Academic literature on the topic 'Patriotic poetry, American'

Romanticism is often misunderstood as something genuine love and merely about romance. In fact, romanticism is an understanding of great ideas that also be delivered great ideas. The development of Romanticism delivered a new orientation that called National Romanticism by maintaining the freedom of individual, sovereignty, and independent of human rights. This study took data from three Walt Whitman poems; Patriotic, War Democracy, and Poem of America. Researcher was using the concept of interpretation to explore the meaning of poetry and the influence of romanticism in Whitman poetry. Researchers use Isaiah's theory in his book “the root of romanticism” to explore the influence of the romanticism idea on Whitman's poems. From the three samples of poetry, it is found that romanticism is very influential in Whitman poetry, especially the idea of romantic nationalism. Patriotic themes, nationalities and egalitarian concepts are reflected in Whitman's collection of "Leaves of grass" poems. Patriotic themes and nationalities are seen from the struggle for the right of individual freedom in opposing slavery and aristocratic government. The egalitarian concept is seen from the struggle to promote equality, as well as the democracy system that promotes people's sovereignty. The role of the idea of romanticism has evolved in American territory because it shares the same pattern and state of affairs as revolutions against noble, social, and political norms and rationalization of nature. Thus, the representation of romantic ideas originating from Western Europe of the 18th century has penetrated into the 19th century America which is reflected in the works that carried Whitman.

El estudio es una exploración histórica sobre algunos aspectos del desarrollo de la poesía centroamericana a lo largo del siglo XIX, como parte de un proyecto más amplio para la recuperación documental y comentada, de una importante manifestación del género lírico, escasamente tratado por la crítica. Se describe la recopilación El Parnaso centroamericano (1882), del que se hacen observaciones sobre sus criterios de selección, la temática predominante, y las tendencias estético-discursivas de los poemas recogidos: poesía panegírica, poesía patriótica, poesía amorosa, metapoesía.The study is a historical exploration of certain aspects in the development of Central American poetry during the 19th century. It was carried out as part of a larger project for the recovery and analysis of documents corresponding to a significant manifestation in the genre of poetry which has been somewhat overlooked by literary critics. A description is provided of El Parnaso centroamericano (1882), with a commentary on selection criteria, the predominant issues, and the esthetic discourse tendencies of the poems collected: panegyric poetry, patriotic poetry, love poetry, and metapoetry.

Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. “The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, “but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the “local colorist” hunting for patriotic “HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the “false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that “McGrath is a poet of alienation…. His trajectory has been that of willful defiance … At every point when the applause – anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated – seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls “official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a “usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of “official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire.

This paper aims to critically analyseand discuss the use of poetry as war propaganda during World War I and World War IIconsideringthe distinct cases of Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”, Thomas Hardy’s “Men who March Away”, and Ezra Pound’s “Canto 46”, which was read by the author himself during one of his Radio Rome broadcasts in 1942. While Brooke, similarly to other young soldiers who saw in the war a chance of fulfilling their patriotic duty and achieving glory, wrote verses clearly marked by his personal idealism, ThomasHardy had manyof his war poems commissioned by the British government in the context of a national propaganda effort in which he might have agreed to participate moved by his initial optimism regarding the war. Decades later, Ezra Pound, a fierce supporter of the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, would dedicate a great part of his works The Cantos to the spreading of fascist, antisemitic, and pro-Axis ideas during World War II, the most notorious case within this effort being the readingof “Canto 46”, which contains explicit antisemitic and anti-American references, during a broadcast for Radio Rome. These propagandistic campaigns, first during World War I then later during World War II, would contribute to the spreading and reinforcing of nationalist tendencies on bothsides, with poetics (not for the first time in the history of Literature) turning into an ally of politics.

