The Finnish national identity and the sacrificial male body: war, postmemory and resistance

Abstract

The article examines through the works of the Finnish artist Seppo Salminen how the nation takes a hold on the male body. It is demonstrated that art can offer a critical relationship to the constitutive elements of the nation. Art is read as a form of postmemory that deals with the nation and its trauma of war. The article forms a critique of the essentialist understandings of nationhood that seek to define and naturalize nations by means of the supposedly homogenous, holistic and historically continuous understandings of tradition, including the nation's history.