A more detailed programme will be coming soon! The panels are:

 

1.Events, exhibitions and festivals

 

Andrea Paz Cerda Pereira

Chile en la Imagen del Mundo: Trazando Prehistorias de una Marca País en cinco Exhibiciones Universales (1875-2010).  

Actualmente es frecuente encontrar logos de naciones y campañas de países  en los medios de comunicación, buscando capitalizar la imagen la nación de mano de técnicas  del branding. ¿Qué tan nueva es esta idea de capitalizar una nación y qué tan nuevo son los imaginarios de nación construidos al alero de una cultura promocional?

Esta ponencia destaca la Historia de las Exhibiciones Universales como un antecedente fundamental en la mercantilización de los imaginarios de nación. Para ello analiza el caso de la participación de Chile  en cuatro momentos y exhibiciones internacionales del siglo XIX y dos del siglo XX (Santiago 1875, Paris 1889, Osaka 1970 y Sevilla 1992).   Luego compara esas pre-historias una quinta exhibición reciente y permeada por técnicas del branding: la del pabellón Chileno en Shanghái 2010.

A partir de la comparación se discuten novedades y continuidades en la producción del imaginario nacional. Entre las novedades destacan la creciente producción visual de relatos de identidad y los tropos que asocian a dichos relatos con mejores posibilidades cambiarias. Entre las continuidades, se destaca el constante horizonte futuro del progreso que nutre los relatos en exhibición y la posición permanente de Chile como país “en desarrollo”.    

En suma, esta ponencia describe  la historia de las exhibiciones chilenas en ferias universales como estrechamente ligadas al branding de la nación de hoy  y reflexiona sobre la necesidad de estudiar el nacionalismo en una era donde el capitalismo ya no es principalmente de imprenta, sino visual. 

 

María Paz Peirano-Olate

Branding National Cinema: Chilean Films ‘For Export’ and National Branding at European Film Markets

 Chilean cinema has recently flourished in the international market. Like other peripheral cinemas, Chilean film depends on expanding beyond its small national market (De Valck 2007, Falicov 2010), and Chilean film professionals, along with the Chilean government, have aimed for the ‘internationalisation’ of local cinema. Since a change in the national cultural policy in the mid-2000s, Chilean films and film professionals have increasingly participated in international marketplaces where national branding has become a matter of major significance for ‘national’ film industries in the contemporary post-industrial economy (Grainge 2008).

This paper is based on a two-year multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with Chilean film professionals at international film festivals, and in particular on participant observation at the largest European film marketplaces, the Cannes Marché du Film and the Berlin European Film Market. The paper explores the marketing strategies of Chilean film professionals, the agency CinemaChile, and the Chilean Trade Commission ProChile, and highlights their focus on the concept of ‘The people from Chile’ to brand both national films and filmmakers as a local product ‘for export’. Branding performances of ‘Chilenity’ are embedded in not only the visual promotional materials but also the everyday social interactions of Chilean film professionals at film festivals. The subsequent commodification of art cinema is not, however, free from contradictions. The paper discusses some of the conflicted feelings that the branding process generates among Chilean professionals in relation to their aesthetic and political convictions about national cinema, understood as a form of cultural resistance and not just as a ‘business’ promoted by national branding. 

 

Nicola Astudillo Jones

The Festival, the Director and the Consumer: Branding Latin America through the ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival in Manchester, UK

Since the early 1990s, there has been increasing interest in Latin American culture in Britain (Beasley-Murray, 2003; Román-Velázquez, 1999; Urquía, 2005), and the relative invisibility of its Latin American community (McIlwaine, Cock and Linneker, 2011) has facilitated the branding of Latin America within these cultural forms for British audiences. This paper examines how and why Latin American culture is branded within the local space of the ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival in Manchester. Drawing on primary data, this paper proposes that the branding of Latin America results from the convergence of three cultural agents. Firstly, textual and discourse analysis reveals how festival organisers brand Latin America as different and exotic in order to market the festival to a wider audience. Secondly, while Latin American film directors strive to alter perceptions of their respective countries in their face-to-face discussions with festival audiences, they are unable to avoid established tropes and unwittingly reinforce cultural perceptions. Finally, despite initial recognition of cultural similarities, the consumer performs their own branding of Latin America by subsequently ‘decoding’ (Hall, 1980) Latin American culture as inherently different to that of Britain. This paper consequently proposes that the branding of Latin America as ‘different’ to the UK in the ¡Viva! film festival derives from the desire to perform cosmopolitan knowledge of cultural diversity and enact ‘Othered’ Latin American identities. 

