Heroic Figures Research Articles

Performing Fugitivity: Henry Box Brown on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage

ABSTRACT Henry Box Brown was a fugitive US slave who, in 1849, mailed himself from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia in a large postal crate. Brown survived and went on to perform panoramas of his experience and stage shows involving magic, mesmerism (hypnosis), phrenology, and even dark séances in the US, the UK, and Canada. In 1857 in England, he also acted in semi-autobiographical plays written specifically for him by the minor British playwright E. G. Burton. The author of this essay has now recovered and transcribed these handwritten plays. By comparing these plays to other British drama in this period about slavery, the article argues that they are important in staging a black, heroic figure who survives enslavement and arrives to freedom. Secondly, and more theoretically, the article contends that Brown’s performances in these dramas enact a challenging mode of performative fugitivity – of ‘running up against’ slavery and social death – and depict the enslaved obtaining a resistant mode of visuality. Brown therefore can be viewed as a radical performance artist who manipulates his own objectification to create a powerful onstage persona that cannot be caught within a viewer’s ethnographic gaze and thereby creates a mode of performative freedom.

Mutations of Heroism: The Case of the Egyptian Superheroine

Abstract The history of heroism in Egyptian culture has mostly been perceived as a male attribute, centering on the figure of the male hero, and generally excluding figures of female heroines. In this article, I explore the representation of one type of female heroism, the rising phenomenon of the superheroine. In contrast to popular definitions of heroism connected to the superhero genre wherein heroism is perceived as an extra-terrestrial superpower, recent depictions of superheroines in Egyptian popular culture focus on representing the mundane aspect of the lives of these characters, leading to a reconceptualization of heroism. I examine three examples of superheroines by three women writers, Qahera by Deena Mohamed, Nano Volta by Hanan El-Karargy, and Lamis by Safia Baraka. I focus on the concept of ‘normalcy’ by way of reading the depiction of the three superheroine characters, arguing that the emphasis on the mundane reality of the three superheroine figures proposes an alternative reading of heroism that depends on women’s agency as it explores their potential for empowerment.

The Enabling Instrument: Milton Babbitt and the RCA Synthesizer

In this paper, I review some of the claims about electronic sound synthesis and human subjectivity that were made in the name of RCA’s first electroacoustic sound synthesiser, as it was understood by its various sponsors in the American military-industrial-academic-cultural complex. As described by Harry Olson, head of the corporation’s acoustics research division, RCA’s Mark I synthesiser was intended to be ‘a musical instrument with no limitations whatsoever.’ I argue that the promise of RCA’s limitless musical instrument began at the University of Iowa, with an embryonic effort to define and quantify musical talent. When it emerged fully-formed from RCA’s Princeton-based acoustics laboratory, the synthesiser represented Cold War cultural and economic supremacy by channelling wartime innovations in signal processing, information theory, and cybernetics into the service of a booming American entertainment industry. As centrepiece of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, the synthesiser was conscripted by the composer Milton Babbitt to realise an ongoing experiment in art and psychoacoustics, linking twelve-tone composition, information theory, positivist epistemology, and psychoacoustics. Babbitt’s ideas about composition as experimentation, I will suggest, supported a vision of human rather than mechanical potential—and of the autonomous artist as a Cold War liberal, a heroic figure more enduring than RCA’s celebrated machine.

Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

Ativação popular do espaço público na América Latina - pracialidade, monumento e patrimônio-territorial

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar, a partir dos espaços públicos de Camagüey (Cuba) e Goiânia (Brasil), a relação entre os sujeitos e os monumentos. Nesse sentido, a Praça Ignacio Agramonte, em Camagüey, é significativa nos aspectos culturais e arquitetônicos, bem como demanda as experiências cotidianas dos sujeitos com a figura heroica do monumento a Ignacio Agramonte. Da mesma forma, a formação da Praça do Bandeirante, em Goiânia, tem sua essência associada à esfera político-cultural que emerge do processo de construção da cidade e implica nas formas de socialização, logo, o monumento ao Bandeirante desperta o interesse em compreender os sentidos políticos e/ou lúdicos representados pela estátua. Metodologicamente, trata-se da ativação popular do espaço público à luz do patrimônio-territorial, reforçando essa busca pela compreensão de usos e funções nos/dos espaços públicos das cidades latino-americanas e as possibilidades nas relações destes com os monumentos.

