The Visual Politics of Fear: Anti-Communist Iconography in Post-War Greece with Dr Alex Kazamias [Wed 4/3 – Research Seminar Series]

See below for details of next week’s School of Humanities talk, which will take place in GE403 at 4-5pm on Weds 4 March.

Hope to see you there,

Benet & Chris

The Visual Politics of Fear: Anti-Communist Iconography in Post-War Greece Alexander Kazamias

This talk examines how visual media was used in post-war Greece to construct a regime of anticommunist fear.  It focuses on the sizeable volume of propaganda imagery produced by the victors of the Greek Civil War (1944-49) in posters, illustrations, book covers, stamps, photographs and movies to demonize the left and spread mass terror around it.  It argues that this anticommunist imagery patterned itself on older themes of negative othering embedded in Greek popular culture, using medieval and early modern tales of lycanthropy, teraphobia, Orientalism, Islamophobia, chauvinism and gynophobia. Through it, communists were depicted as monsters, beasts, barbarians, Muslims, Turks, Jews, unfeminine women and, sometimes, as Satan personified.  Although anticommunism posited itself as a critique of ideas, its iconography suggests that it was a power discourse of social stigmatization.