Polish-Soviet War in Film and Cinema: A New Perspective Based on the Films For You, O Poland (1920) and Miracle on the Vistula (1921)

The Polish-Soviet War, particularly the Battle of Warsaw (13–25 August 1920), soon became a subject of legend and myth. Irrespective of its fundamental political significance, the defeat of the Red Army was glorified as salvation for both Poland and Europe in military, ideological and metaphysical terms. Conducted beyond academia, the narrative was forged mainly by veterans, the Catholic Church and various forms of literature and art. Due to government subsidies, documentary and feature films also conveyed a normative notion of these dramatic events and their participants. This article focuses on cinematic works like Dla Ciebie, Polsko [For You, o Poland, PL 1920], and Cud nad Wisłą [The Miracle on the Vistula, PL 1921] produced in order to commemorate the war between the Poles and the Bolsheviks. Taking the iconic turn, this article scrutinises the cinematic self-portrait of the Polish nation that had already been ‘imagined’ as a bulwark of European culture in the East by earlier literary works. Spotlighting protagonists who were given a place in the pantheon of national heroes, it also asks about those who were denigrated or marginalised like women and Jews. Finally, using quantitative methods and Geographical Information System (QGIS) as a tool, the article juxtaposes the maledominated, ethnically and confessional homogeneous ‘imagined nation’ with the film entrepreneurs and actual cinema audiences characterised by their diversity.

The Transparent Eyeball of the Nation: Walt Whitman’s Imagined Nation in “Song of Myself”

This paper provides a textual analysis of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, revealing its significance as a national poem. The paper argues that Whitman’s "Song of Myself" breaks literary and political limits, challenging the sovereignty of the nation. By examining "Song of Myself" in the six different editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, this paper will further analyze Whitman’s style and his speaker as representations of the limitations and sovereignty of literary tradition and the politics of his nation. By “politics,” I refer to the religious, political, and social doctrines that shape the nation. By “literary,” I mean the traditional literary style of writing, such as the poem’s form, scope, and subject.

I’m(migrant) Canadian: Renegotiating a “Canadian” National Imaginary in English as a Second Language (ESL) Classrooms

What does being “Canadian” mean to racialized students learning an additional language? What happens when such students do not fit in with dominant, idealized notions of being a Canadian? Drawing on Norton’s and Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, this article posits that Canada is an imagined nation. In responding to the two questions, I summarize the relevant literature and share some key personal and lived experiences in teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) and Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) students. To conclude, I suggest that in light of the significant demographic changes that negotiating and reconstructing the “Canadian” identity, is a learning process in which all societal members must participate in equitable ways.

Nation and Responsibility: The King and His Soldiers in Shakespeare’s Henry V

Who bears responsibility for the actions of a city or state? Is it the entity that we sometimes call a nation? Or the individual members of the nation? Shakespeare’s Henry V includes a brief interchange the night before the battle at Agincourt that addresses this question. A disguised king and the common soldiers of his army debate who is responsible for the deaths that will occur during the forthcoming battle if the war they are fighting is unjust: the king or his soldiers? Who will be punished on Judgment Day? The interchange opens up reflections on the challenge of deciding who acts when a state acts. Henry V is a play that emphasizes the role of the imagination as central to both stagecraft and the politics of creating a nation. Engaging with the medieval theory of the “king’s two bodies,” the Henry of Shakespeare’s play is caught between the desire to be the embodiment of the imagined nation and yet be his own “natural person” when questions of responsibility for the actions of the nation emerge. Dependent on the imagination to build a unified nation of diverse peoples, Henry desires to escape responsibility for the potentially unjust actions of the nation by focusing on the private actions of his individual subjects. The play thereby brings questions of responsibility for the actions of collective bodies founded by the imagination to the fore and forces us to explore who is responsible when states or nations act.

The impossibility of being Drake: Or, what it means to be a successful (Black) Canadian rapper

This article takes Canadian hip hop artist Drake, his celebrity and his body of work as a point of departure for an examination of discursive constructions of race, hip hop and Canada in intersection. Canada’s role in the global hip hop movement has always been contested; circumscribed from abroad by its proximity to the United States and at home by its ideological positioning of Black citizens and Black cultural production vis-à-vis the imagined nation. Framed by broader questions of the role of hip hop in the Canadian public sphere, this discursive analysis analyses the work and utterances of Drake as well as discourses produced about Drake through music criticism and by other hip hop artists. Drake’s public performance of Blackness via hip hop is framed by overlapping and competing ideologies. Drake ‐ whose public persona seems to embody a number of seemingly competing identities ‐ is ‘impossible’ in so far as he is the product of intersecting, circulating conceptualizations of Blackness that render only some performances of Blackness both commercially viable and authentically hip hop, while others remain impossible, unacceptable, unutterable or unimaginable both inside and outside the nation state.

Political Legitimacy in Contemporary Russia ‘from Below’: ‘Pro-Putin’ Stances, the Normative Split and Imagining Two Russias

This paper explores how urban Russians perceive, negotiate, challenge and reaffirm the political configuration of the country and leadership in terms of the ‘imagined nation’. Based on around 100 interviews in three Russian cities, three main pillars appear to prop up the imagined ‘pro-Putin’ social contract: (i) the belief that ‘delegating’ all power into the hands of the President is the best way to discipline and mould state and society; (ii) the acceptance of Putin’s carefully crafted image as a ‘real man’, juxtaposed against negative views of the Russian ‘national character’; (iii) the internalization of a pro-Putin mythology on a ‘government of saviors’ that delivers normality and redeems a ‘once-ruined’ nation. The paper shows that those who reject these pillars do so due to differing views on what constitutes ‘normality’ in politics. This normative split is examined over a number of issues, leading to a discussion of internal orientalism and the limited success of state media agitation in winning over the skeptical.

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975

Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, this book presents us with an interpretation of “South Vietnam” as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the “Vietnam War.” The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The book reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

Firekeepers

Sápmi is the term of the imagined nation of the Saami people, covering a territory that goes across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Northern Russia. The joik is the specific form of Saami chanting. It coveys lyrics, melody and throat singing techniques, with a high level of abstraction in rendering the relation to people, natural sites, places, animals and events, that we attempted to understand contextually and historically. The cultural complexity emerging in this multivocal and multisited project shows the embodiment of verbal recollections, gestures, conversations, lyrics, chants, improvisations, outbursts and secretive features of the Saami chanting endeavor. Among the socio-political issues that the film addressed is the poignant reality of fading away languages: Southern Saami is today spoken by less than 500 speakers in Norway.

(Re-)presenting the Paralympics: Affective Nationalism and the “Able-Disabled”

The relationship between media, sport, nations, and nationalism is well established; yet, there is an absence of these discussions at the intersection of communication, Paralympics, and disability studies. This omission is particularly significant considering the rapid commodification of the Paralympic spectacle, exacerbated by the entry of Channel 4 (C4) as the UK Paralympic rights holders, that has seen the games become an important site of disability (re-)presentation. In this article, we focus on the construction of national, normative, disabled bodies in Paralympic representation drawn from an analysis of three integrated data sets from C4’s broadcasting of the Rio 2016 Paralympics: interviews with C4 production and editorial staff, quantitative content analysis, and qualitative moving image analysis. We highlight the strategic approach taken by C4 to focus on successful medal-winning athletes, the implications this has on the sports and disability classifications given media coverage, and the role of affective high-value production practices. We also reveal the commercial tensions and editorial decisions that broadcasters face with respect to which disabilities/bodies are made hypervisible—and thereby those which are marginalized—as national disability sport icons that inculcate preferred notions of disability and the (re-)imagined nation.