‘And makes it indistinct / As water is in water’: The melting away of the heroic subject in Antony and Cleopatra and All for Love

Premising the structural importance of water imagery in William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Antony’s ‘liquefaction’ reflects the core of his interiority, which is identified with his love affair with Cleopatra. Their desire requires a third party, Rome, in relation to which a seemingly self-enclosing erotic universe is built, and against which Antony fights for ascendancy, as a ghostly heroic self. In John Dryden’s All for Love, the historical flux vanishes, Antony’s heroic past figures as a residue and history as an embarrassment to love. In contrast with Shakespeare’s heroes, the lovers’ domestication foregrounds the compatibility of love and eros within marriage.

Redemption as a Suppression of Tragic among Sophocles' Oedipus Plays

The main purpose of the article is to point how the final redemption of the protagonist of the Oedipus at Colonus leads to the impossibility of subsistence of any of the previous tragic paradigms by opposing the climax built initially through the Oedipus the King. According to the thesis to be defended here, having his life consummated by divine grace, the figure of the tragic hero, in this crucial moment, foreshadows an identification with that notion of hieros underlying the Christian metaphysics of caritas dissolving the hybris as an essentially tragic element.

Emile Durkheim Rides Again: The Death of the Western Hero and the Rise of the Moral Individualist

Emile Durkheim Rides Again: The Death of the Western Hero and the Rise of the Moral Individualist Scott Pearce Corrigendum: (updated 10.05.20) Page 79: The last paragraph of text has been updated to read: "At the beginning of the film, Munny is living a law-abiding life as a farmer while raising two children, but it is only an illusion of social integration. At the end of the film, after his rampage, Munny has demonstrated the magnitude of the threat he poses to society. When the epilogue then notes that Munny “prospered in dry goods," signaling his return to an illusion of integration (magnified, in fact, by prosperity), the film holds the myth of a nation’s moral identity in a final contempt." This article examines the function, transition, and ultimate removal of the hero from the Western film genre in the late 1960s. Most examinations of the genre, especially of its mid-twentieth-century heyday, have assumed that the Western requires a “hero.” Even “antihero” Westerns of the late 1960s depend on this assumption, for although the hero is often absent from antihero narratives, the hero and antihero exist on the same spectrum. The result has been a remarkably binary approach to the genre, with heroic figures played by the likes of Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Alan Ladd, and John Wayne used as lenses for understanding large-scale cultural movements.1 This article argues instead that revisionist Westerns, which arose as early as The Ox-Bow Incident (Wellman 1943) but flourished in the 1970s onwards, present neither hero nor antihero but, rather, the “moral individualist”—a complex and problematic figure best understood through the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim. Origins of the Western The Western film genre has its roots in “Manifest Destiny,” the nineteenth-century form of exceptionalism in America that conflated westward expansion with Christian hegemony. The concept sprang, in part, from European settlers, who themselves could trace exceptionalism not just to nation-state expansions and retreats over the previous thousand years but to religious crusades and to key theological constructs that required both [End Page 67] domination and sacrifice. But the United States adapted and consolidated that exceptionalism into a new sense of personal and political destiny. Spreading the American republic over the vast North American continent required a relatively modern vision of conquest, in which the land would be dominated not by hierarchy or caste but by the egalitarianism and individualism—even if these values required deception, dispossession, and extermination to effectuate. It was the creed of the exceptional individual, the hero, taken from classical myth but deployed not in service to any single collective but in service to the assorted masses of individuals. The killer was simultaneously the personal liberator. There were clear and deliberate attempts to establish the legitimacy of this national myth towards the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen McVeigh names the four-volume collection The Winning of the West (1889–1896) by Theodore Roosevelt, along with Roosevelt’s presidency itself (1901–1909), as vital to the promotion of the mythology of the West. For McVeigh, at the core of Roosevelt’s work are two directives: the “negation of the Native-American” and “the formation of the American character,” the latter defined by self-reliance, and “the priority of the individual” (21). Roosevelt’s position early on as both a former frontiersman in South Dakota and a former member of the lower house of the New York State Legislature bridged the gap between the east and the west, between the cultivated and the wild. Roosevelt embodied both forms of life in America, winning him broad acceptance among the populace. His presidency, along with his expeditions to Africa and South America, only fortified his position as an authoritative voice on how and why America had flourished. He offered in his own life an example of the exceptional American individual. Roosevelt, however, was supported by other like-minded people, most familiar of whom was Frederick Jackson Turner, whose essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” presented in 1893 at a meeting of the American Historical Association, formulated for academics a new direction and perspective on the foundations of...

