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Populist Stories of Honest Men and Proud Mothers: a Visual Narrative Analysis

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Populist Stories of Honest Men and Proud Mothers: a Visual Narrative Analysis Review of International Studies (2020), 46: 2, 217–236 doi:10.1017/S0260210519000421 RESEARCH ARTICLE . Populist stories of honest men and proud mothers: A visual narrative analysis Katja Freistein* and Frank Gadinger Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (Received 28 January 2019; revised 23 October 2019; accepted 25 October 2019; first published online 9 December 2019) https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms Abstract This article proposes the methodological framework of visual narrative analysis through the study of images and narratives. We are interested in the appeal of political storytelling. In applying an approach of layered interpretation, we study images and slogans to consider the more complex underlying narratives in their political and cultural context. Our exploratory case studies draw on material from right-wing populist par- ties, namely election campaign posters from Germany and the UK as material for the analysis. We find that narratives operate with a ‘fantasmatic logic’, which adds fantasy to politics, to depoliticise and camouflage their radical intent and gain approval by making consent desirable. We identify two exemplary narratives (honest men under threat; proud mothers) that entrench traditional gender roles in accordance with patri- archy and nationalism. Theoretically, our approach contributes to debates in IR on cultural underpinnings in international politics and the construction of collective identities through shared/divided narratives. Visual narrative analysis provides a promising methodological tool for analysing visual representations in their productive relationship with text. This perspective foregrounds the power of political storytelling through fantasmatic appeal and fosters a better understanding of the global rise of populism. , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at Keywords: Political Storytelling; Images; Visual Narrative Analysis; Gender; Populism Introduction In January 2019, US president Donald Trump tweeted an image, combined with a political 1 23 Sep 2021 at 13:58:50 slogan, which generated 242,000 likes and 71,000 retweets. In the image, Trump poses as the ‘ ’ , on builder of the Wall and appears against a dark purple background as a larger-than-life figure. In the front bottom is a vast landscape cut horizontally by a steel fence, vaguely showing a land- scape or settlement on the far horizon. Trump is portrayed with a dignified, earnest demeanour, god-like and looming above the semi-transparent steel fence in a desert-like area. The accom- 170.106.33.42 panying text reads ‘The Wall is Coming’. The text obviously references the well-known HBO show Game of Thrones, which popularised the slogan ‘Winter is Coming’ and simultaneously fea- tured a wall as central role to the plot. Ironically, that wall proves incapable of providing protec- . IP address: tion against the evil forces of the Night King and his army of the Undead. It becomes the battleground for different groups’ brutal fights that, in fact, are never fully deterred or hindered by the wall. In combination, the image and text transform Trump’s fantasy of building a wall – resulting in the government shutdown of early 2019, the longest in US history – into an epic struggle against a greater evil that is both extremely threatening and diffuse. The iconic image and warlike message underline Trump’s strength (political and otherwise) and promise the ful- filment of one of his central election promises, namely building a wall on the US-Mexican border. https://www.cambridge.org/core 1See {https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1081735898679701505}. © British International Studies Association 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210519000421 Downloaded from 218 Katja Freistein and Frank Gadinger As an instance of political storytelling, the tweeted image is significant. It features no boring political manifesto. Instead, it is a highly entertaining and somewhat fantastic rendering of pol- itics as an epic battle. While such images may have high symbolic value thanks to their immediate . accessibility to a broad audience, they are easily forgotten soon thereafter. At the same time, images are generally omnipresent and thus make for important elements in the political storytell- ing that shapes political discourse over time. Often in combination with text, images uniquely condense information, convey stories, and give easy access to broader political contexts. This allows for a vast array of responses and thus appeal to a great spectrum of observers.2 Since we are interested in the routines and technologies of international politics that stabilise or desta- bilise certain ideas and practices, we will not focus on images that depict grand moments such as G7 summits, the Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un meeting, or extreme crisis events that become ‘iconic images’.3 Instead, we concentrate on everyday political representations. Taking the appeal of images as a starting point, our article aims to explore them in their larger https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms political context to show how images function as attempts at interpretive closure by conveying what is politically (im)possible in terms of policy options. ‘Appeal’ in our interpretive reading refers to the performative dimension of presentation rather than reception, to which we have no analytical access. Thus, when we talk about the appeal of a narrative or symbolic representa- tion, we refer to the potential for pleasure they may incite among recipients, drawing on different affectual registers like indignation, outrage, schadenfreude, etc.4 Appealing to fantasy, such images, embedded in narratives, allow for a variety of responses while being simultaneously geared towards implicit consent. While policy programmes or speeches are often seen as detached and elite-driven, images are vital elements of political storytelling whose universality allow them to address issues in a manner that is distinct to official statements. As routine narrative devices, they may exert power particularly because they appear inconspicuous and apolitical.5 IR scholars have recently put more emphasis on the importance of narratives6 and visuality7 to better understand the cultural foundations of international politics. However, not many have attempted to connect these different strands in conceptual and methodological terms.8 , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at Assuming a productive relationship between images and other forms of representation like 2See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 2008); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Keith Moxey, ‘Visual studies and the iconic turn’, Journal of Visual Culture, 7:2 (2008), pp. 131–46. 3See Lene Hansen, ‘How images make world politics: International icons and the case of Abu Ghraib’, Review of – ‘ 23 Sep 2021 at 13:58:50 International Studies, 41:2 (2015), pp. 263 88; Axel Heck and Gabi Schlag, Securitizing images: The female body and the war in Afghanistan’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:4 (2013), pp. 891–913. , on 4See Albrecht Koschorke, Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 81–5. 5On the different roles of images, see Roland Bleiker, ‘Mapping visual global politics’, in Roland Bleiker (ed.), Visual Global – 170.106.33.42 Politics (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1 29. More specifically, see also Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Katrine Emilie Andersen, and Lene Hansen, ‘Images, emotions, and international politics: The death of Alan Kurdi’, Review of International Studies, First View (2019), available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210519000317}. 6See, for example, Richard Devetak, ‘After the event: Don DeLillo’s White Noise and September 11 narratives’, Review . IP address: of International Studies, 35:4 (2009), pp. 795–815; Heather Johnson, ‘Narrating entanglements: Rethinking the local/global divide in ethnographic migration research’, International Political Sociology, 10:4 (2016), pp. 383–97; Kai Oppermann and Alexander Spencer, ‘Narrating success and failure: Congressional debates on the “Iran Nuclear Deal”’, European Journal of International Relations, 24:2 (2018), pp. 268–92; Paulo Ravecca and Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘Narrative and the possibilities for scholarship’, International Political Sociology, 12:2 (2018), pp. 125–38. 7See, for example, Roland Bleiker, ‘The aesthetic turn in international political theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30:3 (2001), pp. 509–33; Lene Hansen, ‘Theorizing the image for security studies: Visual securitization and the Muhamad Cartoon Crisis’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:1 (2011), pp. 51–74. 8Interesting approaches include those of Bleiker, ‘Mapping visual global politics’; Roland Bleiker et al., ‘The visual dehu- ’ – ‘ https://www.cambridge.org/core manisation of refugees , Australian Journal of Political Science, 48:4 (2013), pp. 398 416; Yoav Galai, Narratives of redemp- tion: the international meaning of afforestation in the Israeli Negev’, International Political Sociology, 11:3 (2017),
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