EuropeNow – Page 123

The Power of Narrative: An Interview with Mikkel Rosengaard

Interviewed by Morten Høi Jensen

In democratic nations there is usually a multitude of narratives about people in power, but in these one-man dictatorships there’s just one, and its usually very warped and far-fetched. So I was very interested in the idea of Ceaușescu’s narrative in Romania, and of how one’s own narrative about one’s life clashes with that larger, overpowering official narrative. And then, of course, there’s the fact that, from a storytelling perspective, in a world in which these very rigid rules are imposed on you there’s much more at stake.

Fiction

Fox by Dubravka Ugrešić

Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and David Williams

Marlene was Polish (in age she could have been my daughter) and she occasionally cleaned my apartment for ten Euros an hour. Who knows how she’d found her way to Amsterdam and from where, but in the flood of words she showered on me in her poor, strongly Polish accented English, I remembered mention of a collective somewhere in Belgium with its leader whom she referred to, reverently, as “Baba.”

Academic

Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Reviewed by Cathrine Thorleifsson

Teitlebaum gathers striking empirical knowledge on the role of music and expressive culture in reconfiguring neo-nationalist thought and action.

Academic

The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema by Kate Ince

Reviewed by Michelle Royer

Since the 1980s, Western countries have seen an increasing number of films by female directors who challenge the mainstream representation of women, and attempt to present women’s lives and identities in a new light. Kate Ince’s volume offer new readings of several key French and British female filmmakers of the last twenty-five years, and shows that feminist philosophers can provide the tools for rethinking female subjectivities in cinema.

Irish Drug Policy: At the Crossroads of Inclusion and Acknowledgment

By Kieran Kelley

The specters of anti-social criminality and death by overdose, amplified by crisis-inflected media coverage, loom large in public discourse. In the face of the uncertainties and crises that proliferate around drugs, the language of social inclusion and human rights raises new perplexities.

Academic

Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany: A Comparative Study from 1800 to 1932 by Shane Nagle

Reviewed by Fearghal McGarry

The comparative approach has long been recognized as an effective means of analyzing nationalism, even if studies of nationalist movements remain mostly confined within nation-state frameworks. While the appeal of nationalist rhetoric is rooted in its claim to represent the unique values, aspirations, and destiny of a specific national community, comparative studies emphasize the political and cultural commonalities shared by various brands of nationalism.

Campus Dispatches

Our City, Our Streets!

By Esther Dischereit

Three months after the Nazi march and terror attack in Charlottesville, a film that seeks to unearth what exactly happened there on August 12, 2017 celebrated its premiere in the very same place.The film, directed by Brian Wimer and Jackson Landers, is called Charlottesville: Our Streets.

Nonfiction

Par Amouricana

By Joshua Kleinberg

It’s not the threat of violence. It’s the questions I’m expected to answer before the violence that bother me. All stemming from premises I don’t agree with, but what are you going to get into a debate with a man who just caught you making out with his “domestic partner?”

Poetry

Four Poems by Antonio Machado

Translated by Daniel Evans Pritchard

It was a time of infamy and lies. / The nation itself was dressed up / like a squalid clown to draw / attention away from our wound.