This chapter undertakes a study of politics of consumption which places the nation at the heart of the examination of consumer culture. From thinking of consumption as a personal act for the purpose of survival or satisfaction to thinking about consumption as a tool for political expression or for fighting against injustice, a convoluted version of the nation and national belonging can be found. In approaching the relationship between nationalism and consumption, there are four key areas of study: ethnocentric consumption, economic nationalism, consumer nationalism and commercial nationalism. There are some tensions in the unraveling of these manifestations of nationalism in consumer culture, concerning: a) power dynamics between the state and/or market actors on the one hand and citizens on the other, b) power asymmetries between campaigners of consumer activism for and against a cause, c) binary treatment of forms of consumer politics as either good or bad.

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

In this thesis, I demonstrate that the historical, and ideological, trajectories of HIV/AIDS discourses mirror the tensions between the local, global and transnational in my analysis of selected Anglophone Caribbean and South African literature and film. My methodology is adamantly a comparative studies approach as I overview the broader socio-historical narrative of HIV/AIDS whilst concurrently incorporating the idea of texts as always inflected by the wider historical and ideological processes behind transnationalism. I then link the competing histories of HIV/AIDS with textual depictions of HIV/AIDS, Indo-Caribbean histories, black Atlantic histories, and same-sex desire whilst foregrounding the socio-historical backdrop of transnationalism since the colonial period.

A central thread running throughout is that transnational dialectics signify both the effects of the past on the present and the importance of comparative analyses for transnational textual engagements. Texts under discussion are the feature film Dancehall Queen by Rick Elgood and Don Letts, the novel The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet, the documentary film The Darker Side of Black by Isaac Julien, the feature film Children of God by Kareem Mortimer, the novella Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe, and the feature film The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif.

Given the concurrent focus in postcolonial/queer around specific regional histories, I pinpoint that the dialectics between local, global and transnational discourses convey more nuanced, yet also more contradictory, textual engagement(s) with HIV/AIDS, transnationalism, sexuality, gender and ethnicity than some of the dominant narrative threads and debates surrounding postcolonial/queer. This point is particularly stressed in light of how many postcolonial/queer discussions readily fix the idea of the local as distinct from the global and the transnational. I thus re-read the contradictory registers of these discourses whilst foregrounding the relationship between these and HIV/AIDS discourses since the 1970s. I concurrently situate ny transnational comparative approach within the broader field of postcolonial/queer theory and approaches.