Friday, December 5, 2014

Archives: Political Posters

In preparation for the upcoming final I recently finished reading Susan Tschabrum’s "Off the Wall and into a Drawer: Managing a Research Collection of Political Posters.” The article is a great introduction to dealing with graphic collections that do not fit securely into an archives collection policy (and contains a lot of information about cataloging and access challenges that I will include in my paper). Being about political posters specifically it also contained content about the social meaning of these posters that may be beyond my paper topic.

Tschabrum argued that because the people who create many political posters are advertising unpopular, controversial, and occasionally illegal activity, they offer invaluable insight to those groups. With marginalized groups, this is a huge advantage to studying political posters. My main concern with the article is that Tschabrum does not really discuss the negative social implications of political posters or the effects that this has on archives. The use of propaganda has a long history connected to political posters and complicates their meanings. This does not lessen the research value of the posters, but I think people should be careful when looking at this material. Since Tschabrum took on the job of promoting political posters, I understand why she emphasized the social responsibility to save political posters over their more tumultuous history.

Toward the end of the article Tschabrum stated, “Popular culture studies thrive on the careful consideration of the cultural detritus of industrial society – postcards, comic books, travel brochures, TV commercials, and so on – whose lowly status, fleeting nature, and/or ubiquity speak volumes about the social groups that made and used them.” (323) On one hand, this is a common defense of studying ephemeral-type material. However, since these are the types of material I enjoy studying, it is great to find the words coming from someone writing specifically about archives.

Reading