 

Svitlana Biedarieva

“Quetzalcoatl doing Op Art twist”: 1968 and the branding of Mexican modernity

The official design for the 1968 Olympics appeared after Pedro Ramírez Vázquez’s call “to forget an image of Mexico, that of a figure covered by a poncho and a sombrero sleeping soundly beneath the shadow of a tree”. The expiry of this media-supported externalized image coincided with a need to break off with a set of nationalist concepts visualized by artists of the Mexican Muralism. These transformations aimed to reveal ideological backgrounds for the ‘new’ globally successful Mexico. The presentation of Mexico in terms of modernity and industrialization was needed for creation of a ‘mirage’ or an ideal image of the state. The whole Mexico City was redesigned in order to become the brand of Mexico’s modernized identity.

The logo of the Olympic Games developed by Lance Wyman was once described as “Quetzalcoatl doing Op Art twist” – as merging the idea of contemporaneity and the indigenous references. However, the explosion of student protest that resulted in Tlatelolco massacre threatened to undermine the legacies of successful self-representation of the country. The graphic design of the Olympic cultural programme widely promoted its main symbol, a dove of peace (and the motto “Todo está possible en la paz”), while the government was violently suppressing the Student Movement. This contrast was reflected in a series of student posters where they re-interpreted the Olympic designs giving them opposite signification.

The paper considers branding as an ambiguous process where the same visual imagery can be employed by two conflicting sides for the support of particular ideologies. The paper refers to the research of Eric Zolov, Luis Castañeda, Ariel Rodríguez-Kuri, Keith Brewster, etc. The presentation focuses on the questions: Was the Olympic attempt of national branding successful despite the social conflict surrounding it? How such controversies of the interpretation influenced the development of visual culture in contemporary Mexico? How the official branding of the 1968 Olympiad influenced the contemporary presentation of Mexico worldwide?

 

2. Contestations, challenges and conflict

 

Felix Lossio Chávez

Resisting nation-branding: Counter-campaigns and the discursive battles for the nation in Peru.

Rather than just marketing strategies, this paper understands nation branding as a political device that aims to produce (the meaning of) the nation and suggests the ways in which citizens should relate to it. This becomes particularly complex in Latin America, characterized by economic inequalities, cultural diversity and permanent political conflicts rooted in a colonial background that continues to structure vertical social relationships. Unsurprisingly, recent nation branding campaigns such as the one in Peru (2011) have not been passively received but actively challenged and contested, both textually and visually. By intervening its logos, slogans or creating parodies that far from its original purposes evidence issues such as  unregulated natural resources exploitation, government corruption or racism; this “culture jamming” (Klein: 2000) disrupts the idyllic-exotic depiction of the Latin American nations and underlines that these are “simulacrums”: images of something that doesn’t exist. (Baudrillard: 1994). Put it briefly, my paper will analyse the nation brand counter-campaigns of Peru. I will focus on visual designs, video-parodies and online social networks interactions, supported by interviews carried out to its creators. By doing so, and engaging with the work of Benedict Anderson (1983), Michael Billig (1995), Partha Chaterjee (1993) and Hommi Bhabha (1994), I will discuss the resistance to what I name the “advertising discourse of the nation” and the promotion of new discursive frames within these symbolic battles; raising questions about the contemporary conceptualization and construction of the nation.

 

Josetxo Cerdán & Miguel Labayen

La marca como conflicto: tres propuestas cinematográficas que cuestionan la branderización de Latinoamérica.

