Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hvcq20

Download by: [Dr Lyombe Eko] Date: 16 December 2015, At: 19:55

Visual Communication Quarterly

ISSN: 1555-1393 (Print) 1555-1407 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hvcq20

When Memory “Sees Signs” and “Plays Games”: AnAnalysis of Two Sports Shoe Controversies

Lyombe Eko & Natalia Mielczarek

To cite this article: Lyombe Eko & Natalia Mielczarek (2015) When Memory “Sees Signs”and “Plays Games”: An Analysis of Two Sports Shoe Controversies, Visual CommunicationQuarterly, 22:3, 160-173, DOI: 10.1080/15551393.2015.1069193

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15551393.2015.1069193

Published online: 16 Dec 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015160

When Memory “Sees Signs” and “Plays Games”: An Analysis of Two Sports Shoe Controversies

This article explores the interplay of collective memory and semiotics in two sports shoe controversies: The “Nike Air” and Adidas “JS Roundhouse Mids” affairs. It explores how two “memory communities”—Muslims and African Americans—successfully resisted objectionable corporate sports shoe products by playing

“memory games.” Muslims accused Nike of inserting the sacred symbol for the word Allah on the heels of its sneakers, while African Americans accused Adidas of

affixing shackles, a symbol of slavery, into its sneakers. The Nike controversy showed how Muslim groups used religious signifiers of the past to counter sacrilege in the present, while the Adidas controversy showed how African

Americans used the negative memories of the past to resist an objectionable mass-market product in the present.

Lyombe Eko and Natalia Mielczarek

Shoes are ubiquitous contraptions invented by human beings to protect their feet. Aside from their purely utilitarian functions, shoes have diverse cultural,

social, and political significance. They are associated with fashion, war, oppression, sports, resistance—the word sabotage comes from the act of using wooden shoes (sabots) to jam machines in factories—as well as collective memory. Individuals and groups communicate with and through their shoes. Due to globalization and the interconnection of nations, cultures, and peoples, a number of international incidents involving shoes have made international news headlines. They include: the Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at President George Bush (Williams, 2008) and the controversy over a White House picture of President Obama speaking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his feet visible on the table (CBS News, 2009). This article is concerned with two international controversies involving sports shoes or sneakers.

The billion-dollar global sports shoe industry, with its colossal marketing and sponsorship footprint, has helped to transform the world into a global arena in which grandiose sports spectacles, ranging from the Olympics Games to the Superbowl, are staged. The real “stars” of these sports spectacles are dynamic, stylistic sports shoes. Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, ASICS, and other sports shoe companies have

become global brands whose products are prized possessions around the world. Nike, Inc., of Beaverton, Oregon, and the Adidas Group of Germany were involved in two different sports shoe controversies that brought to the fore clashing cultural mentalities with respect to shoes, religion, human dignity, and negative collective memory. This article analyzed both controversies within the framework of collective memory, a collective memory that “sees” Bommas (2012, p. xxxi) in specific images (which we call, in the language of semiotics, “signifieds”), memory cues that rouse emotions, reinforce memory, and lead concerned “memory groups” to “play memory games” (Mink & Neumayer, 2013, p. 4). This article is therefore about the visual semiotics of two controversial sneakers produced and marketed by Nike and Adidas, respectively. The aim of the article is thus to explore what the “settled” memory of two “memory groups,” the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which claimed to speak for “Muslims,” and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which claimed to speak for African Americans, reported that they “saw” in the controversial Adidas and Nike Shoes, respectively. Thereafter, we explore the “memory games” that the two “victim groups,” played with the memories that they respectively “saw” in these two different shoes. The study was carried out within the framework of collective memory and visual semiotics.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 161160–173

The “Nike Allah” Affair

In 1997, Nike, Inc., released its summer line of basketball sneakers called “Nike Air.” This line of sneakers featured a stylized graphic of the words “Nike Air” arranged to look like flames on the heel and sole of each shoe (see Figures 2 and 4). This sneaker was shipped to retailers in all parts of the world. As soon as distributors in Saudi Arabia saw the stylistic rendition of “Nike Air” on the heels of the shoes, they informed Nike that the shoe was problematic because the Nike Air design was similar to the Arabic form of Allah, the Arabic word for God (Murphy, 1997). Muslims in other parts of the world also reacted strongly against the shoes. They felt that by producing the shoe, Nike had blasphemed by literally and symbolically trampling God under foot. The sacred calligraphic form of the Arabic word, Allah, which has been transformed into expensive sites of memory (Nora, 1989)—that is, valuable ornaments—in the Muslim world (see Figure 3) was being desecrated by Nike. In order to save the situation, Nike promptly modified the design of the shoe by separating the first two letters of the word “air” that looked like part of the word “Allah” and released the newly modified shoes (Harrington, 1997). That minor modification did not mollify Muslim critics. Distributors in Indonesia, Malaysia, and other

majority-Muslim countries informed Nike that the modified Nike Air design was still blasphemous and highly offensive to Muslims (Figure 1).

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization with a mission to combat stereotypes of Muslims and Islam, spearheaded opposition to the Nike Air shoe (Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2010). It called on Nike to withdraw the shoe from the market and apologize to Muslims for insulting their God. Nike diverted about 30,000 pairs of the sneakers with the modified verion of the “Air” graphic from Muslim countries to non-Muslim countries. CAIR was not satisfied with that move. It demanded total recall of the shoes because the blasphemous Nike Air graphic was highly offensive to Muslims throughout the world (Murphy, 1997). The Council threatened to lead a worldwide boycott of Nike products if the retailer did not withdraw the shoes from the market.

The Adidas “Slave Shoe” Controversy

Fast forward to 2012. German sports shoe and sports equipment manufacturer, Adidas, A.G., also found itself in cultural hot waters over one of its shoe products. The Adidas high-top sneakers, “JS Roundhouse Mids,” scheduled for release in August 2012, were supposed to be the hit of the summer. They were supposed to be so comfortable that their owners would want to strap them onto their ankles with plastic orange shackles attached to plastic chains (see Figure 5). Things did not turn as expected. Once Adidas advertised the new shoes on its Facebook page, it was greeted with a chorus of criticism. Adidas was accused of trivializing and commercializing the collective memory of the descendants of slaves who had been brought to American shores

Figure 1 (Left) Nihad Awad, Founder and Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations displaying the blasphemous “Nike Air” shoes (1997).Figure 2 (Above) The stylized English lettering of air and Arabic calligraphy of Allah.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015162

in the type of leg shackles Adidas was capitalizing on in its latest sports shoes.

