Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative

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 thesetransmitted 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.

Auteur
Anne Wagner is Associate Professor at the Université Lille Nord de France. She is a research member at the Centre de Recherche Droits et Perspectives du Droit, équipe René Demogue as well as a Research and Adjunct Professor at China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing). She is also President of the International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law and Vice President of the Multicultural Association of Law and Language. Anne Wagner has been granted the French National Award of Scientific Excellence. She has lectured in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America and extensively published research papers in the area of Legal Cultural Studies, Law and Semiotics, Legal Discourse Analyses.
Sarah Marusek is Professor of Public Law in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i Hilo on Hawai'i Island. Her research interests in jurisprudence focus on exploring how law works in everyday life. She has published research articles in the areas of legal semiotics and legal geography. Sarah Marusek is the 2011 recipient of the University of Hawai'i Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and teaches courses in legal geography, constitutive legal theory, and constitutional law.

Texte du rabat
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.

Résumé
On behalf of Professor Hugh Brady, Director and Senior Fellow, The Flag Research Center at the University of Texas School of Law, "Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer 2021) has been selected as the recipient of our Gherardi Davis Prize is presented for a significant contribution to vexillological research for the year 2021. This work was selected because of its breadth and depth in examining flags as meaningful transmitters of significant symbolic information concerning the origins, culture, self-image, and values of a society. We believe it represents a signal achievement in the study of flags that sets a new standard for research in the field." The Flag Research Center, founded in 1962, is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the human need to create and use symbols to express political, cultural, and social ideals through flags and flag-related material culture.

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.

Advance Praise for Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative
"In an epoch of fragmentation, isolation and resurgent nationalism, the …