La conciencia de Latinoamérica como marca (brand) viene de lejos. La reflexividad sobre esa identidad construida en un proceso de negociación habitualmente desigual, también. El brasileño Oswald de Andrade hizo de su Manifiesto Antropófago un ejercicio vanguardista de resistencia por la vía del canibalismo y la resignificación de dicha branderización ya en 1928. Arthur Omar llevaría sus ideas al cine en Triste Trópico (1974). Pero es Agarrando pueblo (Los vampiros de la miseria), de Carlos Mayolo y Luis Ospina, la película que condensó a partir de 1978 ese trabajo de apropiación y empoderamiento desde la periferia latinoamericana. Nuestra comunicación se centrará en tres ejemplos de esa resistencia desde el cine latinoamericano a la vampirización, que tiene lugar tanto en términos estéticos y narrativos, como institucionales. El primero el del colombiano Rubén Mendoza que en múltiples trabajos ha ironizado sobre cómo en Europa se conceptualiza el cine latinoamericano. El segundo, la coproducción argentino-danesa El escarabajo de oro (Alejo Moguillansky y Fia-Stina Sandlund, 2014), un film reflexivo sobre las coproducciones entre Latinoamérica y Europa. Por último, completaremos el recorrido con el estudio de una propuesta como los premios Fénix, unos premios cinematográficos iberoamericanos de reciente aparición cuyo principal propósito es participar en la proyección de la imagen del “cine iberoamericano a otras regiones”.

 

Liz Harvey

Reflecting Perfection?: The Depreciation of Costa Rica’s Brand Power

When people think of Costa Rica they see tropical beaches, majestic mountains and volcanoes, and lush rainforests with a wealth of wildlife waiting to be discovered. When tourists arrive there they are also invariably told that it is a peaceful country - the army was abolished in 1948 - which prizes hard work and free state education for all citizens above all else. It is also impossible to miss their ‘pura vida’ philosophy or their crowning glory: the ticos are, officially, the happiest people in the world, according to the Happy Planet Index.

 

This hard-earned brand identity has remained firm since the inception of the independent nation in 1821, surviving the nation building projects of the 1880s, the revolution of 1948, and, to some extent, even the equal rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s along the way.

 

Why, then, in the twenty first century, are cracks beginning to appear in Costa Rica’s happy facade?

 

This paper will begin by considering the tico, or Costa Rican, brand - what goes into making it and who has been responsible for its maintenance and upkeep. It will then posit that with the growth of digital technologies and social media in the twenty first century, questions around national identity and what constitutes the Costa Rican social norm have been thrown up, requesting answers. This paper will go on to highlight how these themes have been explored by the country’s film directors, who often try to reflect what they see as the national reality on screen, and why the picture they paint shows a society far from perfect.

 

Paula Gómez Carrillo

Covert Nation Branding and the Neoliberal Subject: The Case of “It’s Colombia NOT Columbia” 

Within the field of nation branding, the citizen of the national state has always formed an integral part of analyses. Yet, within all these studies, the citizen has merely been talked about, with his or her positions and roles within the complex dynamics of nation branding dictated or taken for granted. In this sense, the citizen has become an implied category, with academe failing to provide due attention to the citizen’s own understanding of his or her own role within the campaign, as well as the campaign per se. This study set out to contribute to this gap in the literature by putting the individual’s personal understanding of nation branding practices at the center of analysis.

Specifically, this research project employed a critical perspective to nation branding. Here, it attempted to analyze how Colombian citizens engage with the nation branding campaign “It’s Colombia NOT Columbia” (ICNC), a covered joint collaboration between Colombia’s official nation brand and private companies, which publicly positions itself as a social movement geared from below. Therefore, this study aims to understand the citizen’s own role within this deliberately inner-oriented nation branding campaign.

This study, furthermore, sustained the idea that nation branding is a technique of neoliberal governmentality whose expansionary logic comes to dictate and govern the practices of the citizens. In this sense, this study set out to assess the extent to which Colombians’ engagement with ICNC could come to be understood through approaching the citizens as neo-liberal subjects. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews (N=10) were conducted with followers of ICNC. Thematic analyses demonstrated the particular ways citizens internalize a neoliberal rationality in order to attribute meaning to their support and participation within the covert nation branding campaign ICNC. 

 

3. Media: images, film and music

 

Andrew Ginger

International Love?

