More than Words: Visual Representations of Political Economy in the 20th Century

This panel analyzes how visual representations helped promote and support different political economy projects and regimes in the twentieth century amidst the global diffusion of capitalism. Alongside the expansion of literacy rates, visual representations proved to be instrumental resources in communicating to and drawing support from different constituencies to state and party projects for the joint management of the economy and the polity, in concealing or justifying the emergence of structural inequalities within and between countries, in engaging individuals and groups in international patterns of production and consumption, in promoting convergence towards the quantification of national economies, and in mobilizing resistance to the violence and oppression that accompanied the dissemination of capitalist structures. The papers in this panel thus resort to the examination of strategies of knowledge production and diffusion as well as to the study of propaganda and advertisement campaigns and to trace (1) the production of corporative aesthetics by the fascist regime in Italy to understand how visual representations sought to draw support from the masses to the concomitant projects of restructuring the polity and the economy; (2) the constitution of a middle class in Latin America’s Southern Cone in the 1960s to explore how the marketing of mass consumption of durable goods such as automobiles tied definitions of the middle class to expectations of levels of income and to visions of nuclear families, and (3) the standardization of practices of national accounting in the 1950s and 1960s to analyze how convergence towards measurements of national income and output supported definitions of economic growth and development that helped displace national wealth as an alternative indicator of prosperity, productive capacity, and economic governance.