Purpose of the Article

In this article, our aim is twofold. First, we sought to interrogate the message or semiotic signification of the controversial Nike and Adidas sneakers through a historical and semiotic analysis. We wanted to find out how the stylized form of the English words Nike Air morphed into a cross-cultural object that Muslims found very offensive. The Nike and Adidas sneaker controversies were a result of globalization, the interconnection of nations and cultures, which has led to what Ricoeur (2013) called “relations of intersignification” (p. 19) in networked environments. Each culture comes to the global networks with its “geo-graphic” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972) interpretations, meanings, representations, significations and resignifications. This often results in conflict because cultural significations are almost always grounded in collective memories.

Therefore, in the second part of this article, we analyze cultural interpretations of the Nike and Adidas shoes in question within the framework of collective memory. We believe that collective memory explains why the Muslim and African American groups considered both shoes as affronts to their communities and resignified them as instruments of religious and racial insentitivity.

Theoretical Framework

Semiotics and Visual Communication

Peirce (1931--35) advanced a theory of signs and sign use that features a semiotic triad made up of signs, objects, and interpretants (meanings). According to this perspective, “signs are qualities, relations, features, items, events, states, regularities, habits, laws, and so on that have meanings, significances, or interpretations” (Burch, 2010). A sign represents or means something. As Burch (2010) put it, the object is “what the sign is a sign of.” Objects or occurrences to which signs refer produce “meaning” (interpretations of reality) in our minds through the intermediary of the “signs” (selective, positional, context-specific aspects of reality) picked up by our senses. In other words “signs” refer to objects or occurrences that exist in reality. Signs are also “interpretants” or symbolic markers that spark, prime, or trigger meanings in our minds. These meanings are subjective and depend on our individual politico-cultural, economic, religious, and social contexts. Burch (2010) suggests that in Peirceian semiotics, an interpretant is something like a mind, a mental act, a mental state, or a feature or quality of mind; at all events the interpretant is something ineliminably mental. The semiotic triad explains multiple, differential, culture-specific interpretations of phenomena. According to this perspective, the interpretation of every new experience is mediated by layers of previous

Figure 3 (Left) Sole and heel of the Nike Air shoe (1997).Figure 4 (Above) Ornamentalized sacred Islamic calligraphy in a shop in London, England (2013).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 163160–173

interpretations of previous individual and cultural experiences.

Semiotics has evolved from a focus on language and written texts to visual, iconic, and mythic discourses. Saussure (1959) defined semiology as a “science that studies the life of signs in social life” (p. 15). The key concepts of semiotics are the signifier, the signified, and the sign. Saussure’s semiology emphasized mental imagery. He stated that the signifier is the sound-image, the signified is the thing that is being described, while the sign is the meaning or signification of the association between the signifier and the signified. Since “language is a system of signs that express ideas” (Saussure, 1959, p. 33), the verbal sounds or enunciations of language conjure up images in the minds of all those who enter into the culture of a specific language. Therefore, language and the images it evokes are inseparable. When language is written and becomes visual and perceptible, it “moves from an oral/aural channel to a visual/tactile one. . . . As a result, physical texts are able to acquire authority as new ontological entities invested with iconic power” (Levy, 2012, pp. 74–75). This transformation from oral to visual language—with its rich assemblage of images and metaphors—opens up many possibilities for semiotic encoding and decoding. This process has what Levy (2012) calls “intersubjective effects.” The graphic symbols of written literary texts (signifiers) are the embodiment of what Saussure called image acoustique (the acoustic or sound-image) of language: “In language . . . there is only the acoustic or sound-image, and the latter can be translated into a fixed visual image. . . . Language is a storehouse of sound-images, and writing is the tangible form of those images” (p. 15). Saussure further suggested that in semiology, there are “fixed visual images,” or “visual signifiers” (p. 700). These are sound-images that are associated with certain concepts (signifieds) and produce specific signs. For his part, Ricoeur (2013) suggests that semiotic significations often refer to concrete, visible entities or phenomena: “The sign is not the thing. . . . The sign rather, is about the world” (p. 15).

Barthes (1957) was instrumental in expanding semiology to the field of visual communication—photography, cinema, advertising, posters, and so on—where objects are “tokens for something else” (p. 110). He suggested that “any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning” (p. 110). Therefore, “even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (p. 110). Barthes also says that visual narratives and discourses are “mythologies,” and that the “materials of mythical speech”—language,

photography, painting, posters, rituals, and so on—“are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by the myth” (1957). Elsewhere, Barthes (1995) also states that each image, each news photograph, is produced and consumed within the framework of the professional, aesthetic, and ideological norms of specific societies. As a result, when signs are transmitted across cultures, they come into contact with the “traditional reservoir of signs” of the receiving culture (p. 940). These new signs spark an infinite chain of associations in different cultural publics (Barthes, 1977).

This is the case in international and intercultural controversies involving images because in these situations, “a signified can have several signifiers” (p. 120). A good example of this phenomenon occurred in the Mohammed cartoons controversy, which was triggered by satirical cartoons of Mohammed published by the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, in 2005. The different parties involved in the controversy—cartoonists, newspaper editors, Muslims human rights groups, and the courts—had different conceptualizations or significations of Mohammed (the signified) (Eko, 2012). Publication of the Mohammed cartoons by Danish and French newspapers, which saw Mohammed as an historical figure that was not above criticism, created global diplomatic tensions that threatened a delicate network of “relations of intersignification,” to use the

Figure 5 The Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids “shackle shoe” (2012).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015164

expression of Ricoeur (2013, p. 12). This intersignification is human action and experience organized as a network that “ amounts to a coherent language game in which the constitutive rules that govern the use of one term [or image] make up a system with those that govern the use of another term ” (Ricoeur, 2013, p. 19). Muslims felt that the French and Danish newspapers had shown disrespect for Muslims because they failed to understand what Prophet Mohammed signified for Muslims (Eko, 2012).

