Encountering a divine dance of solidarity at the Zalongo Monument

In this article, a combination of travelogue, personal narrative, archival research and cultural analysis, I contemplate the Monument to the Heroines of Zalongo, a sculpture by George Zongolopoulos that stands in the western Greek region of Epirus. It commemorates the Dance of Zalongo, a mass suicide, or heroic sacrifice, of women and children in 1803. The legend of the dance and the monument inspired by it evoke contradictory perspectives on the national identity of Greece and of Greeks that stretch back to the founding of the modern nation: the externally directed view of the philhellenes, and the introverted perspective of the Romii. Seen as an international, philhellenic cause, a mass suicide, the Souliote women’s leap signified helpless women and children, and a nation, in need of rescuing. Seen as a national, Greek narrative, a patriotic sacrifice, the Souliote women’s leap showed female warriors filled with pride and self-determination. The Dance of Zalongo has had many lives: as a nineteenth-century media event that sparked an outpouring of literature and art, a twentieth-century lifeline to the old country for Greeks in the diaspora and a twenty-first-century cultural meme bolstering resistance to economic austerity. The Zalongo Monument, a site for pilgrimage where Greek cultural memory is infused in stone and resonant in the air, recreates the presence of the dance, letting us feel what it means to be free. Visiting the monument as a philhellenic foreigner, I ponder its power as a tribute to solidarity among those everywhere who are pushed to the precipice.

Suspending the “Time Domain” : Technological Tempor(e)alities of Media Infrastructures

Any media event is a time function of signals. In favor of a diagrammatic definition of technological media, media archaeological investigation is not only concerned with their structural “hardwired” level but with their operative unfolding-in-time as well. Such an understanding of techno-temporalities does not focus on phenomenal effects of media on humans but primarily refers to the microregimes within technological devices. In that sense, “hardwired temporality” refers to the infrastructuring of time by technologies and to temporal structures which are revealed from within techno-logical knowledge itself. From that arises an epistemology of technical processuality beyond the conventional notion of “time.”

Swedishness on Stage

Globalization, stagflation and economic uncertainty challenged the Swedish welfare model during the 1980s, driving renegotiations of state-market relations domestically as well as re-conceptualizations of Sweden’s place in the world internationally. This article addresses how a key media event – the 1638–1988 New Sweden 350th Anniversary of the New Sweden Colony in North America (New Sweden-88) – reflects these shifts. Drawing upon materials from the National Committee for New Sweden ’88 and various public-private Swedish-American foundations and initiatives as well as Swedish and US media reception, the paper argues that these renegotiations of Swedish self-identity in the late 1980s contributed in certain ways to prepare the intellectual ground for far-ranging reforms of the Swedish welfare model which followed during the globalized 1990s.

Resonant Moments in Media Events:

Live-tweeting has emerged as a popular hybrid media activity during broadcasted media events. Through second screens, users are able to engage with one another and react in real time to the broadcasted content. These reactions are dynamic: they ebb and flow throughout the media event as users respond to and converse about different memorable moments. Using the first 2016 U.S. presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a case, this paper employs a temporal method for identifying resonant moments on social media during televised events by combining time series analysis, qualitative (human-in-the-loop) evaluation, and a novel natural language processing tool to identify discursive shifts before and after resonant moments. This analysis finds key differences in social media discourse about the two candidates. Notably, Trump received substantially more coverage than Clinton throughout the debate. However, a more in-depth analysis of these candidates’ resonant moments reveals that discourse about Trump tended to be more critical compared to discourse associated with Clinton’s resonant moments.

The Politics of a Memory Wound: Norwegian Exceptionalism and the Trauma of July 22, 2011

Following the July 22, 2011, Oslo bombing and shootings at the Utøya youth camp Norway became embroiled in a conflict over commemorative ethics. The memorial initially selected in an international contest, Memory Wound by Jonas Dahlgren, drew opposition from victims’ families and local residents for its severe impact on the natural landscape. Plans for installation were cancelled in 2017. This controversy, we submit, must be contextualized in relation to the Norwegian justice system’s handling of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator whose criminal proceedings were kept relatively secluded. We demonstrate how the design of Memory Wound and the suppression of Breivik’s publicity reflect a symbolic logic traceable to a national imaginary of Norwegian exceptionalism. By interpretively aligning the use of negative space in Memory Wound with the muting of Breivik as a media event, we investigate the prescriptive force of symbols to inculcate world views. Specifically, we attend to the foreclosure of “prosthetic memory,” which through media circulation allows people to engage with memory that is not primarily theirs. We acknowledge the possibility of empathy across difference that Landsberg ascribes to prosthetic memory; however, we insist that the circumstances under which solidarity might be rejected must be considered. With a dual case study, we offer a perspective on enduring assumptions about cultural identity and the rise of rightwing extremism in Northern Europe.