Author: Tim Jon Semmerling

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 986

ISBN-13:

This dissertation borrows from Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theories to explain the recent visual images being made in Israel and the Palestinian Territories by both Israelis and Palestinians. With a focus on postcards and greeting cards predominantly found among the tourist market place in late 1998 and early 1999, I argue that these types of tourist bric-a-brac should not be too readily dismissed. Rather, these postcards and greeting cards are practices and performances of national identity display and political claims used to buttress present ideologies, to affect knowledge, to build national awareness, and to gain international acceptance. Many written works have looked at the images of the area made by Europeans prior to 1948, however this work looks at what images have been made recently and are currently being made today by Israelis and Palestinians about themselves, their homelands, their cultures, and their nations. This work identifies the symbolic choices in these postcards, how the symbolic choices are arranged into messages, what the symbolic messages convey, to whom the symbolic messages are directed, and who benefits and who loses in these presentations of the national-selves. Each chapter discusses the works of particular postcard/greeting card manufacturers, artists, and/or photographers; and over one hundred postcards/greeting cards are analyzed. Not only do I warn that these seemingly banal and ubiquitous objects are really intended to develop knowledge about Israelis and Palestinians in order to make national gains, but I point out that they are evidence that semiotic struggle is another facet of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.