Semiotic analyses allow researchers to examine the message or semiotic content of communication, as well as the underlying cultural and ideological assumptions of the society and culture from which specific messages or mythologies originate. In visual communication, semiology is not only concerned with what a text means but how visual texts make meaning (Howells & Negrieros, 2012). Visual communication texts essentially carry the ideological and cultural cachet, the world view, of the communicators of those texts. Nike and Adidas have essentially become signs in the sense that they are “endowed with meaning.” Semiology is applicable to religion because every religion has semiotic codes—letters, words, symbols, and icons that stand for memorable things.

Collective Memory

The two groups that found the Nike and Adidas sneakers objectionable—the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition respectively—were “memory groups” (Mink & Neumayer, 2013). Since their grievances were grounded in their respective collective memories, we analyzed their responses to the shoe companies within the framework of this perspective. Collective memory is concerned with the social frameworks developed for the use of the real or imagined past (Halbwachs, 1992). It is therefore a socially constructed act of selectively remembering (and forgetting) that happens on at least two levels: the individual—which is shaped by one’s personality and experiences—and the collective. The collective dimension involves a self-identified group with a collective sense of history, culture, identity, and religion (Halbwachs, 1992). Heller (2006) suggests that collective trauma is the “cement” that binds collective memory. Thus, for many organized groups, collective memory is grounded in a past that does not pass (Ofer, 2009). A fundamental feature of collective memory is that it is an ideological tool that is often manipulated and instrumentalized by organized interest groups for political, social,

economic, religious, and identitarian purposes (Ricœr, 2000). In order for it to be “useful” for the needs of the moment, collective memory has to be dynamic, evolving, malleable, and have the ability to take the “coloration” of the political or social cause that it is being deployed to promote. Halbwachs (1992) called collective memory “the cult of the past” in which individuals “transfigure the past to the point of yearning for it” (p. 51). It thus becomes a dynamic phenomenon in which groups use their collective memories to meet the politico-cultural needs of the present.1

Memory Games

Collective memory is often instrumentalized to advance interests in the politico-cultural and social arenas. Kansteiner (2002) advanced the notion that some individuals and groups are “memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such [historical] artifacts according to their own interests,” (p. 180). According to Mink and Neumayer (2013), utilization of the past to control present political and social circumstances involves “memory games.” These are the “various ways by which political and social actors perceive and relate certain historical events according to the identities they construct, the interests they defend, and the struggles they devise to define, maintain or improve their position in society” (pp. 4–5). Memory games involve strategically deploying traumas of the past to advance political and social goals in the present. In many circumstances, memory serves as a “trump card” that neutralizes an opponent and allows wielders of the memory card to further their interests in the political and social arena. Memory games often involve the deployment of what Ricoeur calls a “language game . . . by which one speaks of movement, cause, event,” (2000, p. 10). The ultimate goal of memory games is to get the authorities to officially recognize the memory claims of the groups playing memory games and put a seal of approval on their collective memory, thereby making it the officially sactioned version of history. Memory games almost always feature images. The Holocaust; ethnic cleansing in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; the “disappeared” victims of the military juntas in Chile and Argentina; and atrocities in Rwanda, Iraq, and Syria are all kept alive by indelible images seared into the collective memory of mankind.

Nora (1989) advanced the notion of lieux de mémoires (sites of memory). These are places and things that anchor memory, sites where collective memory “crystallizes and secretes itself ” (p. 7). Sites of memory include

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 165160–173

geographical and topographical locations, monuments, libraries, museums, and cathedrals, as well as canonical texts that transmit religious and secular memory. According to Nora (1989), memory “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” (p. 8). Nora used the term “memory community” to describe groups who use collective memory and self-image to bolster their identity.

Collective Memory and Religion

Geertz (1973) defined religion as “a system of symbols” (p. 90). Religious symbols are therefore “tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiment of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs” (p. 91). The cross, the crescent moon, and the star of David are signifiers of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (the signifieds) respectively. According to Halbwachs (1992), religion is an important component of collective memory. With its wars, martyrs, heretics, apostates, saints, gurus, seers, and prophets, religion is grounded in collective memory. Indeed, Halbwachs advanced the notion that there is a collective, cultural space in which religion is the locus, par excellence, of collective memory. Since each religion has its “sacred cows,” so to speak, each one emphasizes the memory of its supernatural foundations, worships its divinities, reveres its holy founders, and emphasizes remembrance of its symbolic rites, locations, and sacred shrines. Thus, the aim of religious memory is to “conserve intact, through the ages, and to reproduce, the memory of a former age . . . in order to better resist influences from the outside” (Halbwachs, 1992, p. 102).

The novelty of this article is that it connects semiotics, myth, and collective memory and applies these theoretical perspectives to the ever-expanding arena of global sports marketing and communication. Bommas (2012) suggests that “memory sees” (p. xxxi). Memory can read significations of trauma into specific images (signifieds). For his part, Barthes (1977) suggests that “any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning” (p. 110) in its culture of creation, it culture of reception, as well as in other cultures. Therefore, “even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (p. 110). Since objects are invested with historical significane to the point of becoming objects of sites of memory, that means collective memory has semiotic and

mythic elements. Collective memory, like myth, has a “signifying function.” Indeed, collective memory is a game of intersignification between interlocutors whose paths crossed symbolically in a historic past that has not been allowed to pass for political, economic, social, and cultural reasons. Since memory can read tragedy into signifiers and signifieds, many social groups mobilize these semiotic elements and use them to “play memory games.” Bommas suggests that in these types of situtaions, images (signifieds) serve as “memory aids.” It all depends on the meanings or significations that memory projects “behind those images” (p. xxxii).

We suggest that the method of semiotics is the best methodological fit for exploring and explaining the phenomenon of collective memory, especially collective memory tied to religion, religiosity, and human suffering. Signs, like collective memory, are pregnant with meanings. Collective memories can thus be “tokens for something,” to use the expression of Barthes (1977). Collective memory of religion is grounded in semiotic codes: letters, words, creeds, dogmas, symbols, icons, natural phenomena, and cyclical observances anchored in natural phenomena. Human suffering is a powerful catalyst that crystallizes collective memory in semiotic codes that take the form of reducible metonymic objects like chains and shackles. Furthermore, the various manifestations of collective memory—the ability of memory to “see,” “hear,” and “read” meanings into phenomena and happenings; the fact that historical phenomena have significations that make them lieux de memoire (sites of memory) (Nora, 1989); the notion that signs are “objects of memory” (Olivier, 2011); the very fact that cultural memory, memory games, and the instrumentalization of memory are often inextricably linked to reified semiotic codes—means that semiotics is perhaps the best method for unpacking and explicating the phenomenon of collective memory. In other words, semiological interpretations help us understand the belief systems of Muslim and of African American “memory groups” who have a stake in the outcome of collective memory controversies.

