Visual Evidence: Warfare and Racial Stereotypes
This activity corresponds to the "Visual Evidence: Warfare and Racial Stereotypes" feature in your textbook. The questions below are designed to help you learn more about the topic. Once you have answered the Comprehension questions, submit your answers and move on to the subsequent questions included in the Analysis and Outside Sources sections. Each section is designed to build upon the one before it, taking you progressively deeper into the subject you are studying. After you have answered all of the questions, you will have the option of emailing your responses to your instructor.
Introduction
Racial and cultural stereotypes have been a staple of propaganda at least since the later nineteenth century, when conservative, racialized nationalism became an integral part of state politics. During the two world wars of the twentieth century, such stereotypes were an indispensable tool in the campaigns of the belligerent governments to rally their populations behind the war efforts. Take another look at the Life magazine text and photos you studied in the "Visual Evidence" feature in Chapter 29 of your textbook. There, you see the American mass media working to establish certain stereotypes in the collective mind of a public that made little or no distinction among Asians. The U.S. government then went on to deploy those stereotypes both to secure public support for allies and channel public hatred of enemies. Below, you will encounter some samples of propaganda posters from World War II. As you examine them, notice how they employ various racial and cultural associations
Comprehension
1. What racial self-image did the Japanese government promote?
2. What events in the U.S. did the Life magazine article report?
3. What distinction did article encourage Americans to make?
Analysis
1. Take a look at an anti-Japanese poster at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AntiJapanesePropagandaTakeDayOff.gif. In what ways does the Japanese officer depicted in the poster resemble the stereotype described in the Life magazine article?
2. Now examine this Japanese propaganda poster at http://bp2.blogger.com/_QmJeViixKF8/R8oCZi-MlgI/AAAAAAAAAjE/9y0cMfVnT3I/s1600-h/japanopener.jpg. What cultural stereotypes does this poster deploy? What kind of image does it project with those stereotypes?
3. Finally, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Liberators-Kultur-Terror-Anti-Americanism-1944-Nazi-Propaganda-Poster.jpg and study the Nazi propaganda posters. What cultural associations and stereotypes does this poster use to instill fear of advancing American armies?
Outside Sources
1. Examine the poster at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/wwii-posters/img/ww1647-43.jpg. What role might it have played in the campaign represented by the Life magazine photo essay you studied in the "Visual Evidence" feature in your textbook?
2. Go to http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/jarda/browse/places.html and read about Japanese-American relocation during World War II. What government actions led to relocation? Examine some of the images: what do they tell you about the Japanese experience of relocation?
3. Read the article at http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=79071. What common themes and techniques has today's propaganda inherited from the propaganda of the twentieth-century world wars?