Description
Book SynopsisAn analysis of post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, and cultural self-colonization. The book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism, mapping the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art.
Trade Review“An important and timely volume on post-communist cultures that seeks to offer an insightful contribution to the field of postcolonial studies [...] The diverse disciplinary background of the authors ensures that this very rich cultural material is explored from different angles [...]" - Ágnes Györke, University of Debrecen, Hungary in Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research , Vol. 33 2017 pp.110-114
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik Introduction: Which Postcolonial Europe? Part I: Post-Communist, Post-Socialist, Post-Soviet, Post-Dependence: Preliminary Considerations on East-Central European Un-Homing Madina Tlostanova Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing Benedikts Kalnačs Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options: The Baltic Experience Cristina Sandru Joined at the Hip? About Post-Communism in a (Revised) Postcolonial Mode Emilia Kledzik Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication Part II: The Ghosts of the Past: Post-Communist Rewriting of National Histories Bogdan Ştefănescu Filling in the Historical Blanks: A Tropology of the Void in Postcommunist and Postcolonial Reconstructions of Identity Adriana Raducanu Confessions from the Dead: Reading Ismail Kadare’s Spiritus as a ‘Post-Communist Gothic’ Novel Dobrota Pucherová Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-)Communist Literature Natalie Paoli ‘Let My People Go’: Postcolonial Trauma in Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Edit Zsadányi Voicing the Subaltern by Narrating the Communist Past through the Focalization of a Child in Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’ and Endre Kukorelly’s ‘The Fairy Valley’ Part III: Place and Displacement in (Post-)Communist Narratives and Cityscapes Irene Sywenky Geopoetics of the Female Body in Postcolonial Ukrainian and Polish Fiction Tamás Scheibner Building Empire through Self-Colonization: Literary Canons and Budapest as Sovietized Metropolis Xénia Gaál The City of K. (Königsberg/Kaliningrad) as a Cultural Phenomenon: Cultural Memory, the Myth and Identity of the City Dorota Kołodziejczyk The Organic (Re)Turn ― Ecology of Place in Postcolonial and Central/Eastern European Novel of Post-Displacement Part IV: Imagining the Orient in Central European Communist Travel Writing Róbert Gáfrik Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing during the Communist Regime (1948–1989) Martin Slobodník Socialist Anti-Orientalism: Perceptions of China in Czechoslovak Travelogues from the 1950s Agnieszka Sadecka A Socialist Orientalism? Polish Travel Writing on India in the 1960s Part V: Between the East and the West: The Colonial Present Mykola Riabchuk Ukrainian Culture after Communism: Between Post-Colonial Liberation and Neo-Colonial Subjugation Dariusz Skórczewski Trapped by the Western Gaze: Contemporary European Imagology and Its Implications for East and South-East European Agency ― a Case Study Jagoda Wierzejska Central European Palimpsests: Postcolonial Discourse in Works by Andrzej Stasiuk and Yurii Andrukhovych Contributors
