My recent book Ominous Homelands in World Cinema: Moving Images of (In)Security and the Rise of Neo-Nationalisms (Routledge, 2026) interrogates the resurgence of the term “homeland” as a powerful—yet deeply unstable—imaginary in an era marked by neoliberalism, global securitization and proliferating neo-nationalisms. In this talk, I begin by outlining the conceptual and political urgencies that led me to write this book, tracing how the concept of “homeland” has been mobilized across media and political discourse to produce both affective attachment and exclusionary violence.

I will, then, turn to books and films produced in the United States to examine how the elegiac mode emerged from a form of private mourning into a pervasive public affect far from limited to the American context. From the aftermath of 9/11 to Trump’s presidency, the elegy has become a collective grammar through which loss, grievance, and nostalgia are popularly articulated but also politically instrumentalized. I suggest that we consider melancholia not merely as a psychological state but as a structuring condition of contemporary public culture, intimately tied to economic precarity, cultural displacements, and political crises that have reinforced the emergence populist discourses not only in the US but also in Europe and other parts of the world.

This presentation brings cinema, literature, theory, and politics into dialogue to examine the pressures of populist discourses, and help to forge new forms of collective belonging.


Bio note

Susana Araújo is Assistant Professor in the Anglo-American Studies Section of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra, and an integrated researcher at CEComp – Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon. She completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in 2004, was awarded an MA with Distinction by the University of Warwick in 1999, and holds a BA (Honours) (16 out of 20) from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, awarded in 1997.

In addition to doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, she has been awarded three highly competitive research contracts funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). In 2018, she obtained a CEEC contract as Principal Investigator for the period 2019–2026. Previously, she had been awarded an FCT Investigator contract, also as Principal Investigator (2014–2018), and a Ciência contract (2008–2013).

Susana Araújo was Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC, FLUL) from 2013 to 2016 and taught at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon from 2009 to 2018. She was Principal Investigator of the project CILM – City and (In)security in Literature and the Media (PTDC/CLE-LLI/110694/200), an R&D project funded by the FCT. Between 2009 and 2019, she also coordinated the CEC research group LOCUS, which comprised five research projects, before moving to the University of Coimbra.

She is currently a member of two CEComp research groups: Citizenship in the Arts and Media, and Spatial Humanities and Urban Studies.