"¿Qué decir de los dolores de entonces, veinte años después?": la correspondencia de Dominguito en la Guerra del Paraguay leída por Sarmiento en Vida de Dominguito

En Vida de Dominguito (1886), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento cuenta la biografía de su hijo adoptivo, Domingo Fidel Sarmiento, muerto veinte años antes en la Guerra del Paraguay. Con el objeto de reconstruir la vida y la muerte del joven, recurre a las voces de quienes lo conocieron así como a algunos textos escritos por el propio Dominguito. El resultado es una suerte de collage en el que las distintas versiones por momentos se contradicen. En este trabajo me propongo partir de allí para reflexionar en torno a las contradicciones que entraña la misma configuración de una figura heroica, es decir, la construcción de un relato de aquellos que dan su vida por la patria.

Six-Pointed Star Motif in Muslim Architecture of Bangladesh (Past Bengal) and Turkish Influence: An Historical Study

With the rise of Islamic states as the dominant powers of India and Indian Sub- Continent (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and South Asia Sultanate and Mughal period (1200-1800 A.D.), by Turkish heroic figure (horsemen), Indian art was subjected to Islamic influence, resulting in a hybrid aesthetics as well as Indo- Islamic art which flourished to varying extends across south and southeast Asia. Bangladesh is world third largest Muslim majority country and situated in South Asia. So the main and primary identity of the notion is mosque architecture and then languages via culture in Bangladesh (past Bengal). Moreover, Traditional history called Mughal and ottoman was the center of all traders and referred as the “Middle Man” due to access to water routes between Asia and Europe. The Ottoman and Mughal Empires were all founded with art and architecture by members of the same ethnically Turkic tribe and originated from Oghuz tribe. Firstly, in the early 14th century, Osman Bey established a small principality in the northeast corner of Anatolia. Despite these many similarities, there are some key difference within the approach to Islamic Art and Architecture from Miniatures Illustrations in Indian Sub-Continent to Mosque architecture in Turkey and the Levant the Mughal and Ottoman empires left their indications.Turkish Military Ikhtiyar Uddin bin Muhammad Bhaktiyer Khilji and his Turkish followers captured Bengal in 1204 A.D. and after then ruled by Turkic. Besides these many Sufis saint-like Khan Jahan Ulugh Khan, Burhan Khan, Gharib Shah, came here and spread Islam and Turkish culture with languages too. The Ilyas Shahi dynasty was the first independent Turkic Muslim ruling dynasty in late medieval Bengal, which ruled from the 14th century to the 15th century. It was founded in 1342 by Shamsuddin Iliyas Shah. As follows still presence many Turkish words which used in the Bengali language as Barood, Nishan, Chaku, Bahadur, Begum, Chadar, Surma, bavarchi, kiyma, Korma, and so on. And then showed their power through art and architecture as Mosques and Tombs follows Adina Masjid at Pandua in 1368 A.D.; Eklakhi mausoleum, Pandua; Tomb of Shah Rukn-e Alam in Multan, Sixty Domed Mosque at Bagherhat of Bangladesh, etc. Based on all evidence present, it can be found that the Turks contributed significantly to Bengali languages and culture as well as art and architecture (Mosques and Tombs). Besides many Jewish people came in here through missionary and business purposes. And also we see that there have been found many designs in mosque architecture especially six-point stars which is mentioned as a David symbol. So my focus is the Connectivity between Turkish and Bangladesh through Islamic architecture and Jewish with six point star/hexagon/seal of Solomon. It is a historical study with a journalistic approach.

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain. Edited by Enrique García Santo-Tomás. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii+278.

<i>Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain</i>. Edited by Enrique García Santo-Tomás. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii+278.