The videos and music of the Cuban-American rapper Pitbull overtly connect a ‘Latin’ identity with a claim to global significance. Pitbull has named himself Mr Worldwide; his new album will even be titled Globalization. Pitbull has forged a connection between the ‘Latin’ and the ‘Global’ on several levels: in the mixture of international languages (Spanish/English), in the erotic link between the Latin lover and the conquered world, and in both the image and reality of financial success.  It is easy to criticize Pitbull for stereotyping or for complicity with a given economic system. Equally, it is possible to consider what makes his image as Worldwide Latin compelling to audiences. In this paper, I will consider two dimensions of Pitbull’s image, with particular reference to his video for International Love. First, I will suggest that Pitbull revisits historic pragmatic tactics for universalization in the Spanish-speaking world. Second, and relatedly, I will explore the aesthetic effects of the video in relation to the audience’s experience of time and place.

 

Kariann Goldschmitt

Re-Branding Brazil Through Music

In recent years, the international representation of Brazil through music has extended from the canonic sounds of samba, bossa nova, and MPB to now feature globally oriented music of its large cities and their ties to global youth culture, such as hip-hop and “indie” rock. Meanwhile national cultural policy organizations have invested in Brazil's wealth of musical talent to bolster its national branding to the point of sponsoring recordings and paying for musicians to travel abroad to world music conferences. These changes in musical representation and policy do not happen in a vacuum. Ever since its redemocratization in the 1980s and emergence as one of the stronger economies in the Global South, Brazil's leaders have made a concerted effort to re- brand the nation to appeal to investors, tourists, sports organizations, and politicians. The most visible of these efforts was its concerted effort to win bids to host international sporting events, such as the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, regardless of their cost to national infrastructure. This presentation argues that Brazil's ascendance on the world stage has altered its musical brand. Based on fieldwork in Brazil’s independent record industry since 2007 and on theories of the importance of cultural policy and ethnicity to nations in the Global South (e.g., Yúdice 2003, Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), I show how shifts in socio-economic status lead to not only changes in expressive culture but also to how a nation presents itself to the rest of the world. 

 

Kris Juncker

‘A Cuban Courtship’: Postcards and Colonial Nostalgia in the Early Twentieth Century 

Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1899 ignited new movements in the depiction of Cuban culture through postcard production. Although the Cuban government and press appeared to advocate independence, this paper investigates conflicting movements that arose within popular sentiment. To be clear, in spite of rhetoric encouraging national sovereignty, a tide of Colonial nostalgia emerged among many tourism-based and creative industries. In most instances, postcard images were photographed by Cubans but mechanically printed in the United States and sold in Cuban tourist venues to both national and international audiences. These postcards regularly sought to characterise the nation and its people by transforming once-semi-anthropological materials that presented race, costume and social class into leisure-based paraphernalia. Arguably, this creative adaptation of such cultural studies involved rather extreme creative license and embellishment. In particular, postcards from the decades following Cuban independence illustrate extensive colouring of images as well as photomontage practices. This paper examines some of the more pernicious trends in the postcard representation of Cuba as these images offered inexpensive, mass-produced stereotypes of Cuban people to audiences both within Cuba and abroad. Many of these same postcard publishers printed images illustrating modern industrial development in European and American cities. However, in collusion, photographers and publishers continued to print images celebrating Cuba’s Colonial past and enforcing stereotypes that persist even today in Cuba as well as internationally.

 

Leslie Marsh

Rebranding Brazil in policy and on screen 

Drawing on new approaches to branding (Lury, Arvidsson), place branding (Szondi, Anholt, Pike) and nation branding (Aronczyk), this paper explores shifts in Brazilian cultural policies and audiovisual production in recent years. What is at stake is to consider how contemporary audiovisual policies and practices serve as architects of new social and economic relations and offer new understandings of urban experience and spaces. In this paper, I first offer an overview of the shifts in cultural and audiovisual policy starting in 2003 with the Lula administration when cultural production and policies were defined as strategic tools to achieve social, political and economic integration both at the local level as well as in international arenas. From 2003 to 2014, notions of the creative economy greatly influenced the development of new cultural and audiovisual policies. I assert that the assimilation of ideas of the creative economy draws contemporary Brazilian cultural policy near to an economy of branding. In other words, new orientations in cultural policy have furthered a process of “rebranding Brazil”. To contextualize these shifts, I then reflect on four films that are emblematic of new orientations in audiovisual policies and cultural production, Tropa de Élite(2007), Tropa de Élite II (2010) and the collective productions 5x Favela – Agora por Nós Mesmos (2010) and 5x Pacificação(2012). Although they emerge from different creative territories, these films are products of and offer responses to contemporary audiovisual policy. These four films participate in a trend in world cinemas to portray poverty. Yet, the 5x films stand in critical dialogue with the Tropa films regarding inequality and urban violence in Rio de Janeiro. I further note that these films engage in rebranding Rio’s favelas by redefining these urban spaces as sites for economic and cultural exchange. Consonant with the tenor of recent cultural policies, these films seek multiple profits (economic, social, political).

