Collection: Escaping Transition. Narratives of Post-Communism in Bulgaria and Romania
Edited by Lilya Kaganovsky and Miglena Ivanova
Abstract Deadline: 15 September 2008
The recent Romanian film, "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" (dir. Mungiu, 2007), shows us a day in the life of two women, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), as they prepare for and handle the consequences of an illegal abortion, during the last years of the Ceausescu regime. Set in 1987 the film, as Iona Uricaru has pointed out, is part of "a new historiographic tendency in post-socialist Romania that seeks to testify about the past without vehemence or nostalgia."
We seek essays of 6,000 to 8,000 words for a collection that explores the post-1989 cultural landscapes in Bulgaria and Romania as reflected in literature and film, music and popular culture, the fine and performing arts. We welcome submissions that focus on post-1989 reevaluations of Bulgaria and Romania's literary and cultural canons and interrogate their importance for community building after communism and in the context of the European integration. We are interested in the following themes: 1989, post-communism; post-colonialism; the Cold War; transition; translation; the EU; bi-lingual/ multi-lingual writing; history; memory; new media; new Europe; minor literatures; ethnic, national, and gendered selves; violence; fragmentation; the past; the future; the local; the global.
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
* "New Media": What are the new forms for engaging with the present, evaluating the past, and responding to the post-1989 return of collective, public, or personal memory?
* "New Europe": How are cultural loyalties (re)shaped in grasping and resisting, articulating and visualizing individual and cultural experiences of becoming "European"?
* "Minor Culture in a Globalizing World": What implications does "minor culture" carry for the new internationalist processes and transnational migrant experiences characterizing Romanian and Bulgarian cultural production?
* "1989": What anxieties have shaped the post-Communist and post-Cold-War transitions in the private and public arenas? What role does 1989 continue to play in the cultural imaginary?
* "The Past is the Future": What are the implications of maintaining and even highlighting cultural differences as a counterbalance to boundary-blurring practices of EU integration? To what extent are the symbolic reassertions of boundaries necessary through cultural practices and revitalization of religious traditions?
* "Who Are We?": How do the interactions between the local, regional, and Europeanizing identity-shaping frames of exclusion and inclusion, difference and similarity complicate, challenge, and reconfigure cultural representations of gender, economic, ethnic, national, regional, rural and urban identities?
We thank you for your attention to this project and would be grateful should you forward the call for papers to any parties who might be interested. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.
Abstracts (500 words) and vita to Lilya Kaganovsky at lilya@illinois. edu and Maggie Ivanova at mivanova@coastal. edu by 15 September 2008; completed essays to be included in the volume by 1 December 2008.
Catherine Baker
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
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