A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

An Enigma: The Legend of Saint Benedict

This chapter introduces a few key features of Saint Benedict’s life and death, considering the historical process by which he became known as Monte Cassino’s ‘animus’ and ‘anchor’ – the abbey’s spirit and foundation. This line of enquiry means asking how his influence spread, shaped, and fostered the abbey’s reputation as a centre of spiritual, religious, and intellectual culture. It also means considering the contested narratives surrounding his possible translation, in addition to the many discoveries of his relics and their contribution to the entrenched historiography.

Introduction: Contested narratives of the mind and the brain: Neuro/psychological knowledge in popular debates and everyday life

This special section evolved out of a workshop entitled ‘Minds and Brains in Everyday Life: Embedding and Negotiating Scientific Concepts in Popular Discourses’, held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Our discussions at the workshop and for this special section began with the observation that scientific interpretations and everyday explanations regularly meet and come together in debates about aspects of the mind and the brain. Such entanglements between science and the wider public have already been studied from multiple perspectives in history and the social sciences. Recently, however, warnings have intensified that researchers also need to take into account the limitations that certain scientific claims may encounter in everyday life, and to remain methodologically open to alternative explanations that are not derived from forms of (neuro)psychological knowledge. We suggest that focusing on contested narratives of the mind and the brain may be one approach to studying the interaction between science and the larger public, as well as investigating the ignorance, limits, counterforces, and outright rejection that scientific concepts may encounter in everyday life.