Editor’s Note

Abstract

It’s rare right now to hear the terms “nationalism” and “free speech” outside the context of partisan politics. These have become loaded ideas, ones increasingly used as pretexts for silencing opposition or doubling down on ironclad beliefs. The most extreme interpretations not only set the tone of a country’s political climate, but also influence how society functions. In the United States, both politics and society are radically polarized, with each side seemingly unable to comprehend the other, much less engage in conversation. This unfortunate state of affairs was on my mind when I began thinking about the spring issue, and wondering what question I could ask that would provide an entry point into how a country understands itself, and which legacies its citizens value—or conspicuously don’t.Benedict Anderson famously defined nations as “imagined communities,” and part of the inspiration behind this issue was to explore the mythologies that bind a nation, the useful fictions people share. When commissioning, I asked writers to consider how societies around the world define themselves in terms of what citizens are—and aren’t—allowed to say and represent. It was revealing to see how this deliberately open-ended prompt was interpreted. Hiroaki Sako wrote about the novelist Yukio Mishima and the history of homosexuality in Japan, which has traditionally been accepted in practice, though not in law; Jennifer Wilson surveyed the unlikely bedfellows of the Polish far right. Many contributors reflected on national histories that had in some way been overlooked: Mariano Ben Plotkin examined the role of psychoanalysis in Argentina during and after its authoritarian regime, Kwame Dawes read Jamaica’s roots-reggae revival as a return to a tradition of musicians providing social commentary, and Dan Fox wrote about Britain’s New Age Traveler movement, a freewheeling 70s-era subculture whose impromptu festivals shaped the development of U.K. public-space laws.Other writers looked ahead to make sense of today. In her piece on the development of an Emirati space program, Rahel Aima read Dubai’s plan to send a mission to Mars as reflective of the United Arab Emirates’ fascination with the future—which conveniently distracts from thinking about the present. Sarah Leonard and Yasmin El-Rifae discussed the future of international feminism and what the #MeToo movement can learn from the activists involved in the Egyptian revolution. In our features section, Samira Shackle reported from Jordan on how female refugees are adjusting to life without male breadwinners, and how this might affect gender dynamics in the Middle East. Finally, Kirsten Han reported on how the Singaporean government has framed its efforts to supress free speech as a way to create a “business-friendly” environment.Among the most remarkable pieces in this issue is a conversation between the Iranian film scholar Jamsheed Akrami and the renowned filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who has continued to surreptitiously make movies in Iran despite being banned from doing so by an Islamic court. Over a series of three conversations, Akrami and Panahi discussed the landscape of censorship in Iran, Panahi’s own experiences with it, and the country’s underground film networks. Equally striking is an essay by the Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya about his homeland’s “tragic identity,” which has been defined by punitive U.S. foreign policy, a devastating civil war, and, most recently, the proliferation of gangs.Regular readers will note a number of changes in this issue. South African journalist Antjie Krog is the inaugural writer for our new column, “Last Word,” in which contributors take an expansive view to address social or political issues. And on the very last page, we debut the first of many original cocktails designed by our cocktail editor, Eben Klemm. The mix of the magazine may seem eclectic, but we hope that’s part of the appeal. There’s no one way to consider our title subject, but the range of cultural, historical, and political responses presented here offer many possible starting points. To quote George Eliot, “it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”