Stamps: Longtime, Effective Nationalistic Objects

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

When I was much younger, stamp collecting was a popular hobby among teenagers.

Most of my friends collected them, and we eventually specialized by limiting ourselves to certain countries.

I saved, and still have my album of, the stamps of Switzerland.

The seemingly most ordinary of artifacts often reveal the most about a culture and a people, and so it is with postage stamps.

There is a lot one can learn from them. They disclose much about nationalism, geography and history.

The issuing of stamps, starting in the nineteenth century, made a significant contribution to nation-building.

The imagery of stamps promotes the dominant discourses of a particular nationalism, and recalls historical triumphs and myths. It also defines the national territory in maps or landscapes.

Postage stamps may be seen as tiny transmitters of the dominant ideologies of the state. The shifting visual representations of the nation through them express the ideology pursued by governments.

Countries have taken advantage of the imagery on postage stamps by manipulating them, often by propagandistic art,  to influence the perspectives of people at other localities.

Dramatic political and economic transitions are often represented in changing iconography, sometimes through the symbolic erasure of previously dominant political narratives.

In such moments, the importance of philatelic iconography in state attempts to mould citizens’ identities is enhanced.

“Postage stamps are vehicles for identity creation and propagation, and as mechanisms for regime legitimation,” observed British academics Phil Deans and Hugo Dobson in 2005. “They demonstrate changing concepts of the state over time and the changing aspirations of state elites.”

Looking at the stamps of Russia and South Africa, whose respective ideological systems – Communism in what was then the Soviet Union, and apartheid in South Africa – collapsed in the early 1990s, they reveal massive transformations.

The newly struggling Soviet authorities had attempted to bring order out of the Communist Revolution by using postage stamps and the attendant imagery on them.

One of the visual challenges leaders faced was what kind of images or messages they wished to send to their own citizens and to those beyond their country’s borders.

The designs on stamps were among the most important early symbolic decisions at the state level.

The Soviets issued stamps and sets on a wide variety of topics, including international ties and ideology.

Many pictured Soviet and international revolutionary heroes, such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. They helped build what Benedict Anderson described as “imagined communities” and what Michael Billig referred to as “banal nationalism.”

Post-Communist Russia had to forge a new national identity through stamps; one that required careful consideration of what were deemed desirable images to build and renew Russian nationalism.

Therefore it has issued stamps that promote Russia’s heritage and religion; nationalist imagery replaced ideology and international themes.

In South Africa, the 1948 election of the National Party entrenched apartheid.

The new constructed narrative of nationhood was expressed on stamps through an iconography of white culture and heritage while erasing African, and to some extent British, tradition.

One example was an issue marking the 150th anniversary of the Afrikaner Great Trek.

Historic monuments relating to white settlement and expansionism were deployed to underscore these claims.

The election of Nelson Mandela as the first democratic president of South Africa in 1994 ushered in a new nation-building agenda.

His inauguration was depicted in the first set of stamps issued by the democratic state. The new national flag and anthem soon appeared as well.

But philatelic iconography after 1994 did not symbolically annihilate previous histories and national narratives.

Instead, it pursued a nuanced reworking of national identity framed by a political ideology of equality and inclusion – the so-called “rainbow nation.”