Director’s Preface

Soros, Susan Weber

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Director’s Preface

Susan Weber Soros

Description: Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United...

Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945

Director’s Preface

Author

Susan Weber Soros

PublisherBard Graduate Center

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23097

Director’s Preface

Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States provides a unique opportunity to study a little-recognized aspect of the cultural history of Japan, Britain, and the United States during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945). Textiles are an unexpected source of wartime propaganda, yet the examples discussed in this volume reveal how civilians aligned themselves in a personal and intimate manner to the war effort. Popular culture of the time was filled with the wartime images associated with these textiles. Many readers are familiar with the propaganda machines that existed during this period and the influence that they had on public opinion, but the study of Home Front textiles adds a new dimension to this phenomenon. Readers may find the context for these images surprising and at times disturbing, for when we consider that individuals actually wore most of these textiles, we are struck at how deeply propaganda infiltrated daily life during wartime. Today, when we are bombarded on a daily basis with innumerable popular-culture images, it is easy to become numb to the actual potency and cultural impact of propaganda. The presence of these Home Front textiles in the context of an exhibition provides a filter through which we can better understand how and why such imagery was so prevalent during the heightened conflict in the Asia-Pacific region and why we still make use of propaganda images today. The personal aspect of these textiles reinforces the actual reality and meaning of propaganda.

It is appropriate that the Bard Graduate Center undertake a project of this kind, for it responds directly to our mission to examine objects in a wider social and intellectual context and to give prime importance to the study of objects. Textiles are frequently studied for aesthetic and technical reasons, but within the decorative arts they present a broad range of opportunities for multidisciplinary investigation. It is especially gratifying that the editor of this publication and the curator of the exhibition that accompanies it is a Bard Graduate Center doctoral student, Jacqueline Atkins, who possesses an incomparable knowledge of Home Front textiles. That we have trained students of her caliber is especially rewarding. I am also proud that the Bard Graduate Center is serving as a venue for an unprecedented exhibition that I know will have a profound cultural resonance. The project demonstrates a unity of purpose between the academic and exhibition programs, for the idea derives from the subject of Ms. Atkins’s doctoral dissertation. As curator, she has demonstrated superb research skills and distinctive historical insight, and the catalogue presented many editorial demands that she has handled with intelligence and professionalism. Furthermore, I am grateful for her assistance in securing loans for the exhibition from a myriad sources.

I would like to express my gratitude to the Coby Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Blakemore Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and Camilla Bergeron and Gus Davis for their essential support of this project. A cultural endeavor of this scope would be impossible without these insightful sponsors who have understood the merits of this project and enabled its realization.

This project is the outcome of contributions from all of the Bard Graduate Center departments. I would like to thank the Bard Graduate Center staff for its daily efforts to uphold the high level of standards that have come to define our institutional agenda. This is especially rewarding and, I believe, indicative of the institution’s success.

Susan Weber Soros

Director

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