The Eurovision Song Contest As Historical Fiction
‘I am the voice of the past that will always be’: the Eurovision Song Contest as historical fiction Catherine Baker, University of Hull Abstract: The Eurovision Song Contest has been called everything from ‘the Gay Olympics’ to ‘a monument to drivel’, but can it also be thought of as his- torical fiction – and what could that reveal about how narratives of national and European identity are retold internationally, or about how mechanisms of fictional narrative can structure popular cultural forms not necessarily consid- ered fiction? Beyond the intertextual influence of historical/pseudo-historical fiction on how designers have staged certain contemporary Eurovision perfor- mances to mediate distant national pasts to a transnational audience, some en- tries have been structured as historical fiction more systematically by consisting of first-person narratives where the performer embodies and voices a character representative of what is being constructed as a collective experience in the na- tional or European past. Often these concern historical memory of war and trauma, such as Eimear Quinn’s 1996 winning Irish entry (where a mystical spirit narrated Ireland’s ‘hunger and pain’), Lisa Angell’s 2015 French entry (the story of a survivor from a village destroyed by enemy soldiers) or 2016’s winning Ukrainian entry, Jamala’s ‘1944’. Yet beneath even this level, the con- test itself might be considered a historical fiction in terms of its founding myths of post-WW2 reconstruction, post-Cold-War unity and dehistoricised diversity – a recent past that Eurovision viewers are invited to wish Europe had really enjoyed. Keywords: Europe, Eurovision Song Contest, historical fiction, memory, narra- tive, national identity, popular music An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Historical Fictions Re- search Network conference at Manchester Central Library, 22–3 February 2019.
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