Barthes (1957) states that visual narratives and discourses are “mythologies” and that the “materials of mythical speech”—language, photography, painting, posters, rituals, and so on—“are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by the myth.” Furthermore, “a signified can have several signifiers” (p. 120). Collective memory is thus a master ideology, a worldview and posture toward signs, symbols, and life itself because memory is

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015166

an “ideological option” (Barthes, 1993, p. 927) that is available to those who choose to remember, not to forget, the past. To paraphrase Barthes (1993), tell me what collective memory you remember, and I will tell you who you are and what collective memory games you play.

Research Questions

In order to analyze the semiotic and collective memory aspects of the Nike and Adidas shoe controversies, a number of research questions guided the study. To carry out a semiotic analysis of the Nike and Adidas sneakers, the following research questions are informed by the formulation of Mitchell (2005):

RQ1: What did the contested Nike Air sneakers want? In other words, what was their semiotic significance? What claims did they make on the consumer?

RQ2: What did the Adidas high-top “JS Roundhouse Mids” sneakers want? What was their semiotic significance? What claims did they make on the consumer?

We also sought to describe and explain the meanings that two “memory groups”—the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition—ascribed to these iconic shoes respectively. Following the concept that “memory sees” advanced by Bommas (2012, p. xxxi), the third and fourth research questions concerned the signification or intersignification of the two memory groups with respect to the two sneakers.

RQ3: What collective memory elements did the Council for American Islamic Relations (Muslims) “see” in the Nike Air sneakers?

RQ4: What collective memory elements did the Rainbow PUSH Coalition (African Americans) “see” in the Adidas sneakers?

The next section was concerned with how the memory groups responded to the Nike and Adidas shoes respectively. We analyzed the reactions of both groups through the concept of “memory games” advanced by Mink and Neumayer (2013, p. 4):

RQ5: What memory games did the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “play” in order to affect the outcome of the Nike Air sneakers controversy?

RQ6: What memory games did the Rainbow PUSH Coalition “play” in the Adidas sneakers controversy?

Method

In order to answer the research questions, we employed a multimethod research approach that involved (a) analyzing the semiotic significations of the Nike Air and Adidas Sneakers controversy; and (b) analyzing the politico-cultural and collective memory contexts of the graphic form of the Arabic word, Allah, and the visual imagery of chains and shackles. The aim of this multimethod approach was to underline the interplay of collective memory and visual communication.

Results

What Did the Nike Air Sneakers Want?

The first research question, based on the formulation of Mitchell (2005), was concerned with what the Nike Air sneakers wanted. The obvious answer to this question is that since shoe design is a semiotic phenomenon, the Nike Air shoes were siginfiers, consumer products, endowed with the totality of the values and imagined lifestyle—perpetual youth, health, vitality, passion, excitement, and emotion (the signifieds)—that the global sports entertainment company sold with its products. Therefore, sneakers are things and sneakers are signs, to use the formulation of Manning (2012). As such, the Nike Air sneakers were “models of signification” Baudrillard (2006). They were consumer products whose image and advertising appealed to consumers at the emotional level and moved them to purchase and wear the product because of its “cool” factor. Baudrillard (2006) suggests that “consumer” products are a type of “mass medium” whose messages preclude feedback from the consumer. He adds that the consumption of products and messages prevent us from “gaining access to the magic of the signifier.” This is because “the general order of consumption is nothing other than that wherein it is no longer permitted to give, to respond or exchange, but only to take and use” (p. 78).

The “game” of the sports shoe and apparel manufacturers is to create products (signifiers) with “attitude,” designs that sell glamorous and attractive lifestyles (signifieds). The manufacturers of Nike Air sneakers therefore wanted the consumer to buy into the myth, as Barthes (1957) calls it, of the glamorous, fantasy world ceated by “Big Sports-Entertainment.” Nike Air highlighted the physical limitations of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 167160–173

the consumer—the human inability to fly—and presented itself as an answer to the age-old human desire to soar above the earth like the birds. The Greek word, Nike, is literally a mythic signifier grounded in ancient Greek mythology. Nike was the winged goddess of strength and victory (the signified). Nike was appropriated and resignified as the name and registered trademark of the Oregon-based, billion-dollar, global, sports shoe, apparel, and equipment manufacturer, Nike, Inc. The word Nike; its accompanying graphical symbol, the “swoosh” design logo; and its commercial creed, “Just Do It” are signifiers of the wholesomeness and vitality of youth and sports, the exciting ambience of packed sports stadiums, arenas, hockey rinks, and golf courses. It was also tastefully attired, hyperbolic, sports announcers reciting scores and mouthing the trivia of rich, glamorous sports “heroes” (the signified). Nike was also clever beer, fast food, and nice car commercials. Nike is thus the signifier for “the thrill of victory.” It is consumerism, materialism, and entertainment rolled into one. The overall message is that wearing a pair of “burning” Nike Air shoes would vicariously transform consumers into winners. Nike is thus an assemblage of myths (Barthes, 1957). The only problem with this rosy scenario is that the stylized, visual form of the English words, Nike Air seemed eerily similar to a “geo-graphic” symbol (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972) that is impinged on the collective visual memory of Arabs and Muslims around the world—the Arabic script for Allah, the God of Islam. The Nike use of polytheistic Greek mythology and its appropriation as a symbol of globalized Western capitalist consumerism clashed with the monotheistic religiosity of Islam. This was the cause of the so-called Nike Allah shoe controversy.

What Did the Adidas High-Top “JS Roundhouse Mids” Sneakers Want?