The article explores cultural and philosophical origins and attitudes of the early works of P. Tychyna, namely defining the ones events and phenomena of domestic and foreign ethnocultural and professional cultural life, cultural and philosophical ideas and teachings, as well as P. Tychyna's own cultural and philosophical views, revealed mainly in his poetry books of 1918 – 1924. One of the most important, but still little- known pages of the biography and ideological and artistic evolution of P. Tychyna is the formation during the first third of the twentieth century, fundamental for his entire life cultural and philosophical guidelines of early creativity. The study of this problem is closely connected with the long overdue need for unbiased systematic classification and consideration of the whole spectrum of cultural and philosophical sources and guidelines of ideological and artistic evolution of the poet of ideologically contradictory poems-myths of Ukrainian national renaissance and enslavement – "Golden Homin" as a sacred figure-symbol of modernism and, at the same time, social realism in Ukrainian literature, the most famous and, at the same time, the most criticized domestic artist-model of evaluative polarity of official and public myth-making in the USSR and, later, in Ukraine. In light of the assessment of the main achievements of tychynology, a cultural-philosophical-literary analysis of the three stages of the ideological and artistic evolution of P. Tychyna of this period was carried out. These stages are: 1. formation (Kyiv-Chernyhiv): 1906 – 1916; 2. creative rise and blossoming (Kyiv): 1917 – 1921; 3. decline and crisis (Kyiv-Kharkiv): 1922 – 1929. Two groups of origins of the poet's early works were examined. The first one is represented by domestic and foreign ethnocultures and consists of three subgroups of folklore: 1. Ukrainian; 2. foreign (of other Slavic peoples); 3. foreign, mainly of the peoples of the Near and Middle East (Armenian, Turkish and Indian). The second group is represented by domestic and foreign professional cultures, the last of which is divided into three subgroups: 1. Russian; 2. European and North American; 3. Eastern (the Near, Middle and Far East). P. Tychyna was a symbol and myth of modernism and Socialist realism in the literature and culture of the Ukrainian SSR, and the early stages of his cultural and philosophical credo's evolution from the neopagan-Christian Ukrainian national-patriotic myth to the national-communist pantheistic-materialistic cosmogony.

The article offers an interpretation of Joseph Brodsky’s poem, rarely used for analysis, “You will return to your homeland. Well...” (1961). If traditionally Brodsky’s elegy in the intertextual aspect is considered as a “dialogue-repulsion” (A. Nesterov) with A. Vertinsky’s romance “Without Women”, then the work reveals other pretexts that at first glance seem alien to Brodsky’s love lyrics — these are texts of patriotic themes by S. Yesenin and M. Tsvetaeva. It is shown that Brodsky’s motive of homecoming is emphatically focused on “The Homecoming” and “The Soviet Russia” by S. Yesenin, in 1924, upon his return from America, formulated a sincere poetic confession in the extreme loneliness he experienced in his homeland (“My poetry is no longer needed here, / And, perhaps, I myself am not needed here either ...”). The prevailing idea of the dissimilarity of the poetry of Brodsky and Yesenin is questioned. The reference text of M. Tsvetaeva is the poem “The Homesickness. A long time ago...” (1934), as shown in the article, which served as an obvious prototype for “You will return to your homeland. Well...” The compositional structure of Tsvetaeva’s pretext with the dominant strategy of “affirmation through negation” determined the poetic organization of Brodsky’s elegy. It is argued that over time, the dialogic interaction of texts was accompanied by emotional and semantic recoding, the non-textual meanings in Brodsky’s poems grew.

İbrahim Dellal (1932-2018) was a community activist and played a pioneering role in establishing religious and educational institutions after his arrival in Melbourne in early 1950. As the grandson of a late Ottoman mufti, being educated at the American Academy, a Baptist missionary school in Cyprus, clashed at times with his traditional upbringing based on Islam, service and Ottoman patriotism. İbrahim’s parents, especially his mother, raised their son to be Osmanli Efendisi, an Ottoman gentleman. He was raised to be loyal to his faith and dedicated to his community. I met him in the late 80s in Sydney and discovered he was an important community leader, a ‘living history’, perhaps the most important figure in the Australian Muslim community since the mid-20th century. He was also one of the founders of Carlton and Preston mosques, which were the first places of worship in Victoria. I wrote his biography and published it in 2010. However, later I found he had more stories related to Australian Muslim heritage. First, this article will analyse İbrahim’s untold stories from his unrevealed archives that I collected. Second, İbrahim’s traditional upbringing, which was a combination of Western education and Ottoman Efendisi, will be critically evaluated. He successfully amalgamated Eurocentric education and Islamic way of life. Finally, his poetry, which reflects his thoughts, will be discussed.

Abstract Although many scholars have discussed Phillis Wheatley’s subversive appropriation of the classics, they have been reluctant to locate a similar strain of subtle repudiation in her Revolutionary War poems. The present article reexamines these verses — ‘To His Excellency General Washington’ (1775), ‘On the Capture of General Lee’ (1776), and ‘On the Death of General Wooster’ (1778) — in light of the tradition of (neo)classical heroic poetry. I read them as a formally innovative epic, dispersed across three apparently ‘patriotic lyrics’ (Levernier (1993: 175)) and dubbed the ‘Little Columbiad’ for their personification of America. Wheatley signals that the triptych should be read as far more than a trio of occasional poems. She not only evokes elements of the epic tradition but also obfuscates the Lucanic heart of her piece within a Virgilian body. This deft juxtaposition of disparate epic registers and forms allows the poet to reprove revolutionary generals, comment upon the war, and decry a movement committed both to liberty and to slavery’s perpetuation. In playing the part of epic admonisher, Wheatley likewise spotlights the genre’s tendency to expose and dissect the flaws of leaders in even its most laudatory iterations. The ‘Little Columbiad’ therefore gives us an important opportunity to reevaluate its author’s pivotal position in the history of North American heroic poetry and epic reception, as well as to nuance regnant paradigms of the genre itself.

