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Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing ‘the serbs’ as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinović points to the Gothic associations of violence, blood, and soil in the writings of many intellectuals and politicians during the 1990s, especially in portrayals by the U.S.-led Western media of ‘the serbs’ as a vampire nation, a bloodsucking parasite on the edge of European civilization.

Interpreting oral and written narratives and visual culture, Longinović traces the early modern invention of ‘the serbs’ and the category’s twentieth-century transformations. He describes the influence of Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century novel Dracula on perceptions of the Balkan region and reflects on representations of hybrid identities and their violent destruction in the works of the region’s most prominent twentieth-century writers. Concluding on a hopeful note, Longinović considers efforts to imagine a new collective identity in non-nationalist terms. These endeavors include the emigrant Yugoslav writer David Albahari’s Canadian Trilogy and Cyber-Yugoslavia, a mock nation-state with “citizens” in more than thirty countries.

Around the year 1000 a Viking ship landed on the Atlantic coast of what would one day be North America. Nearly a millennium later, on June 7, 1945, Norway’s King Haakon VII returned from exile under guard of the American Ninety-ninth—or “Viking”—Battalion. In Vikings across the Atlantic, Daron W. Olson reveals how these two moments form narrative poles for the vision of a Greater Norway that expanded the boundaries of the Norwegian nation.

Looking at matters of religion, literature, media, and ethnicity, Olson explores how Norwegian Americans’ myths about themselves changed over time in relation to a broader Anglo-American culture, while at the same time influencing and being influenced by the burgeoning national culture of their homeland. Beginning in the 1920s, homeland Norwegian identity-makers framed the concept of the Greater Norway, which viewed the Norwegian nation as having two halves: Norwegians who resided in the homeland and those who had emigrated from Norway, especially those in America. Far from being merely symbolic, this idea, Olson shows, was actually tested by the ordeal of World War II, when Norwegians the world over demonstrated their willingness to sacrifice and even die for the Greater Norway.

In its transnational approach, Olson’s book brings a new perspective to immigrant studies and theories of nationalism; Vikings across the Atlantic depicts the nation as a larger community in which membership is constructed or imagined, a status of belonging defined not by physical proximity but through qualities such as culture and shared traditions.

In recent years, works by American Indian artists and filmmakers such as Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Edgar Heap of Birds, Sherman Alexie, Shelley Niro, and Chris Eyre have illustrated the importance of visual culture as a means to mediate identity in contemporary Native America. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Native film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art draws on American Indian Studies, American Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. Among the artists examined are Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Eric Gansworth, Melanie Printup Hope, Jolene Rickard, and George Longfish. Films analyzed include Imprint, It Starts with a Whisper, Mohawk Girls, Skins, The Business of Fancydancing, and a selection of Native Latin films.