The second research question was concerned with what the Adidas high-top “JS Roundhouse Mids” sneakers wanted. Adidas, the largest European sports, leisure apparel, and training equipment manufacturer, declares on its webpage that it is driven by passion and emotion to innovate and make the world a better place. Adidas wanted consumers to feel passionate about the new sneakers, develop an emotional attachment, and get hooked (literally) on them. The JS Roundhouse Mids sneakers were signifiers, the gateway to the mythical world of Big Sports-Entertainment. Saussure (1959) suggested that in semiology, there are “fixed visual images” or “visual signifiers” (p. 700). The colorful JS Roundhouse Mids sneakers signified

passion, durability, elegance, and style. Adidas hoped that images of the “cool” sneaker with chains would send the message that the sneakers were so valuable that they had to be literally chained to the ankles of their wearers. The JS Roundhouse Mids were meant to signify sneakers that one never parted with. Things did not turn out that way. As we see in the following, the chains on the sneakers triggered negative collective memories of shackles, signifiers of the trauma of slavery and subjugation. Clearly this was not what Adidas wanted or needed.

What Collective Memory Elements Did the Council for American Islamic Relations See in the Nike Air Shoes?

The third research question was concerned with the collective memory elements that the Council of American Islamic Relations, the self-appointed representatives of Muslims around the world, “saw” in the Nike Air sneakers that made them protest against it. Bommas (2012) suggests that “memory can see” (p. xxxi). This signifies selective perception of injustices of the past. Based on reports that shoe dealers in Saudi Arabia had read the word Allah into the stylized form of the English words, Nike Air, CAIR began a process of what Geertz (1973) called “reorientation of thought.” The organization publicized the idea that the stylized form of the words Nike Air (the English signifier) did infact spell the Arabic word for God, Allah (the Arabic signified). Once that particular reading of the lettering on the heels of the sneakers had been publicized, Nike and its shoes quickly came to signify an object of negative cultural memory for Arabs and Muslims. Due to what Kerlinger (1986) called “in the head” cultural mentalities, CAIR and other Muslims easily transposed Nike Air into Allah. This was done through transcultural “intertransposability,” to borrow the expression of Geertz (1973, p. 94). That is to say, new cultural meanings were read into Nike Air and transferred across cultures. Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, the United States, and elsewhere, did not see in the sneakers the significations that Nike wanted them to see. Instead, their perceptions were colored by their collective memory.

The Islamic faith creed states that: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Islamic law and culture are thus grounded in the teachings of Mohammed, who made the Arabic theonym, Allah, the centerpiece of Islam. The word Islam means “submission to the will of Allah.” Islamic cultural memory is grounded on a number of sites or monuments of memory including the Qur’an, the Kaaba in Mecca, the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015168

crescent moon, ritual fasting during the month of Ramadan, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca. These Islamic rituals are lieux de mémoire sacré par excellence (“perfect sites of sacred memory”), to paraphrase Pierre Nora (2002). CAIR and other Muslims thus read an Arabic sound-image (Saussure, 1959, p. 32), into the stylized form of the English words Nike Air. Thus, apposition of that graphic on sneakers was highly offensive to Arab-Islamic collective memory. In effect, the intermingling of what looked like Arab-Islamic theonymic calligraphy that extolled Islamic monotheism with the name of Nike, a god from the ancient Greek polytheistic pantheon, represented clashing “intersignifications” (Ricoeur, 2013), an explosive clash of interpretations and cultures. The Nike Air sneaker was essentially seen as a product that trampled the collective memory of Muslims underfoot.

Nike, Inc., tried in vain to explain that the stylized form of the words Nike Air on the heels and sole of the new sneakers was not a calligraphic representation of the word Allah. The graphic inscription was, according to the manufacturer, a collection of embroidered flames that spelled out the word air, not the Arabic word Allah. Muslims around the world were neither persuaded nor amused. They continued to make the interpretative leap and decoded air as Allah precisely because of the visual likeness of the two in the eyes of Arabic speakers (Peirce, 1998). As a result, they transposed a religious signified onto a profane signifier.

The Nike Air shoe controversy was also a linguistic controversy. Muslims believe that classical Arabic, the language in which the Qu’ran was divinely revealed, is “holy writ,” the lingua franca of heaven, and the earthly embodiment of the language of God. Indeed, the Arab-Islamic world has a long history of calligraphy, a “geo-graphic” cultural code, to borrow the expression of Deleuze and Guattari (1972), that in the course of history became the vehicle of collective memory grounded in the graphic, written forms of the words of God and Mohammed. Arabic calligraphy is a code of religiosity, a graphic representation of the Word of God, faith, and collective memory. In Arabic, the graphic or written form of the word Allah (“God”) is a sound-image or signifier, to use the expression of Saussure (1959), that conjures, in the mind’s eye, the concept of divinity, God Almighty (the signified). The visual “sign” then, is the totality of religious ecstasy—including auditory stimuli—experienced by believers when the graphic or calligraphic form of the word Allah is combined with an oral pronouncement

of the same. Arab-Islamic sacred calligraphy is the art of collective memory. Therefore calligraphic forms of religious concepts are sacred mnemonic devices that “shape civil theology,” to use the expression of Bommas (2012, p. xxvi), and serve as the repository for the universal, collective, cultural memory of the Islamic religion (Schimmel, 1994). Allah (God) is not only the center of human existence, he is the central “framework of memory,” to use the expression of Halbwachs (1992). Allah is the “point of crystallization” of Islam, in the words of Assmann (2011). The Islamic doctrine of the “99 names of Allah” teaches that Allah’s special names should be held in awe and reverence. This is the foundation of Islamic religious commonality or “cultural imagination” (Harrisson, 2012, p. 222). The graphic form of the Arabic word Allah is thus a sacred site of collective memory in the Islamic world.

The Nike Air shoe was thus offensive to Muslims at several levels. Halbwachs (1992) advanced the idea that collective memory is made up of a system of ideas that becomes souvenir-images (“memory images”). Assmann (2011) calls these images “figures of memory” (p. 24). The graphic form of the name Allah is a perfect memory image or figure of memory for Muslims.

From a semiotic perspective, the signifier was the graphic, calligraphic form of the Arabic sound-image, Allah, the signified was the concept of God (Allah) that the word represents, while the sign is the totality of the political, religious and culture-specific “impressions [of Allah] deposited in the brain of each member of the [Muslim] community” (Saussure, 1959, p. 67). The totality of the notion of Allah or God comes from associating the graphic form of the word Allah and the abstract concept of God. We can therefore say that as far as the word Allah is concerned, memory not only sees (Bommas, 2012, p. xxxi), it also hears.

