Imprints of Revolution

What is the significance of the visual representation of revolution? How are historical events reconstituted through public images? What purpose does this serve in the development of public memory? Imprints of Revolution highlights how revolutions and revolutionary moments are historically constructed and locally contextualized. It explores a range of diverse events in order to illustrate how movements are reconstituted through the visual as both a mobilizing and demobilizing force in the wake of globalization. The importance of media, public art, and civil and government commemorations emerge as central components within the intersections of the visual and the concept of revolution in the contemporary process of re-imagining and re-constituting social change. The diverse case studies include opposing representations of the Mexican revolution produced in the 1930s and 1940s, visual protest against the Vietnam War, the commodification of Incan civilization and Hugo Chavez's use of the figure of Simon Bolivar. The volume illustrates the relevance of historical revolutionary movements to our contemporary understanding of local, national, and transnational spaces and processes.