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Symbolism has long been established as a means for achieving social mobilisation. The protesters at the London G20 protest on April 1, 2009 employed a wide range of symbolism to kindle people's collective memory. This article studies visual protest symbolism through photographs taken at the protest and discusses six types of visual protest symbolism - costumes, effigies, flags, organisation banners, and slogans - that rely on people's collective memory to mobilise. The article treats the six types of protest symbols as cultural objects and evaluates them in relation to the dimensions of institutional retention, retrievability, rhetorical power, and resonance.
Introduction
In the past two decades, summit protests, known sometimes as anti-globalisation protests, have been increasingly frequent occurrences at summit meetings such as the WTO, the G7/8, and the G20. While the activists at a particular protest may have a diverse set of concerns, they are all 'driven by a call for global solidarity and global justice,' and 'related to the question of democracy in a globalising world' (Rucht, 2006, p.194). The London G20 protest on April 1, 2009 was such a protest. It was also the first major protest after the global economic meltdown beginning in the fall of 2008. In the months leading up to the G20, ordinary people's lives had been affected by the global economic crisis in many countries of the world.
A protest is part of a social movement. Symbolism is a powerful vehicle for social mobilisation because it can bind together people in a social movement behind a common cause by helping participants self-define themselves. In this article, I report and analyse six types of visual symbolism used in the 2009 London G20 protest - costumes, emblems, effigies, flags, organisation banners, and slogans. If we view collective memory as the content of a cultural object, as defined by Schudson (1989), then there exist four major channels through which a cultural symbol becomes effective: it must have institutional retention, retrievability, rhetorical power, and resonance. To anticipate the conclusion, the visual examples referred to in this article demonstrated that many symbols at the London G20 protest were efficacious to varying degrees in relation to these dimensions.
Symbolic Power and Collective Memory
Often the power of symbolism may not be readily recognised...