Bailey's book is a slim, elegant personal reflection on censorship - self-censorship, use of the death penalty in contemporary Iran, and otherwise - of homosexual activity and affection. It supplemented by a collection of extracts from literature and reports of repression, notably an account by a gay man in the kleptocracy known as Egypt and accounts of what it's like to be gay (or merely perceived as gay) in places contested by Fatah and Hamas.
Zagkos et al explain that
Money is the foundation of any national economy, but also the mark of national sovereignty, reflecting the state which issues it. Its symbolic role is one of its essential characteristics, and the name of the currency its salient feature. Policymakers recognize that currencies can act as important carriers of nationalist imagery, particularly if its supply is monopolized. Money would indeed seem a perfect locus on which a state can construct an ‘ordinary nationalism’ that is all the more powerful for being part of the seemingly unremarkable fabric of daily life. In this paper, using a semiotic methodology, we shall analyse the symbols of the state produced banknotes of Albania, Turkey, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria, in an attempt to read the underlying meanings of the symbolisms selected by each state, in the geographical area of Balkans that is synonymous with nationalism, since the foundation of the modern nation-states on the region.Altman comments that
For most people, stamps are objects that are bought after queuing at the post office, used, and discarded. Apart from stamp collectors few people really look at stamps, although almost everyone who is literate will make frequent use of them. Every recognised state -- and quite a few unrecognised ones -- produces stamps, increasingly far more than are necessary for purely postal purposes. In 1890, a few hundred stamps were issued worldwide; these were small, dignified and sombre in appearance. In 1990 almost 10,000 stamps will be issued, many of them large, garish and multicoloured. ...
"There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments" wrote the German author Robert Musil, and in a sense stamps are monuments writ small. Almost no subject is too obscure to appear on stamps. Yet they are both miniature art works and pieces of government propaganda: they can be used to promote sovereignty, celebrate achievement, define national, racial, religious or linguistic identity, portray messages or exhort certain behaviour. Even the most seemingly bland design -- one depicting roses, say, or domestic animals -- has been deliberately issued by a particular government for a particular purpose.
It is true that it is difficult to read messages into certain designs, those just displaying a numerical value, for example, or those produced by a number of countries using astrological symbols. (Even though the latter would hardly be acceptable to certain orthodoxies, either Christian or Marxist.) But often what appears to be just a pretty picture has a deep significance in the local culture. Stamps of shells -- very common from Pacific Island countries -- draw on traditional associations; this design from Fiji, for example, shows shells widely used for currency. ...
It is the assertion of this book that even if you have never collected stamps in your life, to start really looking at them is ... to start seeing things anew. What appears on stamps is a message. It is the purpose of this book to decode these messages, and to show how that often ignored piece of coloured paper on the edge of an envelope is part of a picture of the world that governments seek quite consciously to create. In this sense, stamps make up part of what the Australian political scientist Donald Horne has termed "the public culture", namely that set of images and values which are propagated as the taken-for-granted picture of the world.