 

4. Media: The power of the written word

 

Carla Moscoso

Chile the Latin American Jaguar: branding economic and political consensus during the political transition 

The end of the Chilean dictatorship in 1990 brought with it a transitional process marked by both the consolidation of democracy and a growing economic development. This phenomenon was intertwined with the development of a national branding, built upon the idea of ‘success', which had for aim leaving behind the dictatorship and the political divisions of the past. The present paper explores how Chilean newspapers helped to reconfigure the post-dictatorial national identity by using the metaphor of Chile as the Latin American jaguar. The texts for analysis comprise the most important newspapers from 1994 to 1998 considering sections of news, reports, articles and columns of opinions. The method of analysis used is critical discourse analysis, through which media representation of Chile as the Latin American jaguar is analysed and subsequently categorised in three main areas: economic, political and cultural. Findings suggest that this representation highlights Chilean economic success as a feature that made the country comparable to developing nations such as those in South East Asia. Such a focus was useful to secure political stability; the permanence of the economic model instituted by the dictatorship and, at the same time, brings out a sort of cultural superiority of Chile in relation to its Latin American peers. Thus the Latin American jaguar sought reunify national identity grounded in a political and economic consensus that meant the acceptance of the free market economy as the only model of development and the establishment of a pacted democracy as the only model of political administration.

 

César Jiménez Martínez

‘Brazil is something else!’ –Struggling for the image of the nation in the age of ‘new visibility’

Different authors have observed that concepts and practices related to public diplomacy, nation branding or soft power attempt to craft a relatively homogenous version of national identity, thus flattening diversity and potential conflicts (Kaneva, 2011; Aronczyk, 2013). In recent years, in fact, several Latin American governments have adopted nation branding as a relatively cheap tool that would allegedly project a positive image of their country abroad as well as foster development.

However, in the age of ‘new visibility’ (Thompson, 2005), no party can completely control the messages, images and narratives that circulate through the media. Focussing on the tensions surrounding the organization of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and the biggest demonstrations that the country experienced in two decades during June 2013, this paper examines how the media is not only a tool and a space that contributes to foster a sense of community among individuals on a national level. Based on original research gathered in two dozens of interviews with journalists, activists and representatives of the Brazilian government, this paper will argue that, nowadays, the lack of stability and permanent negotiations that constitute the essence of the nation are also mediated, and the tensions and struggles over its meaning and its role in the world are displayed and circulate through the global, chaotic, multi-layered contemporary media space, subject to the gaze of both domestic and foreign audiences.

 

Elvira Antón Carillo

LATINOS en Madrid. Un análisis de los anuncios publicitarios del periódico ‘Latino’ como agentes creadores de identidad. 

Desde la última década del S.XX y la primera del XXI, a partir de las conocidas como ‘décadas perdidas’ y las crisis económicas en numerosos países de Latinoamérica, los movimientos migratorios desde muchos de estos países a Europa se intensificaron. Como resultado de estos movimientos migratorios surgieron comunidades transnacionales, que al posicionarse en un espacio diferente, y dentro de una nueva y compleja red de relaciones político-sociales y culturales, debieron necesariamente reordenarse y negociar su identidad.

El constructo identitario ‘latino’ o ‘hispano’, en el que confluyen una gran diversidad de culturas, etnias, nacionalidades, clases sociales, etc. tiene ya una larga historia en Estados Unidos e internacionalmente. En el nuevo enclave europeo, España, donde se comparte la lengua, uno de los rasgos más sobresalientes de esa identidad ‘latina’, ¿cuál será la denominación, definición, cuáles serán las estrategias de homogenización de la identidad?

