Israeli and Palestinian Postcards: Presentations of National Self

Introduction: The Presentation of National Self

introduction The Presentation of National Self P icture postcards are ubiquitous, relatively inexpensive, and easilydiscarded .Theyare often looked upon, oreven dismissed, as trite and cheap objects associated with the bric-a-brac of tourism . However, as this book shows, picture postcards are much more than that. They are visual artifacts that deserve scholarly attention and discussion. In fact, they may actually play an important role in the culture and politics of national identity discourse. Like novels, newspapers , magazines, film, and even comic books, postcards, too, are part of the family of print capitalism that fosters and creates national identity and identification, even if only ‘‘imagined,’’ as termed by Benedict Anderson.1 Postcards from Israel and the Palestinian Territories are cases in point and the subjects of this inquiry. In the following chapters we shall see that postcards collected in these areas are not merely mundane objects but provocative and active presentations of ‘‘national self.’’ Their makers and sellers consider 1 Tseng 2003.12.9 08:24 6951 Semmerling / ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN POSTCARDS / sheet 15 of 255 them expressive declarations and performances of national status. The postcards are intended to inspire and demand for the particular nation a conferment of all the intrinsic rights and privileges of national and international consideration, stature, membership, and even envy. For the tourists and local consumers of postcards, theyare important bases of social knowledge, recognition , and expectations about the modern nations that the postcards claim to represent and the relationships of these nations to the world at large. This book is a visual study that adopts combined methodologies that Gillian Rose calls ‘‘semiology’’ and ‘‘discourse analysis.’’2 Here visual artifacts are scrutinized for their use of signs to convey meaning (semiology).Theyare discussed as socially constructed displays of similarity and difference, articulations of discourse in images, and demonstrations of institutional practices, issues of power, and regimes of truth (discourse analysis). A core theoretical concept of this book, and hence its subtitle, borrows from the works of an eminent scholar of sociology, Erving Goffman. His theories, as put forth in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Behavior in Public Places, are important to understanding social expression and interpretation .3 Goffman believes that individuals in social gatherings carefully construct and control their behaviors, on the verbal and semiotic levels, in order to convey preferred impressions to others. As he states, This control is achieved by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and he [the individual] can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. Thus when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey.4 Goffman compares such behavior to a stage ‘‘performance.’’ He describes the individuals who perform the behavior in these face-to-face interactions as actors who act out a ‘‘social face’’ in a ‘‘front’’ area, while the true self exists in private or in a ‘‘back’’ area. Moreover, he identifies those to whom the performance is displayed as an audience that either accepts or rejects the performance based upon socially accepted rules of moral conduct. 2 : : Israeli and Palestinian Postcards Tseng 2003.12.9 08:24 6951 Semmerling / ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN POSTCARDS / sheet 16 of 255 The ideas of control and performance are key to the presentation of self, and, with these in mind, Goffman provides an important caveat. Audience members must beware that performers can dupe them into making false assumptions . In some cases, a performer may be so concerned with achieving moral stature that he or she is amoral in engineering a convincing impression that standards are being realized. Moreover, audience members can deceive themselves into believing such performances based upon their own moral and role expectations. In this book, I analyze the social faces people, or collectives, present to an audience as national identity. I take into consideration that the audience members, who are predisposed to national consciousness and claim national selves of their own, can identify these individuals and the selves they profess within national identity discourse. In this way, we can speak of individuals as...