Donald Trump, the Reality Show: Populism as Performance and Spectacle

The rhetoric of U.S. President Trump is deeply ingrained into a populist discourse that caters to the emotional – rather than the rational – elements of human perception and interaction. Most notably, Trump’s populist rhetoric is marked by links to the genre of reality television. Rather than aspiring to educate viewers, reality television emphasizes personal conflict and dramatic tension. Trump’s performances (his rally speeches, but also his bestselling publications) are permeated by a reality-TV aesthetics, designed to effectively entertain audiences and create an impression of authenticity. Trump’s ›authentic populism,‹ however, is also deeply embedded into the conventional structures of nationalist thought, nativism, anti-elitism, and religious fundamentalism. An investigation of Trump’s populist rhetoric reveals four key components that are in tune with the key criteria that, according to Michael J. Lee, define the populist rhetoric: (1) a portrayal of ›ordinary people‹ as heroic figures; (2) a focus on presumptive enemies as threats to traditional values; (3) attacks against an ›establishment‹ threatening the people; and (4) an evocation of apocalyptic scenery. As a media persona, Trump combines these characteristics into a spectacle that resembles the type of entertainment program American viewers are familiar with from reality television.

The Evil Savage Other as Enemy in Modern U.S. Presidential Discourse

If identity is developed in relation to the Other, as researchers in the social sciences claim, then a nation’s sense of self must also be, to some degree, contingent on its understanding of what constitutes the Other. This constructive perspective is all the more useful if we consider nations to be “imagined communities” (Anderson). In this respect, the American identity is probably the best example of a “self” understood through “otherness.” Research in various disciplines has shown that Americans have long defined themselves through a binary narrative of “us” versus “them” (Butler; Coe-Neuman; Campbell; Edwards; Schlesinger). Whether it takes the form of the American Indians of the Frontier, the British during the American Revolution, the immigrants in the early 20th century, the Nazis, the Communists, and more recently the terrorists, this Other has three constant characteristics: it is always deemed a threat, somewhat uncivilized and evil, and serves to define national identity by demarcating an “inside” from an “outside,” a “self” from an “other,” a “domestic” from a “foreign”, “civilization” from “savagery” and “good” from “evil” (Butler; Campbell; Ivie; Slotkin). As the embodiment of the nation, the president is central to this construction of the U.S. national identity and he takes on the role of storyteller-in-chief. As Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, he also has the responsibility to protect the nation and define which threats may attack it. Scholars in communication have shown that the principal image of the enemy in presidential discourse is the “Savage Other” (Ivie; Coe; Neuman). This enemy can be categorized as either “primitive” or “modern.” The former is portrayed as a decentralized enemy living in a primitive society of instability and chaos, devoid of civilization, whereas the latter is considered a centralized evil agent that has “some semblance of civilization” but is nonetheless savage because their aim is to destroy America’s civilized order (Butler). We will begin by showing how one of the distinctive features of America’s enemies has been their evil nature, a charge which reflects the fusion of religious and secular elements that typifies U.S. presidential rhetoric. Then, after looking over the history and definition of the “savage other”, we will discuss how the period since the end of the Cold War, now lacking in “identifiable monolithic enemies” (Edwards), is characterized by a resurgence of the figure of the “primitive savage” presented through a series of animal and sexual images and scenery that turn the evil Other into a predator, not unlike the Indian of the Frontier, while making America the heroic figure of the story. Then, we will show how America’s enemy is also strategically framed as a “modern savage” in the months and weeks leading up to major conflicts, such as the Iraq war. Only an enemy capable of destroying America’s order can constitute a powerful enough threat justifying a full-blown war. Finally, we will try to assess Donald Trump’s disruptive use of the enemy image which, contrary to all his recent predecessors, he applies to entities located both inside and outside the national space, such as immigrants or news media deemed “the enemy of the people.” We will conclude by hypothesizing that President Trump’s highly gendered and racialized enemy rhetoric is emblematic of a nationalist discourse of exclusion and purification of the social body motivated by a fear of fluidity of various identities in an increasingly multicultural society, hence the importance of claiming clear demarcation.