Seeing Negative African American Collective Memory Metaphors in Sneakers

The fourth research question was concerned with the memory elements that the Rainbow PUSH Coalitions and African Americans saw in the Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids sneakers. The social, cultural, and psychic traumas of slavery define African American collective memory. Kansteiner (2002) states that “memories are at their most collective when they transcend the time and space of the events’ original ocurrence” (p. 189). Indeed, the 400-year African slavery and slave trade are reservoirs of collective memory in the American society. Visual and material objects

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 169160–173

play a fundamental role in the construction of the reality of slavery. The shackles on the Adidas sneakers were essentially “the material pegs” on which the socially constructed meanings (significations) of the trauma of African slavery were hung, to borrow the expression of Manning (2012, p. 3). That is why the Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids sneakers “slave shoe” opened up the painful legacy of dehumanization that has crystallized into negative collective memory over the centuries.

Saussure (1959) suggested that in semiology, there are “fixed visual images,” or “visual signifiers” (p. 700). These are sound-images that are associated with certain concepts and produce specific signs or significations. When Adidas manufactured the controversial shoe and started advertising it on the Internet, the company hoped that the shoe would be a signifiers of simplicity, elegance, style, and “cool” in the minds of youthful consumers. This signification did not resonate with the Rev. Jessee Jackson and other African American leaders. The imitation shackles on the JS Roundhouse Mids sneakers became potent signifiers of hundreds of years of negative collective memory of African slavery and the slave trade. To African Americans, who are mostly descendants of African slaves, chains, leg irons, and shackles are signifiers of what Eko (2006) called “the black problem” (p. 93). This is the historical and philosophical question of the humanity—or lack thereof—of peoples of African descent. The official attribution of mental and aesthetic inferiority to Black people fueled racial demography, institutionalized racism, dehumanization, slavery, and the slave trade in the West and in Arabia. Pope Eugene IV’s proclamation in 1442 that enslaving Africans had the blessing of a crusade, if the aim of the crusaders was to convert the natives to Christianity, put a religious stamp on extreme human exploitation (Thomas, 1997). The shackle is thus a metonym for African American enslavemennt. Collective memory therefore trumped and transcended the sports-entertainment context of the sneakers. As a result of the widespread mediated criticism of Jesse Jackson and other African American leaders, the JS Roundhouse Mids sneaker became the signifier of slavery, involuntary servitude, and penal incarcaration, not of the fantasy world of glamor, wholesomeness, vitality, and fair play peddled by Big Sports-Entertainment. The Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids sneakers constituted an affront to the collective memory of African Americans to the point that it became known as the Adidas “slave shoe.”

Playing Memory Games with Sneakers

The last two research questions were concerned with the “memory games” (Mink & Neumayer, 2013, p. 4) that the two “memory communities” (Nora, 1987)—the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition—played in an effort to advance their respective social and political agendas and thereby influence the final outcome of the controversy. The first memory game that CAIR played was to transform the Nike Air controversy into a theonymic controversy, a dispute over the name of a deity—in this case, Allah, the God of Islam. If Allah was offended by the Nike Air design, he did not communicate his displeasure to Nike or the public. That left CAIR, which acts as the defender of Muslim rights in the United States, to act on Allah’s behalf. CAIR quickly assumed the role of defender of the name of Allah, promptly proclaimed that the stylized graphic form of the English words Nike Air was indeed the Arabic word Allah, and called the Nike design a blasphemous “insult” to the more than 1 billion Muslims in the world. A June 25, 1997 Washington Post story paraphrased the executive director of CAIR as saying that “Muslims do not object to ‘Allah’ on caps and T-shirts, but its appearance on shoes suggests disrespect. He compared it to putting ‘Jesus’ on shoes” (Murphy, 1997, p. C13). However, CAIR did not show how the alleged blasphemous design offended God or insulted or harmed Muslims.

The memory game of CAIR and other Muslims was played in the terrain of Islamic “entitlementality,” the expectation of transcultural reverence for Islam, Allah, and Muslims (Eko, 2012). This entitlementality of respect is itself a memory game that has often taken the form of “symbolic, yet bellicose identity demands . . . put forward in internal political arenas but also addressed to the world at large,” to use the expression of Mink and Neumayer (2013, p. 2). Furthermore, CAIR framed the Nike Air controversy as a clash between Western secular consumerism and the monotheistic religiosity of Islam. To make matters worse, the collective memories of Arab-Islamic and other cultures in the Middle East include cultural codes that relegate shoes to the lowest stratum of the hierarchy of utilitarian objects. Shoes are viewed with much disdain in that part of the world. That is why groups like CAIR thought that associating even a semblance of the name of Allah with shoes, things that are culturally framed as lowly, ritually unclean, was offensive to the sacred collective memory of many Muslims. Appropriating the name of Allah

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015170

and inscribing it on Nike sports shoes, willfully or not, was tantamount to trampling Allah, Islam—and its millions of martyrs—underfoot. Placing the name of Allah on shoes named after Nike, the ancient Greek goddess of victory, was doubly offensive to CAIR.

Forgetfulness, whether conscious or not, is a strategy in the memory games played by interest groups. In its quest to eliminate the perceived blasphemy of Nike Air, CAIR deliberately ignored the First Amendment free speech jurisprudence of the United States, under which blasphemy is not a crime. The claims of CAIR would not have prevailed in a court of law, but they worked in the public relations arena, where corporations abhor controversy. The Nike Air sneaker turned out to be a public relations disaster for Nike. The company recalled the shoe from its distributors worldwide and apologized to Muslims for what it deemed an unintentional offense. The company also introduced sensitivity training to Nike designers on Islamic imagery and agreed to investigate the case internally. It also committed to building at least one playground in a Muslim community in the United States. It was Nike’s first ever product recall (Harrington, 1997).

The “Memory Games” of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

As we saw earlier, the physical, social, cultural, and psychic trauma of slavery and racial discrimination defines African American experience. The civil rights movement gave African Americans an opportunity to play what Kansteiner (2002) called “national memory politics.” That is, the development of heightened “historical consciousness” (p. 197) with regard to historical wrongs. The psychic trauma of hundreds of years of slavery and racial victimization has crystallized into a negative collective memory for African Americans. Collective memories are often grounded in the physical, material, and cultural elements of a specific society “and its inventory of signs and symbols” (Kansteiner, 2002, p. 188). Chains and shackles are part and parcel of human collective memory. From time immemorial, the words “chains” and “shackles” have been widely understood metonyms for slavery and servitude. This metaphorical usage goes back to antiquity (Tocqueville, 1843; Thomas, 1997). In The Social Contract, Rousseau (1762) famously said, “Man is born free but everywhere he is chains” (p. 1).

