Image as a Propaganda Tool? Visual Representations of the ‘New Man’ in History Textbooks of the Socialist Era
This paper aims to analyze whether the images employed in national history textbooks in Albania for the eight-year school under the socialist regime were used as a propaganda tool to communicate the Party’s vision for the socialist transformation of society. It adopts Kress and Van Leuween’s visual socio-semiotic approach to examine the images in terms of their representational, interactive, and compositional meta-function. The findings indicate that most of the images depict the “new socialist man,” who is willing to build up socialism and defend the homeland; they have been represented close to the viewer, as the latter belongs to the “new socialist society,” and the majority of the images place the “new man” in the center of the composition. Consequently, images in history textbooks served the state propaganda to manipulate and indoctrinate the young generation.
Esilda Luku
Esilda Luku is an associate professor of contemporary world history in the department of political sciences at the Aleksandër Moisiu University of Durrës and a postdoctoral researcher and Humboldt scholar at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media–Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig. Her current research interests include curriculum and textbook analysis, state socialism, and the Holocaust.