The People, the Homeland, the Great Patriotic War - the Political Seen from the Perspective of Theatre Studies

Sa？etak Pre-theoretical, common sense understanding of basic political concepts, such as ？people？, or ？homeland？, tends to be objectivistic. More precisely, these and other policital terms are being conceived of as physical objects, with stable and permanent characteristics, whose analysis mainly remain on purely descriptive level. Argentinian political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, in his books Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory and On Populist Reason reverses such an approach and perceives political subjectivity as a discursive construct, i.e. an a posteirori of a prior theoretical articulation. Along those lines, strenghtened with Spehnjak’s and Najbar Agi？i？’s historiographic insights on the nature of cultural politics in the early socialist period of Republic of Croatia, I’ll propose a political reading of Kazali？ni list (Theatre Newspaper) – an official publication of Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, published from 1945-48, and demonstrate the emancipatory aspects of its populist foundation