Israeli and American memory of Poland and Poles was shaped in different social and historical contexts, what is visible in the shape of memory and typical patterns of remembrance associated with Poles in the American and the Israeli Jewish communities. It can be observed by using the concept of travelling memory of “carriers of memory” and “mnemonic forms” of Astrid Erll. Memory of Poland traveled to the United States and to Israel with two types of memory carriers: Polish Jews both to the United States and Israel and Poles to the United States only. The identities of three memory communities formed themselves: firstly, Polish Jews in the United States, secondly, Poles in the United States and finally, Israeli Jews of Polish origins in Israel. Interaction or its lack between the Polish non-Jewish and Polish Jewish diaspora shaped the above mentioned memory communities’ identities, leading to creation of ‘mnemonic forms’: the Jewish Mother, the Jewish American Princess and the Brute Pole in the United States and Polaniya in Israel. The lack of certain mnemonic forms in Israeli collective memory might be connected with isolation of it from the Polish non-Jewish culture and different types of tensions in Israeli society. A lack of strong stereotypical figure of non-Jewish Pole in Israel created a void of memory about Poles of non-Jewish origins, that in the time of leisure tourism to Poland was filled with familiar mnemonic form of Polaniya, despite the original meaning of this figure, defined as a stereotype of Polish Jewish woman, and not a Polish woman of non-Jewish origins.

The aim of this article is to discuss the concept of Pathosformel in the context of music, and opera (musical drama) in particular. The starting point for the considerations is Gary Tomlinson’s claim that Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformel has been reserved exclusively for the visual arts, and that its span has been limited to the image in the narrow sense of the word. Tomlinsonpro poses to extend the meaning of “image” toward the imagination, so that the Pathosformel category is also applicable within the musical arts and sound-phantasmic activity of man. To this end, he refers to Giambattista Vico’s theory, and especially to the concept of sapienza poetica (poetic wisdom), in which imaginative metaphysics meets the emotional, pathetic song of archaic peoples. The article traces five “pictures of pathos,” which Tomlinson recognizes starting with Aby Warburg’s theory, through Vico’s historiosophy and Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism, and ending with Claudio Monteverdi’s operas. The last two pictures of pathos, emerging from Monteverdi’s various operas, mark the transition from an affect operating on the principle of sympathetic magic (presentation) to an affect encapsulated in symbolic form (representation). The article proposes a complementary, sixth “picture of pathos” that can be interpreted from Sergei Eisenstein’s works on film art. Significantly, Eisenstein was the creator of an alternative (and abundant in musical references) concept of the “pathos formula.”

The Beksan Wireng Bambangan Cakil in the Mangkunegaran style is performed by two dancers, each portraying characters with opposing traits and natures. These two characters symbolize the contrast between good and evil. The character Bambangan represents goodness or intellect, while Cakil represents evil or uncontrolled desires. The costume design plays a significant position in visualizing these two characters with their contrasting traits. This article aims to describe the costume designs of Bambangan and Cakil characters in Beksan Wireng Bambangan Cakil in the Mangkunegaran style. This is deemed important to reveal how Javanese people (particularly those from Mangkunegaran) visualize protagonist and antagonist characters as representations of good and evil based on their beliefs and ideas. This research employs an ethnochoreological approach with a qualitative research design. The data collection techniques used are participant observation supported by literature study and interviews. The results show that, as the protagonist, Bambangan is visually represented as a handsome knight with calm movements, while Cakil, as the antagonist, is visualized as an ugly and even frightening giant with dynamic movements. Through this visualization, it demonstrates one way in which Javanese people (especially those from Mangkunegaran) depict the contrast between good and evil. Visually, through the iconographic costume designs, the dance movements are reinforced to depict a person with a noble spirit in accordance with norms and ethics, and vice versa.

Functioning as a social mirror and critique, comics allow for discussions on contemporaryphenomena and social issues, including anti-queer violence. Focusing on the hypersexualization of transgender people and anti-transgender violence, this paper explores the complication of queer representation in one of the revisionary comic books of the 1980s, Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss (1988). The paper opens with a brief history of the representation of sexuality in American comics and the “anti-comicsist” efforts to eliminate comics for their explicit material. The second subsection demonstrates the duality of comics as both social critique and celebration of social issues. The next subsection provides a close analysis of anti-queer police violence, offering a comparative analysis of the fictional representation and reality of anti-sexual-minority violence. Finally, the subsection titled “Industrializing Hypersexualization” offers a discussion on the circulation of pornographic comics with hypersexualized portrayals of femininity as a reaffirmation of patriarchal norms. Such close reading of Chaykin’s pornographic vampire noir crime story will show that American comics of the late 1980s simultaneously reflect and reproduce social problems like antiqueer violence, specifically through visual tools such as perspective and onomatopoeia. Having gained a literary status and academic recognition, comic books provoke useful discussions on queer representation in cultural products.

In this article, the author focuses on Maria Turtschaninoff’s Arvejord, discussing Finnish bogs as commons and places of refuge for the subaltern. She considers both exhaustible commons – wetland forests that, in the novel, resist enclosures – and inexhaustible ones, centering on the networks of relationships formed within the “saga of the swamp people”. In doing so, the author shifts from the noun form of „commons” to the verb form of commoning, framing peatlands not merely as resources or locations, but primarily as spaces of cooperation. She is also interested in the novel’s resistance to narratives of Enlightenment progress and in moments when characters attempt to turn swamps and forests into profitable investments – an endeavor in which they ultimately fail.

This article analyzes a recently published memoir entitled Wczoraj byłaś zła na zielono (Yesterday You Were Angry in Green) by Eliza Kącka. The memoir tells the story of raising an autistic child by a nondisabled mother. The article employs disability studies tools to think of the book and examines why the author refrains from using a word “autism” while listing the symptoms and naming the therapies her daughter attends. It argues that the memoir constitutes a continuum of nondisabled mothers’ confessions about raising children with disabilities, and explores the ways in which Kącka grapples with the fundamental concepts of disability studies such as access and diagnosis. For example, it shows how Kącka reformulates the concept of access without identifying a barrier that prevents her from accessing her daughter’s world. In other words, the memoir discusses her longing for access to her daughter’s inner experiences, but does not identify what makes getting access impossible. As such, the memoir departs from more mainstream accounts of autism that depict it as a “thief” or “terrorist” who “steals” children. Moreover, the article considers the author’s approach toward diagnosis and juxtaposes it with autistic people’s experiences of getting autism diagnosis. As a result, the article shows that while mothers’ accounts of living and raising disabled children are crucial for understanding disability in Poland, they cannot be the only source of knowledge about disability.

Drawing upon the Frantz Kafka’s visions of spaces and character named Odradek, the article seeks the ambiguities of photographic staging in modernist “neoformations” by Mies van der Rohe, implied depth and its meanings to reconstruct the significant features of photo conceptualism underlying Jeff Wall’s “cinematographic” mise-en-scène strategy. Exploring the pictorial effect of theatricalization, and absorption of the visual narrative, oscillating between arranged modernist spaces the argument put forth the nuances of Jeff Wall’s staged photographs, the inscription of the “minor” representative of the working class within the “warped space” of the photography entitled Morning Cleaning (1999). The heterogeneous, fragmentary arrangement allows the viewer to capture a divided space seen in many parts and together as an example of illustrating and valuing socially “invisible” people split between two “mediamorphic” spaces.