French journalist and revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat (1792), wrote a book entitled, “Les Chaînes de L’Esclavage” (The Chains of Slavery) to

denounce slavery, link it to the despotism of the ancien régime and promote revolutionary ideals in France. Crèvecœur (1782), one of the earliest French commentators on American society, observed that slaves in America were treated inhumanely, “neither moral nor physical means are made use of to soften their chains.” (p. 112). In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1910) wrote that: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”

As a result of the long and sad history of slavery and penal servitude in the Americas and elsewhere, the chain and the shackle are, for African Americans, objects of negative collective memory, symbols of “racial injustice,” and “institutionalized racial oppression” (Gorman, 1997, p. 441).

The first memory game played by the Rev. Jessee Jackson was semantic. He renamed the Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids line of sneakers “slave shoes” (Rainbow PUSH Coalition, 2012), and urged people to “resent and resist them.” He described the shoes as a “degrading symbol of African-American history.” The Adidas “slave shoe” was then presented as an insensitive commercial product that opened up the painful legacy of slavery. In a press release issued on June 18, 2012, (Rainbow PUSH Coalition, 2012) following the online unveiling of the new Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids, the Reverend Jackson personalized negative collective memory:

The attempt to commercialize and make popular more than 200 years of human degradation, where blacks were considered three-fifths human by our Constitution is offensive, appalling and insensitive. Removing the chains from our ankles and placing them on our shoes is no progress.

The epithet, “Adidas slave shoes” was aimed at opening up psychic wounds of the past that had not passed for political purposes. Rev. Jackson and scores of Facebook users evoked the negative collective memory of African slavery that they saw reproduced in the design of the Adidas shoes (Solomon, 2012). The controversy had become a memory game. This memory game put Adidas on the defensive. The company denied that it was seeking to profit from the sufferings of African Americans. It released a statement claiming that though the shoe designer’s vision was “outrageous” and “unique,” the shoes had nothing to do with slavery (Solomon, 2012).

That argument was not persuasive. The public backlash in real space and cyberspace (social

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 171160–173

media) became so intense that Adidas decided to withdraw the JS Roundhouse Mids from the market.

Conclusion and Discussion

The article analyzed the so-called Nike Allah affair, and the Adidas “slave shoe” controversies within the framework of semiological theory. The aim of the study was to explore the interplay of semiology and collective memory games that were at play in the Nike Air and Adidas “slave shoe” controversies. Both sports shoe products were composed of layers of semiotic codes and significations that were susceptible to multiple interpretations. The logos and shoes of Nike and Adidas have become popular cultural artifacts with easily recognizable semiotic codes that are “invested with meaning” (Howells & Negrieros, 2012, p. 118) by the global sports entertainment industry and its consumers. Each big sports-entertainment company has a certain signification, a globally recognized cachet in popular culture. Nevertheless, the “intersignifications” (Ricoeur, 2013) of these global sports apparel companies and the two “memory communities” quickly became culturally dissonant. The aesthetic, mythic, and marketing messages or significations that the companies disseminated and hoped to use to transform the new sneakers into commercial successes were successfully countered and negated by the collective memory “games” played by CAIR and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Both groups successfully “activated” their memory games for purposes of designating and stigmatizing their “enemies” (Mink & Neumayer, 2013). The juxtaposition of what looked like the Arabic calligraphic of Allah on sports shoes made by a company named after Nike, an ancient Greek goddess,touched the very core of Arab-Islamic theonomy (the theological doctrine of the names of Allah).

Saussure (1959) suggested that the fundamental principle of semiotics is that “the linguistic sign is arbitrary” (pp. 67, 100). That is to say, the whole reality that results from associating the signifier—the graphic form of the words Nike Air and the shackles on the Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids—with the signified (the concept of Allah [God] and slavery/servitude respectively) is arbitrary. In other words, there is no connection between a word and the thing it describes or a thing and what it symbolizes. That logic works in the case of the Adidas “slave shoe” controversy. However, it does not work in the realm of religion. The Nike controversy demonstrated that to many Muslims, the idea or concept of Allah (God) is inextricably linked to the sound-image, the

graphic representation of the word Allah in Arabic calligraphy. Thus, the metaphysical bond between the signifier (the word, Allah) and the signified (Allah) is unbreakable in Islam. Muslims believe that the Qu’ran is the literal embodiment of the Word of Allah, revealed to Prophet Mohammed. Therefore, the linguistic sign, the totality of the experience that results from associating the sound-image Allah with the reality of God (Allah) is not arbitrary. That is why desecrating the Qur’an is an offense punishable by death in Muslim countries.

Despite their global reach and power, Nike and Adidas were no match for the negative collective memories of the two memory communities. The only option left to them was to withdraw their “offensive” shoes and apologize for being insensitive toward the collective memory of Muslims and African Americans. At the end of the day, Nike Air, and the Adidas JS Roundhouse Mids became, to use the expression of Baudrillard, “models, neutralized as signs, they are emptied of their meaning” (2006, p. 81). The outcomes of both controversies have serious negative implications for freedom of expression. The Nike controversy showed how Muslim groups used sacred religious signifiers of the past to counter perceived sacrilege and religious insensitivity in the present, while the Adidas controversy showed how African Americans used the negative collective memories of slavery and the slave trade to resist what they considered crass, corporate, commercialization of their centuries-long trauma for purposes of selling a frivolous, vexatious, mass market product in the present. The outcomes of these controversies show that even global corporations need to have cross-cultural awareness.

Notes

1 Two, more recent blasphemy cases received international media and political attention. In 2012, a court in the Russian Federation convicted and sentenced three members of a feminist punk rock band, Pussy Riot, to terms of imprisonment for desecrating a place of worship by singing a “punk prayer” entitled “Mother Mary, Please Drive Putin Away,” inside Christ the Savior Cathedral, a grand Russian Orthodox house of worship in Moscow.