The role and representation of women has been one of the central issues in the societal, aesthetical, philosophical processes of the 20th and 21st centuries, so much so, that it became a turning point of sorts in the development of Western civilization and in shaping it to its current form. Even today, the topic of women remains a measure of the progress of a country, and is one of the main characteristics of social and cultural development. The voice of women, hardly heard in literature over the centuries, was even more silenced in colonized or foreign-dominated societies. The Soviet cultural policy significantly changed the direction of development of Georgian literature, and hindered modernist-avant-garde tendencies and attempts to express women’s genuine feelings and grievances in literature. The article studies the representation of women and gender roles in Georgian poetry of the Soviet thaw and onwards, as compared to the voice of women in the poetry of a number of prominent North American and Canadian poets. The article analyzes the works of Georgian poets who were selected mainly on the basis of the concepts of the national narrative and alternative narrative. In the late 20th century, the national narrative was the real driving force in the literature of Soviet-dominated Georgia, especially in poetry, as opposed to the official, imposed official Soviet narrative. The selected poets are studied in light of different concepts and hypotheses introduced by outstanding feminist scholars and writers. The results show that masculine discourse and double-voiced discourse can be observed in the poetry of Georgian male authors. The tendencies prevalent in the poetry of the Georgian men analyzed were influenced by the national motifs endorsed by both the Stalinist and post-Stalinist cultural policies from the Soviet center, and reinforced in Georgia after Sovietization. The patriotic and masculine tendencies of Georgian literature can be interpreted as an implicit reflection of the attempts of Georgian men to represent themselves as the owners of their land, and consequently their women, thus to oppose the reality of the Russian-Soviet colonization of Georgia. Écriture feminine and a protest against patriarchy is seen to prevail, alongside double-voiced discourse, in the works of female poets from the late 1950s onwards. The Georgian female poets have a lot in common with their North-American counterparts, but also differ from them by expressing their protest less overtly, a fact which changes over time. Écriture feminine in the poetry of the studied female poets, as well as the double-voiced discourse observed in the poetry of the representatives of both genders in Georgia, can be considered as part of the Alternative Narrative Culture. The developments of the 20th century still have an impact on Georgian literature, as well as other fields, in modern Georgia. The alternative narrative which prevails in Georgian literature of the 20th century is regaining momentum in the literature of independent Georgia, making it a full-fledged member of postmodern and post-colonial culture.

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

This chapter explores connections between scientific culture and the literary corpus associated with the independence from Spain of the provinces of Río de la Plata in the second decade of the nineteenth century. It seems no coincidence that Fr. Cayetano Rodríguez, Esteban de Luca, and Vicente López y Planes—the three authors of the lyrics competing to be chosen as a national anthem—had strong scientific interests. The analysis of the rhetorical role played by the scientific imaginary in the patriotic poetry of those authors points toward a double dimension of science in this kind of discourse. As a source of intellectual authority and reasonability, it reinforced the neoclassical formats cultivated by the patriotic authors and had a stabilizing effect; but science also opened up a dimension of revolutionary dynamism, a breaking away from tradition, and toward political emancipation.

Establishing a methodology for the book as a whole, this first chapter argues that the draft connected the abstractly political and concretely biopolitical via acts of public reading that occurred at the site of the draft lottery, when names were drawn that were then further disseminated in print. A popular literary trope, reading the names generated a citizenry that could be individuated (to the level of the subject) and function as a collective (generate populations), with the draft operating as an important hinge between these two scales of biopower. The draft lottery and its depictions in images and poetry, including Herman Melville’s, formed an assemblage that connected embodied with imagined communities and linked American lives to national ideology. Wartime print periodicals did not merely report on but actively participated in practices of public reading that drew on a range of gestures to facilitate military subject formations.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not the only writer to popularize a Black Samson figure. Moving away from treating Samson as an abolitionist hero, other writers continued to develop this uniquely American Samson figure within folklore, fiction, and poetry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Samson became immortalized in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Black Samson of Brandywine,” which transformed Samson into a symbol of African American achievement. In this chapter, we highlight the writers who offer new understandings of Samson as a loyal American patriot. Folklore about the Battle of Brandywine developed a less revolutionary and more conciliatory image of Black Samson than those modeled after the biblical story.