Towards an Understanding of Visual Dialogism: Iwo Jima, Coca-Cola, and the African Postcolony

Abou B. Bamba

Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères – Numéro 1 (2009) Page(s) 1 - 12 ISSN 2076-6130

The field of visual culture is traversed by myriad of theoretical concerns ranging from whether visual communication is possible to how to argue with visual artifact passing through the nature of visual syntax. These queries have received a relatively large scholarly attention in recent years. However, other issues, including the problematics of visual dialogism, have remained at the margins of the scholarship on visuality. In effect, few scholars have enquired whether it is possible to have a visual intertextual dialogue. If yes, how and where does one find visual dialogism? To come to terms with these questions, I designed and analyzed a visual artifact or rather a collage [see Fig. 1, next page], which I have entitled “Transplanting the American Dream in Africa.” 2 My claim throughout this discussion is that though the field of visual dialogism longs to see its Bakhtins and other Saussures emerge, one cannot fail to see the potentiality and actuality of conscious and unconscious dialogic relations between visual compositions. It is my belief that from the paintings of Picasso to the 1989 Polish campaign poster featuring movie star Gary Cooper, visual structures and particles have met and cross- Figure 1 : “Transplanting the American Dream in Africa” Source : This is a manipulative collage of two pictures: Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph and a picture of a bottle of Coca Cola.

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Abou B. Bamba. « Towards an Understanding of Visual Dialogism: Iwo Jima, Coca-Cola, and the African Postcolony ». Revue Ivoirienne de Langues Étrangères, Numéro 1, 2009, p. 1. ISSN 2076-6130.