La ponencia presenta un análisis del discurso del periódico Latino, en especial de los anuncios publicitarios y en un estudio de caso: los anuncios publicitarios de ‘RIA, envíos de dinero’ que durante el año 2008 hace una campana a través de viñetas tituladas ‘La familia’, con el objetivo de exponer qué identidad propone, cuáles son las narrativas de la pertenencia y qué valores se asignan a esta nueva identidad. 

 

Pedro Quijada

Branding El Salvador

This study examines how scholarship on El Salvador has contributed to brand this country as a violent, undemocratic, underdeveloped, and chaotic nation. Since the academic world took an interest in studying El Salvador in the 1980s as a result of that country’s civil war, scholars from various disciplines have produced and published titles such as The War of the Dispossessed, Landscapes of Struggle, Remembering a Massacre, Weak Foundations, Authoritarian El Salvador, The Massacre at El Mozote, The Politics of Violence, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence and Disillusionment in Post War El Salvador, and Peace Without Justice: Obstacles to Building the Rule of Law in El Salvador. These titles, sadly, repeat one single story, a story of violence, chaos, and despair. Even though the academic research on issues related to war, violence and corruption often bring out the voice and the agency of the less fortunate and certainly bring to light events and situations that are undeniably important and even fundamental for the Salvadoran society, the continuous emphasis on only those issues ends up branding and perpetuating El Salvador as a nation that exists exclusively through its negative aspects.

This dominant narrative on El Salvador, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would possibly put it, “silences the diverse past” of El Salvador and turns it into a single narrative. Such single narrative, in the end, continues the colonization of small nations in the Americas, since the knowledge about countries like El Salvador is defined by western scholars and intellectuals whose work—consciously or not—keeps branding smaller nations as subaltern and underdeveloped.

This study also explores how Salvadorans despite their sometimes adverse history, have attempted to brand themselves as the “hardest working people” of Central America and as proud children of “the country of the eternal smile.”  This perspective has been ignored by the local and international academic world but remains viable through popular culture productions—being music, the literature of the Salvadoran Diaspora, and lately the internet, the mediums through which working Salvadorans brand themselves, their country, and create their own cultural identity.  

 

 

5. Campaigns, techniques and strategies

 

Ray Freddy Lara

Complementariedad o antagonismo en las formas de atractividad territorial de las ciudades centrales latinoamericanas frente a las marcas­país de su Estado­nación: Los casos de Ciudad de México, Lima y Río de Janeiro. 

Desde el inicio del Siglo XXI, las ciudades de América Latina han buscado nuevas formas de atractividad territorial (implementación de actividades paradiplomáticas, organización de eventos deportivos y culturales, adopción de modelos de ciudad e inserción de redes globales de ciudades) con la intención de 1) atraer nuevos tipos de turismo, capital intelectual e inversiones, 2) aumentar la calidad de vida de sus habitantes, y lo más importante, 3) tener una exposición a nivel internacional más allá del Estado-nación donde se sitúa. El objetivo de la comunicación es identificar las estrategias de atractividad territorial que han asumido Ciudad de México (México), Lima (Perú) y Río de Janeiro (Brasil), y cómo se diferencian o se asemejan a la marca-país de sus Estado-nación.

Se parte de la premisa de que estas capitales latinoamericanas son ejemplos de los distintos niveles de exposición internacional de una ciudad, asemejándose o diferenciándose a la de sus estados nacionales y sus marcas-país. Ciudad de México busca no ser encasillada en el espectro totalizador y en la imagen de incertidumbre y violencia del territorio mexicano; para lo que hace tiempo se ha presentado como la “capital en movimiento”, la “ciudad de la esperanza” o, simplemente, “CDMX”. Contrariamente, Río de Janeiro ha tenido que ajustarse a las pautas que le exige la marca de Brasil “Sensacional!”, organizadora de los grandes eventos en los últimos diez años. Por su parte, Lima ha buscado influir en la marca Perú a través del desarrollo de su propia marca de “capital gastronómica en América.

