Description
Book Synopsis Arguably more than any other region, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Yet its inhabitants, from statesmen to literati and from cultural-economic elites to the poorest emigrants, have consistently forged or fathomed links to distant lands, populations, and intellectual traditions. Through a series of inventive cultural and historical explorations, Eastern Europe Unmapped dispenses with scholars’ long-time preoccupation with national and regional borders, instead raising provocative questions about the area’s non-contiguous—and frequently global or extraterritorial—entanglements.
Trade Review “This collection joins a growing dissatisfaction on how we see, interpret, and portray Eastern Europe…[It] is refreshingly rich in references to lesser known recent texts on Eastern Europe, many of which have been neglected in the Anglophone literature.” • Journal of Soviet & Post-Soviet Politics & Society
“Eastern Europe Unmapped lays the conceptual and empirical groundwork for a substantial new body of research. Building on a trend in the field of East European history away from the old East-West diffusion paradigm and toward transnational history, it offers an insightful critique of two dominant scholarly paradigms.” • Austrian History Yearbook
“The volume's big achievement is its ‘unmapped’ thesis…German and East European language/comp lit specialists and adventurous interdisciplinarians will find a lot that is useful in Eastern Europe Unmapped, a smart and eclectic analysis of human geographical landscapes.” • Sehepunkte
“This is an exciting collection that appears at a moment when scholars in eastern European studies are exploring new modes of connecting postsocialism and postcoloniality. It makes an original contribution to this emerging subdiscipline, and is highly likely to stimulate new scholarship.” • Catherine Baker, University of Hull
Table of Contents List of Maps and Figures
Introduction: A Discontiguous Eastern Europe
Yuliya Komska
PART I: RE-PLACED RELIGION
Chapter 1. The "Jewish Pope" in the 1940s: On Jewish Cultural and Ethnic Plasticity
Miriam Udel
Chapter 2. Unmapping Islam in Eastern Europe: Periodization and Muslim Subjectivities in the Balkans
Piro Rexhepi
PART II: DISLODGED DISSENT
Chapter 3. Located on the Archipelago: Toward a New Definition of Belarusian Intellectuals
Tatsiana Astrouskaya
Chapter 4. Re-reading Kultura from a Distance
Jessie Labov
PART III: FICTIONAL CARTOGRAPHIES AND TEMPORALITIES
Chapter 5. Troubles with History: The Anecdote, History, and the Petty Hero in Central Europe
Daniel Pratt
Chapter 6. The Transnational Matrix of Post-Communist Spaces
Ioana Luca
PART IV: APPROPRIATED AFTERLIVES
Chapter 7. Appropriations of the Past: The New Synagogue in Poznań and Olsztyn’s Bet Tahara
Sarah M. Schlachetzki
Chapter 8. Bruno Schulz’s Murals, Oyneg Shabes, and the Migration of Forms: Seventeen Fragments and an Archive
Adam Zachary Newton
PART V: ELECTIVE AFFINITIES
Chapter 9. The Balkan Notebooks
Ann Cvetkovich
Chapter 10. A Polish Childhood
Irene Kacandes
Afterword/Afterward: Eastern Europe, Unmapped and Reborn
Vitaly Chernetsky
Index
