Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
October’s MQUP Top 5 is from Alison Rowley, author of Putin Kitsch in America.
An examination of how the Russian president’s image circulates via memes, parodies, apps, and games, Putin Kitsch in America illustrates how technological change has shaped both the kinds of kitsch being produced and the nature of political engagement today. Appropriately, Alison Rowley has selected five books that informed her research on contemporary political leadership, and specifically, the relationship between the evolution of modern media and politics.
It is impossible to study Russian leadership cults without reading Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (enlarged edition, Harvard University Press, 1997). Tumarkin’s book outlines how Soviet leaders came to lionize Vladimir Lenin after his death in 1924, and the role that his leadership cult played in Soviet political life. Two things stood out as I re-read this text for my research. First, while a vast array of Lenin kitsch was created in the 1920s, the forms that it took were very much products of their time, meaning that technological capability was a crucial factor in what was produced. When I turned my attention to Putin materials, that idea forced me to think about what technologies could be driving the current outpouring of Putin kitsch. That is why my book contains discussions about such disparate subjects as internet usage rates, the rise of print-on-demand services, and the emergence of digital tool kits that allow ordinary people to create apps and video games. Technology is also at the heart of the second point I took away from Turmarkin’s study. She was able to show how effective a handful of government decrees were in securing near total control over Lenin’s image. Today Kremlin officials can only dream about that level of control, for they live in a world where every single photograph or video of the Russian leader is potentially open to manipulation and repurposing by ordinary people from across the globe.
When Matt Bai’s All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (Vintage, 2015) was released, I heard him interviewed on NPR. The book – an account of the scandal that wrecked Gary Hart’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 – sounded so good that I ordered a copy the same day. Bai’s work brilliantly describes how the media landscape in the US changed in the 1980s. The rise of 24-hour cable news channels, as well as the invention of videotapes (and portable cameras that used them), revolutionized the nature of journalism by speeding up the news cycle and allowing reporters the mobility to quite literally chase down subjects. These factors – as well as the growing importance placed on “character” in American political life – set the backdrop for where we are now: a world where news reporting lurches from scandal to scandal, and where it is acceptable to speculate not only about the sexual lives of politicians, but also about the strangely warm relationship between Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart.
A similar eureka moment came when I read Joe Trippi’s account of his work on the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything (revised edition, Harper, 2008) Trippi – who combined a background in computing with a lifelong passion for working on political campaigns – explains how the internet began to affect the conduct of American politics. What Trippi emphasized in his book is the participatory and horizontal nature of politicized online communication. That pushed me to delve deeper into what is referred to in scholarly literature as “participatory” or “DIY” culture – so much so in fact, these concepts came to frame how I see the production of most Putin kitsch.
I confess that I knew nothing of the world of online fan fiction when I started looking to the kitschy aspects of Vladimir Putin’s public persona. Since rather a lot of my new book discusses Trump/Putin, works like Catherine Roach’s Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 2016) offered intriguing ways to approach the construction of Putin’s image. Apart from being a genuinely interesting read about a huge segment of the book market, Roach’s book led me to understand how Trump/Putin stories parodied certain tropes of the romance genre. Putin’s impressive pectoral muscles and the almost magical properties imbued in his penis are reminiscent of the physical features of every romance hero – even as they served to comment on contemporary politics.
Finally, Ryan Milner’s research on internet memes was an invaluable primer to someone whose Luddite tendencies are frequently mocked by her teenage sons. In The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (MIT Press, 2016) Milner traces the history of memes and analyzes commonly used features of them. Perhaps even more importantly, he strikes two cautionary notes for those who wish to study this important new form of digital communication. First, he discusses the ethics of reproducing memes that feature images of ordinary people, given the power that such items have to destroy people’s public reputations and the fact that the internet archives them seemingly forever. Second, referring to “Poe’s Law” Milner notes that it is impossible to be 100% certain about the motivations that drive people to create and use memes, since the anonymity of the internet ensures that genuine online extremism is difficult to distinguish from similarly extreme satire. I grappled with exactly that dilemma when I looked at digital Putin kitsch, and Milner’s book forced me to think about how to draw any conclusions at all about what is out there.
Alison Rowley is professor of Russian history at Concordia University. Find out more on Putin Kitsch in America >
No comments yet.