The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre

The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre

The Road to Ukraine by Dr. Euhen Hlywa

On October 27, 2019, Australia returned to Ukraine the body of one of the most prominent hypnotherapists in the English-speaking world, Dr. Euhen Hlywa, who pledged to return to the eternal embrace of his mother Mariya and dad Leonid Hlywa in his native village of Nosiv, Pidhaytsi district, Ternopil region. For 75 years of his life, he did not see Ukraine, his father’s house, from which a 16-year-old boy went to the OUN to defend Ukraine against German and Moscow occupiers. Villagers met on Sunday, October 27, ambassadors of faraway Australia, Ukrainian and foreign scientists, OUN-UPA veterans and modern-day defenders of Ukraine on the Eastern Front, who, like Dr. E. Hlywa, continue to defend the Ukrainian land from voracious Moscow. From Ternopil, where the urn with the ashes of Dr. E. Hlywa was accepted for honorary preservation by the Department of Psychology and Social Work of the National Economic University, she was brought to Nosova by the editor-in-chief of the All-Ukrainian magazine “Psychology and Society”, the head of the department of psychology and social work, professor, doctor of psychology Anatoliy Furman and Chairman of the Ukrainian Society of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy, Professor, Doctor of Psychological Sciences Sergii Boltivets. Farewell words were heard from the lips of Sergii Ivanovich Boltivets, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, Professor, Head of the Youth Policy Development Department of the State Institute of Family and Youth Policy of Ukraine, Chairman of the Ukrainian Society of Hypnosis and Psychotherapy, who was personally acquainted with the deceased. Nosiv Mayor Ivan Panashiy expressed gratitude and respect to Euhen Leonidovich’s best friends, trustees and stewards of the deceased, Mrs. Svitlana Yakovenko and Mr. Mark Shumskyi for their self-sacrifice, responsibility and responsibility for their work. so that every letter of the deceased’s will was fulfilled in full, as Dr. Euhen Hlywa wanted, and above all, regarding his return to Ukraine in the embrace of his mother Mariya and Dad Leonid. Pidhaytsi District Council Chairman Iryna Baran expressed her respect for the personality of Euhen Hlywa, whose name extols the glory of our region in the world. Editor-in-Chief of the All-Ukrainian Journal of Psychology and Society, Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work of the Ternopil National Economic University, Professor, Doctor of Psychological Sciences Anatoliy Furman presented the future museum of Dr. Euhen Hlywa in the village of Nosiv with a set of journals. Mushrooms and which he blessed in the world as part of the editorial board of the main Ukrainian scientific psychological journal. The head of the Future of Orphans charity, Andriy Nazarenko, said he was grateful to the deceased, because he gave the same amount of money to our village to the orphans, the most vulnerable people in society. Hanna Komarnytska-Hlywa, a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature at the Secondary School of Secondary Education Anna noted that Euhen Hlywa is an outstanding person, a legendary, heroic figure in the national competitions of the Ukrainian people, an outstanding scientist, foreign academy, foreign academy of Ukraine the great ascetic of psychological science. Dmytro Levkovych, the deputy head of the Monastyrysk RDA, as a former resident of the village of Nosov, said that Euhen Hlywa is a pride not only of Pidhaytsi but of the whole region. I thanked for the help of the village and the people who managed to use it for the benefit of all. M. Chudakevich noted that today our fellow villager, with a fond memory Euhen Hlywa , is returning to the bosom of his native land. It turns out that now it is forever to relate to it. He goes back to his family of dads and moms who have been waiting for him for a long time, because, having removed his bloodstream from his home back in 1940, he was never seen again. The funeral of Euhen Hlywa was carried out by Father Vasyl and Father Volodymyr, and the famous documentary filmmaker Ivan Yasniy took the film. The monument commemorating the outstanding hypnotherapist scientist Dr. Euhen Hlywa and the exposition of the future Museum-Institute of Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy in his native village Nosiv were opened.