References

Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural memory and early civilization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies (Annette Lavers, trans.). New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication Quarterly Volume 22 July – September 2015172

Barthes R. (1977). ‘The photographic message’ (1961), in Image-Music-Text, 17 (Stephen Heath, trans.).

Barthes R. (1993). Le Message photographique (Photographic message), in Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works) Tome 1, 1942--1965 (Vol.1), Eric Marty (ed.). Paris, France: Editions du Seuil.

Baudrillard, J. (2006). Utopia deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967–1978) (Stuart Kendall, trans.). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

Bommas, M. (2012). Introduction: Sites of memory and the emergence of urban religion. In M. Bommas, J. Harrisson, & P. Roy (Eds.), Memory and urban religion in the ancient world (pp. xxvi–xxxviii). London, UK: Bloomsbury.

Burch, R. (2010). Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#seme).

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (2010). www.cair.com.

Crevècoeur, J. de (1982). Letters from an American farmer. Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library (original text published in 1782).

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Capitalisme et schizophrenie : L’anti-Œdipe [Capitalism and schizophrenia: The anti-Œdipus]. Paris, France: Editions de Minuit.

Eko, L. (2006). New media, old free speech regimes: The historical and ideological foundations of French and American regulation of bias-motivated speech and symbolic expression on the Internet. Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, 28, 69–127.

Eko, L. (2012). New media, old regimes: Case studies in comparative communication law and policy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of culture. NY: Basic Books.

Gorman, T. (1997). Back on the chain gang: Why the Eighth Amendment and the history of slavery proscribe the resurgence of chain gangs. California Law Review, 85(2), 441--478.

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory (Lewis Coser, trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1925.)

Harrington, J. (1997, June 25). Nike recalls disputed logo. The Cincinnati Enquirer. Retrieved from http://www.enquirer.com/editions/1997/06/25/bus_nike.html

Harrison, J. (2012). Isis in the Greco-Roman world: Cultural memory and imagination. In M. Bommas, J. Harrisson, & P. Roy (Eds.), Memory and urban religion in the ancient world (pp. 214–236). London, UK: Bloomsbury.

Heller, J. (2006). Alternative narratives and collective memories: Israel’s new historians and the use of historical context. Middle Eastern Studies, 42(4), 571–586.

Howell, R., & Negreiros, J. (2012). Visual culture. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Kansteiner, W. (2002). Finding meaning in memory: A methodological critique of collective memory studies. History and Theory, 41(2), 179–197.

Kerlinger, F. (1986). Foundations of behavioral research (3rd ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Levy, G. (2012). Judaic technologies of the word: Cognitive analysis of Jewish cultural formation. Sheffield, UK: Equinox.

Manning, P. (2012). Semiotics of drinks and drinking. London, UK: Continuum.

Marat, J.-P. (1792). Les Chaînes de L’Esclavage (The Chains of Slavery).

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1910, 1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chicago, IL: Charles Kerr & Co.

Mink, G., & Neumayer, L. (Eds.). (2013). History, memory and politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Memory games. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Murphy, C. (1997, June 25). Nike pulls shoes that irked Muslims; heel design resemble Arabic word for Allah. The Washington Post, p. C13.

Nike, Inc. (2012). www.nikeinc.com/investors/news/news-release-details.

Nora, P. (1987). Les lieux de mémoire [Sites of memory], Quarto 2 (Vol. 2) Paris, France: Gallimard.

Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire [Sites of memory]. Representations, 26(Spring), 7–24.

Nora, P. (2002). Reasons for the current upsurge in memory. Eurozine. Retrieved from http://www.eurozine.com.

Ofer, D. (2009). The past that did not pass. Israeli Studies, 14(1) 1--35.

Olivier, L. (2011). The dark abyss of time: Archeology and memory (Arthur Greenspan, trans.). Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press

Peirce, C. S. (1931--58). The collected papers of C. S. Peirce, Vols. 1--6, C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.); Vols. 7--8, A. W. Burks (Ed.). Cambridge: Harvard.

Peirce, C. (1998). What is a sign? In N. Houser & C.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5

Visual Communication QuarterlyPages 173160–173

Lyombe Eko, PhD, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Electronic Media, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. His areas of research and teaching are new media law, comparative and international communication, as well as visual communication studies. He is the author of New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy (2012) (Gold Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards, 2014), and American Exceptionalism, the French Exception and Digital Media Law (2013). His research has been published in Communication Law and Policy, The Journal of Internet Law, the Loyola (Los Angeles) International and Comparative Law Review, The John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law, and the International Communication Gazette, among others.Email: leo.eko@ttu.edu

Natalia Mielczarek is a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. Her research interests lie at the intersection of visual communication and new media technologies. She is interested in how various actors, from politicians and journalists to regular people, deploy images to create particular narratives to serve various functions. Email: natalia-mielczarek@uiowa.edu

Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (Vol. 2, pp. 4–10). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Rainbow PUSH Coalition, (2012, June 18). “Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition call Adidas shackle shoe human degradation.” Retrieved from http://rainbowpush.org/news/single/rev._jesse_jackson_and_the_rainbow_push_coalition_call_adidas_shackle_shoe_

Ricœur, P. (2000). La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oublie [Memory, history forgetfulness]. Paris, France: Seuil.

Ricœur, P. (2013). Hermeneutics. (D. Pellauer, trans). Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique [The social contract]. (G. D. H. Cole, trans.). Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm

Saussure, F. (1959). Course in general linguistics. (W. Baskin, trans.). New York, NY: Philosophical Library.

Schimmel, A. (1994). Deciphering the signs of God: A phenomenological approach to Islam. New York, NY: SUNY Press.

Solomon, J. (2012, June 20). “Adidas cancels ‘shackle’ shoes after outcry.” CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/US/adidas-shackle-shoes.

Thomas, H. (1997). The slave trade. New York, NY: Touchstone Books.

Tocqueville, A. de (1843). De la démocracie en Amérique [Democracy in America], Vol. II. (H. Reeve, trans.). New York, NY: J. H. G. Langley. (Original work published 1835.)

Williams, T. (2008, December 21). Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at Bush was tortured in jail, his brother says. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/middleeast/22iraq.html?_r=0

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

r Lyo

mbe

Eko

] at 1

9:55

16

Dec

embe

r 201

5