial display of predominately photographic images with the help of an early projector called magic lantern or sciopticon. In these events, images of all kinds were intermixed: geographical views from all over the world, astronomic charts, contemporary scenes from wars to world exhibitions, and much more, with no sharp lines between spectacle and instruction. Rather, educational aims were fused with the the new media aesthetics, where the wall-size projections of brightly lit image series took centre stage, accompanied by a lecturer’s speech and sometimes music. The purpose of my presentation is to use the case of these 19th-century lantern lectures to reflect, theoretically and historically, on the broader question of pictorial knowledge. While I understand knowledge to be historically determined, i.e., changing across time and social contexts, there are some issues of pictoriality to be further developed. I will discuss how the images of the lantern lectures were embedded in and mediated through a network of media technologies and materials, multimodal presentational practices and widely circulated representational conventions, and what this implies more generally for the epistemic horizons generated by the images. My examples are taken from a case study of lantern lectures in Sweden, which methodologically combines studies of historical sources (such as slide collections and press reports) with multimodal analysis.
Making the Same Image Every Day for Sixty Years: Revelations of Visual Culture and Tourism from the Kolb Trail Photos
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Neumann
This paper is based on the archival photographs in the Emery Kolb Collection housed in Special Collections and Archives at Northern Arizona University. In 1902, Emery Kolb and his brother Ellsworth established a photo studio on the south rim of Grand Canyon. Every morning, wrangler guides would stop their mule teams carrying tourists near the Kolb Photo Studio and Emery would make a photograph with the tourists sitting on their mules, about to descend into the canyon. He did this nearly every day until his death. When the tourists returned from the canyon, he would sell them the photographs he made that morning. Specifically, this paper is based on my research of the “Kolb Trail Photos,” a collection of over 40,000 images of Grand Canyon tourists who rode mule trains into the Grand Canyon between 1904 and the early 1970s. These photographs, made daily for over 60 years by Kolb, are framed nearly identically. Taken together, the images comprise a visual record of visitors to the Grand Canyon and provide insight into the developing tourist culture that began to grow rapidly after 1901 when the Santa Fe Railway opened a rail spur from Williams, Arizona to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. This study provides an analysis of the photographs for what they reveal about the visual culture and tourist structures of vision at Grand Canyon in Arizona. In addition, I address the problems and possibilities of incorporating these largely similar photographic images into a documentary film.
Unraveling Narratives: Image and Word in the Age of Trump
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melissa Bender, Karma Waltonen
In the first months of the Trump administration, word and image have been used to conjure an alternative U.S. narrative, divorced from the recent past. On close inspection, however, we may catch a glimpse of the narrative unraveling. In this study, we examine contemporary U.S. signs and signifiers, through two case studies. Case 1: In early February, Time Magazine, which had named Trump its 2024 “Person of the Year,” featured Elon Musk on its cover. Notably, Musk, who has been allowed to make extraordinary changes to US government agencies since Trump’s inauguration, was seated behind the Resolute Desk: the President’s desk, in the Oval Office. We contrast this image with the imagery of a press conference a few days later, in the same space, with Musk standing beside the desk and Trump behind it. Case 2: By executive order in January, all mentions of transgender identity were removed from the documents and websites of federal agencies, including those of the Stonewall National Monument, which commemorates one of the most important sites and events in LGBTQ history. Stonewall sans the “T” effectively erases the sizable contributions transwomen made during the 1969 riots for liberation. Yet, photographs on the monument website offer an intervention.