중국 시에 반영된 말소리 도상성 고찰 - 당대 도망시와 변새시를 중심으로

No argument can be made against the arbitrary relationship between the sounds of a word and the meaning behind that word. The onomatopoeia may be regarded as the only exception to this universal property. However, recent studies in a laboratory setting have found that speakers of different languages appear to be consistent in associating certain sounds to a group of particular meanings. This sound effects on word meaning can be called sound iconicity. In order to understand sound iconicity in Chinese, the present study examined the reconstructed sounds of the Tang poems. In particular, two genres of the Tang poems, namely, daowangshi and biansaishi, were examined. These two genres were chosen since they represent opposing poetic characteristics; daowangshi expresses the deepest sorrow of a poet mourning for the death of a loved one, while biansaishi often depicts a courageous and heroic figure at war sites. Results of this study find: (1) the relationship between sound and meaning may not be a direct connection between a single sound feature and a certain meaning. Rather a group of features may be responsible for certain meanings or feelings. (2) Openness of vowels may play a role in expressing different poetic modalities, e.g., sadness vs. courageousness. (3) Despite much discussion on the tonal difference among different genres of traditional Chinese poems, tonal effects may not be immediately observable. Further statistical research is warranted to attest the relation between tone and rhyme schemes and poetic themes.

Terminological Entrepreneurs and Discursive Shifts in International Relations: How a Discipline Invented the “International Regime”

AbstractThe disciplinary history of international relations (IR) is usually told as a succession of theories or “isms” that are connected to academic schools. Echoing the increasing criticism of this narrative, we present in this article a new perspective on the discipline. We introduce concepts from linguistics and its method of digital discourse analysis (DDA) to explore discursive shifts and terminological entrepreneurship in IR. DDA directs attention away from schools of thought and “heroic figures” who allegedly invented new theories. As we show exemplarily with the rise of “regime theory,” there were entire generations of IR scholars who (more or less consciously) developed new vocabularies to frame and address their common concerns. The terminological history of “international regime” starts in nineteenth century international law, in which French authors already used “régime” to describe transnational forms of governance that were more than a treaty but less than an international organization. Only in the 1980s, however, was an explicit definition of “international regime” forged in American IR, which combined textual elements already in use. We submit that such observations can change the way in which we understand, narrate, and teach the discipline of IR. DDA decenters IR theory from its traditional focus on schools and individuals and suggests unlearning established taxonomies of “isms.” The introduction of corpus linguistic methods to the study of academic IR can thus provide new epistemological directions for the field.

Sœurs et frères, la belle fraternelle

En repartant du lien fraternel, en double peut-être, qui a uni Sigmund Freud et Otto Rank, ainsi que des fragments de notre clinique avec Ellen, notre article interroge d’une part, les spécificités des légendes gémellaires et fraternelles aux frontières des désirs meurtriers et incestueux, d’autre part, l’influence de ces désirs dans la construction du lien amoureux. Trois thèses essentielles sont ainsi abordées : premièrement, le frère cadet procède de la haine et de la jalousie en organisant la rivalité ; deuxièmement, le frère cadet est une figure héroïque devenant un double haï et envié ; troisièmement, le frère cadet édifie le mythe du préféré, en s’inscrivant aux origines de trois luttes menées par les hommes pour la « mère », la « sœur » et l’« épouse ». C’est donc au travers d’un quatuor d’imagos comptant la sœur et le frère cadets, le double et le héros, que se construit préférentiellement le lien amoureux.

Popular Culture, Moral Narratives and Organizational Portrayals: A Multimodal Reflexive Analysis of a Reality Television Show

This paper contributes to the Business Ethics literature by unpacking the multimodal construction of moral narratives in popular culture and its portrayals of organizations and organizational roles. Understanding such portrayals and their construction is crucial to Business Ethics scholarship because they shape organizational imaginaries, influencing understandings and expectations of the ethical/moral responsibilities of organizations and the actors within them. In particular, we study the construction of moral narratives within a reality TV show that focuses on immigration and border control at an airport. We find that the immigration officers are depicted as rational and heroic figures whilst the travellers are presented as emotional and potentially dangerous characters. Our analysis highlights how this is achieved via five multimodal editing dimensions—the structure of interactional scenes, the ability to address the camera, the narrator’s comments, the visual and music effects—that are key in constructing clearly defined personae. We show how, through the intersubjective construction of clear-cut characters, the show downplays the moral complexity of its content. Portraying immigration officers as heroic, while presenting travellers as potentially dangerous, allows for a silencing of any ethical questioning of immigration officers’ organizational practices.