Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique

Springer, 2021.

Academic editor: Wagner A., S. Marusek

Editor-in-chief: Wagner A., S. Marusek

The book deals with the identification of “identity” based on culturally specific color codes and images that conceal assumptions about members of a people comprising a nation, or a people within a nation. Flags narrate constructions of belonging that become tethered to negotiations for power and resistance over time and throughout a people’s history. Bennet (2005) defines identity as “the imagined sameness of a person or social group at all times and in all circumstances”. While such likeness may be imagined or even perpetuated, the idea of sameness may be socially, politically, culturally, and historically contested to reveal competing pasts and presents. Visually evocative and ideologically representative, flags are recognized symbols fusing color with meaning that prescribe a story of unity. Yet, through semiotic confrontation, there may be different paths leading to different truths and applications of significance. Knowing this and their function, the book investigates these transmitted values over time and space. Indeed, flags may have evolved in key historical periods, but contemporaneously transpire in a variety of ways.
The book investigates these transmitted values: Which values are being transmitted? Have their colors evolved through space and time? Is there a shift in cultural and/or collective meaning from one space to another? What are their sources? What is the relationship between law and flags in their visual representations? What is the shared collective and/or cultural memory beyond this visual representation? Considering the complexity and diversity in the building of a common memory with flags, the book interrogates the complex color-coded sign system of particular flags and their meanings attentive to a complex configuration of historical, social and cultural conditions that shift over time.

Chapters

Semiotic and Legal Analysis of Flags in Russia: Belonging to a Multi-National Federal State Through Color, Form, Space and Time

Erokhina Y., Soboleva A. K., , in: Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique.: Springer, 2021. Ch. 17 P. 333–351.

The chapter provides semiotic analysis of national flags in Russia in historical perspective and describes legal regulation of the use of flags as state symbols on federal and federal entities’ levels. Contemporary white-blue-red national flag, Soviet red flag and imperial black-yellow-white flag are analyzed in different contexts, as official state symbols and as unofficial symbols ...

Added: July 27, 2021

Keywords: semiotics of law, семиотика права, визуальная репрезентация, государственные символы, visual representations, legal regulation of state symbols, Государственный флаг Российской Федерации, official flag of the Russian Federation, symbols in law, символы в праве