The Bandeirantes of Freedom: The Prestes Column and the Myth of Brazil's Interior

The Prestes Column rebellion is among the most mythologized events in modern Brazil: from 1924 to 1927, a group of junior army officers marched nearly 15,000 miles through Brazil's vast interior regions. This Homeric epic into the so-called backlands launched the careers of some of Brazil's most important figures, and for nearly a century it has attained a mythic status in folklore and political history. Seeking to both explain and intervene in this legend, I argue that the myth of the Prestes Column emerged from and remained tethered to the stigmatized image of the interior. As a corrective to the column's dominant narrative and intervening in scholarship on myths more generally, this article reimagines the interior as both a place and an idea. The enduring symbolism of the backlands shows that exclusion, rather than a byproduct of national mythologies, is the pillar on which the ideas of inclusionary myths are based.

Biblical Symbols in the Works of Rudolf Steiner’s Followers: Initiation/Archangel Michael by Amalia Luna Drexler as an Example of an Anthroposophical Interpretation of the Spiritual Mission of the Slavs

At the beginning of the 20th century, national mythologies inscribed in the Christian tradition were held in high regard within the milieu of Polish and Russian followers of esotericism. The international anthroposophical movement initiated by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner is a special case. Among his Russian and Polish devotees sprang the common idea of the Slavic spiritual mission in the service of Archangel Michael. The author of this article explores this idea using the example of a sculpture entitled Initiation/Archangel Michael made in 1927 by the Polish artist Amalia Luna Drexler, who belonged to the group of “first generation”anthroposophists.

Reading the ‘Gold Coast Symphony’ in Thea Astley’s The Acolyte

Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.

Silencing the past, retrotopia, and teaching history

Silencing the past, retrotopia, and teaching historyThe essay analyzes contemporary controversies connected with teaching history in Europe, with particular focus on Poland. It discusses contexts that condition the relation between academic, every day and school narratives about history as it is taught in today’s schools. These contexts are both political and ideological (historical policy), as well as—in a deepersense—are an expression of national mythologies. The main thesis is the following: an analysis of teaching programs in schools tells us much more about the present than the past, and the main mechanism used to build a vision of national history is the notion of silencing the past. In our times, which Zygmunt Bauman has called the retrotopia, history becomes a bastion for nationalism and new tribalism. Uciszanie dziejów, retrotopia i nauczanie historiiArtykuł analizuje współczesne kontrowersje wokół programów nauczania historii w różnych krajach europejskich, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem Polski. Wskazany został kontekst różnic między historią akademicką, potoczną świadomością historyczną i szkolnymi narracjami o dziejach. Historia nauczania w szkołach ma zarówno charakter polityczno-ideologiczny, jak i – w szerszym i głębszym sensie – jest wyrazem preferowanych wersji narodowych mitologii. Główna teza tekstu brzmi: analiza programów i sposobów nauczania historii więcej mówi o współczesności niż o historii w tym sensie, że metody i techniki akcentowania lub uciszania pewnych aspektów dziejów pełnią ważną rolę dla budowania określonej wizji tożsamości zbiorowych, dla których legitymizacją jest ideologicznie podbudowana „historia narodowa”. Widać to także w kontekście pojęcia retrotopii Zygmunta Baumana. W ramach tej ostatniej historia staje się głównym bastionem dzisiejszych postaci nacjonalizmu i nowego trybalizmu.

Eating Like a Local

Both Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein looked to terroir, the taste of place, to facilitate their transplantation to Europe as expatriate intellectuals. They associate global cosmopolitanism with Jewishness, for good and for ill, and they connect regionalism to race through figures like the Breton, the Basque, and the Abruzzian whose deep roots complicate national mythologies and inspire desire and envy in the deracinated American. By gleaning and mushroom hunting, Stein creates new connections to the terrain and embraces queer pleasures and Jewish embodiment. Drinking and eating with local men who demonstrate both culinary and genealogical belonging lead Hemingway heroes to long for the same connection to home and to recognize their own alienation.

“Four Guys and a Hole in the Floor”

In this article, I map out the foundational context and procedural dynamics through which the normative status of the white male trucker is achieved and maintained in the British Columbia-based long haul trucking industry. I pay particular attention to the dehumanizing racism and masculine subordination directed toward South Asian truckers. Drawing on ethnographic data, I socially and historically situate these dynamics in relation to Canadian national mythologies, practices of nation building, and the neoliberal organization of trucking labor. To provide a richly detailed analysis of precisely how these narrative dynamics shape hierarchies of race and mobility in the industry, I examine a pervasive, racializing story among white truckers concerning workplace politics and practices of excretion.