Poland on Stage
After two years of absence, Poland returned the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014 with a notable performance of the song “My Slowanie” by the musical duo Donatan and Cleo (Jiandani, 2014). In this blog post I will do an analysis on the performance of this song at the Eurovision 2014 finals in Copenhagen, Denmark. The performance that Donatan and Cleo put on at the 2014 Eurovision was full of representations of Pan-Slavism, nationalism, and Polish essentialism. In order to fully understand what that means and how that is, one first has to look at Poland’s own identity, as well as the identities of both Cleo and Donatan in this context. It’s no secret that the nation of Poland has gone through an alarming amount of hardship in its history, and that that hardship has shaped it into what it is today. Given its past, it is unsurprising to learn that Poland has a notable lack of diversity. The nation was one of the hardest hit by the Holocaust,...