 

María Chiara D’Argenio

Nation Branding and Re­Invention in Peru 

As scholars have pointed out, nation branding can be understood as a reconfiguration of countries’ national identity (Fan 2010) – which always entails a degree of simplification (Echeverry 2009) – as well as an exercise of a state’s soft power. This paper analyses, from an interdisciplinary angle, the idea of national identity articulated by the nation branding campaign Marca Perú through its advertising videos. Arguably a state’s policy rather than a mere advertising campaign, Marca Perú was launched in 2011 by the governmental commission PromPeru, with its logo being elaborated by the international agency FutureBrand. Since 2012, it has produced three advertising videos, aimed at both domestic and international audience, which explicitly tackle the theme of the country’s identity. Considered as a whole, these videos have created a discourse of Peruvian identity that draws on crucial concepts in today’s political and cultural international debates: cultural diversity, inclusion and sustainable development.

My presentation discusses how such a discourse engages with previous narratives of the nation while addressing a contemporary globalised society. As I shall demonstrate, the idea of national identity conveyed in the videos is controversial for several reasons: for its simplification, exotization and commercialization of issues such as ethnicity and diversity; because it proposes an unclear notion of social inclusion and identifies the sense of peruanidad with consumption (Canepa 2012); because it reformulates aspects of already previous symbolic constructions of national identity, particularly in relation to the role of indigenous people; finally, because it proposes the image of an unproblematic modernising present.

 

Nick Morgan

Colombia’s Passion: Black Legends, White Lies and Nation Building in the XXIst century

As the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC continues in Havana there has been much talk of national reconciliation. These debates have led to an intensified rearticulation of the nation by competing political projects. Using the 1991 constitution as an initial point of reference, this paper charts the representation of colombianidad over the last 15 years, confronting the well-known negative stereotypes of the nation with the attempts to sanitize the national image carried out in recent years by political and commercial entrepreneurs through propaganda drives such as Colombia es pasión, La respuesta es Colombia and, in a slightly different way, Soy capaz.

Drawing on insights gleaned from over a decade of archive work, ethnography and in depth interviews carried out all over the national territory, I use a Laclauian approach to discourse analysis in order to contrast these “black legends and white lies” with the far more complex attitudes of Colombians towards notions such as community, democracy and the state. In the process I comment on the importance of ethnicity, class and region in expressions of cultural identity, and discuss the political implications of these diverse interpretations of the meaning of “Colombia”. In particular, I focus on the winners and losers who emerge as a result of the state’s articulation of a discourse which continues to privilege modernization and the market and note the alternative visions of the nation proposed by social movements such as the cumbre agraria. 

 

Fiorella Montero Díaz

An inclusive ideal in a delusional box? Marca Perú’s impact on young white upper class identity in Lima 

Peru’s internal war (1980-2000) exacerbated the country’s socioeconomic and ethnic divides. Its aftermath left many white upper class youths in Lima questioning their role in Peru and yearning for their own inclusion. Since 2005 blends of traditional Peruvian music with foreign genres have crystallised into a genre highly popular among these youths, who attempt to self-recreate their identity and class role and relate differently to a broader Lima.

In 2010 the Peruvian Government through PromPeru began to harness cultural fusion (fashion, gastronomy and music) to create an upbeat country brand at times reminiscent of Benetton commercials, Marca Perú. Although the brand was initially welcomed as a tool for Peruvians to recover the self-esteem lost in the war, it did not take long before musicians and audiences of diverse social class and ethnicities began to perceive this branding and use of cultural fusion as problematic. Peru’s inequalities persist and Marca Perú is now seen as the government’s branding and commodification of fusion consumption, making the inclusive ideal synonymous with masking real problems.

As people grow more suspicious of Marca Perú, it is increasingly essentialised and the white upper classes are demonised by association with hegemonic manipulation. However, many upper class musicians and audiences critique Marca Perú. They distance themselves from its naïve chauvinism by raising awareness about continued discrimination, government abuse and hegemonic social systems.

This paper will examine Marca Perú’s use of fusion music between 2010-2012, the transformation of brand perceptions and its impact on Lima white upper class youth. 

 

6. Alternative perspectives on branding

 

Ayumi Takenaka

The Emergence of “Nikkei Cuisine”: Peru’s Gastrodiplomacy and Nation Branding

In this paper, I examine how “national cuisine” is created and branded, focusing on the case of Peru. In recent years, Peruvian food has enjoyed an unprecedented global boom. The Peruvian government actively engages in “gastrodiplomacy,” using food to enhance its nation brand and status, through campaigns, such as “Cocina peruana para el mundo” (Peruvian cuisine for the world) and “Marca Peru” (Peru brand). How is Peruvian national cuisine defined and promoted? Who decides and for whom? And to what extent does food bring this divided nation together?

I address these questions by focusing on the emergence and popularization of “Nikkei cuisine.” Broadly defined as Peruvian and Japanese fusion food, Nikkei food emerged as a central element of Peruvian cuisine in the context of the Peruvian gastronomic boom and food diplomacy. As a symbol of the country’s cultural and culinary diversity, this trendy fusion food has served both to represent the nation and promote Peruvian food by primarily targeting high-end customers in and outside of Peru.

The Peruvian gastronomic boom is widely reported to have forged national unity and pride in the country long divided by social and cultural disparities. However, I have found through visits to several Peruvian restaurants in London, New York, and Barcelona and interviews with chefs and customers that the process of nation branding, led by Lima’s urban elites, has created (or exacerbated) social divisions amongst Peruvians by targeting particular types of global clientele. 

 

Nuria Toribio Triana

Tainted Love: The Branding of Latin American Cinema by the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España

The Goya prizes, the Spanish Oscars, are the instruments by which the Academia guides Spanish cinema through what seems to some critics to be a narrow path, elevating certain types of filmmaking and ignoring others. In short, it is an institution for branding cinema and generating a particular type of film culture. It befits national film institutions and professional lobbies to encourage consistent and non-contradictory (and yet diverse) national cinema discourses, particularly if these enable transnational distribution or if these images are useful in nation/community building ventures. However, we could question the purpose of using the same instruments of control and branding on behalf of other nations and territories. This presentation engages with the Goya a la Mejor Película Iberoamericana category of the awards. Is this prize a declaration of possession? Is this a hangover of post-colonial sentiment? Is it a valid claim to exerting authority over Latin American film cultures in the field of cinema by the Academia?  Or is it something else entirely?

 

Rebecca Ogden

Marketing affective capital through Cuba's tourism branding

Despite common assumptions that Cuba’s reinsertion into the competitive market of international tourism has been reluctant, and/or an irreversible backslide into pre-revolutionary economic models and associated social ills, MINTUR (el Ministerio de Turismo) has in fact pragmatically and strategically developed the industry and commissioned competitive tourism marketing campaigns since the early 1990s (albeit distinctly on its own terms). However, there is certain ambivalence between firstly, these directed efforts to brand Cuba through tourism amidst a competitive market, and secondly, attempts to positively include revolutionary values in the tourism brand - to make tourism ‘pay’ beyond economic terms. My research proposes that Cuba’s tourism brand can be conceptualised through the notion of affective capital.  In particular, this paper discusses how actors who have contact with tourists in formal and informal spheres of tourism engage with affective capital and in so doing either reinforce or deviate from the brand in various ways.

 

Alexandra Nitz

Promotion and Perception of Colombia as an International Academic Destination

The number of international students enrolled at universities in several Latin American countries has been continuously increasing during the past few years. The choice of a country for studies abroad can be influenced by the image that students have of this particular country. Focusing on Colombia, my paper firstly outlines the way Colombia is portrayed by official bodies. The presentation introduces the campaign Colombia Challenge Your Knowledge that advertises Colombia as an advantageous academic destination and focuses on the following questions: Which characteristics are attributed to Colombia? What makes this country a unique place for studies abroad? Afterwards, the country images that international students hold of Colombia before their arrival are detailed. Do international students see Colombia as exotic, dangerous, and exciting? Or do they associate this country with other stereotypes? In order to answer these questions, findings from my doctoral project that are derived from recent face-to-face interviews as well as from an online survey carried out in Colombia with international students from various countries around the world are presented. Finally, empirical results are contrasted with the official promotion of Colombia to show if these sets of country images match or if they differ considerably. Based on a new empirical data set, my paper discusses the branding of Colombia as an international academic destination in comparison to the perception of the country image through the target group of this promotional process.