274 research outputs found
Remembering Transition in Contemporary South African and Russian Literatures:Between Melancholia and Repair
Full text linkThis chapter outlines and conceptualizes intersections between the structures of post-transitional time and its transformations between the 1990s and the present in South Africa and Russia. It suggests that a transregional consideration of the ways in which the 1980-1990s transitions are recalled in contemporary cultures reveals the emergence of other times that interrupt the disenchanted present and differ from memories of colonial/imperial oppression or nostalgic longing. These temporalities elucidate the longue durée of current crises and invoke past hopes for emancipation while refusing teleological temporalities. By turning to works of Russophone and South African literature of the 2010s I explore the mnemonic modes through which they engage with the ‘structures of feeling’ that reflect the conditions of the post-Cold war neoliberal present, after socialist and after anticolonial visions of history as emancipatory processes mobilized in struggles for social equality. My reading juxtaposes four novels - first, Alexei Ivanov’s Nenastye (Nasty Weather) and Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things, and second, Nadia Davids’ An Imperfect Blessing and Daria Dimke’s Zimniaia i letniaia forma nadezhdy (Winter and Summer Forms of Hope) - and outlines two modes of memory that each pair exemplifies: melancholia and repair. Despite the difference of temporalities and affect, these texts share a structure of ambiguity in their remembering transitions as times of crisis, loss, or even trauma, but simultaneously of hope, of aspiration, and the shock of new possibilities. Thus, the chapter begins theorizing memories of transition as a possible nexus between postsocialist and postcolonial perspectives on transformation
Exhibitions : Looking back at the exhibitions Russia. Timeless (2019) and Poetry & Performance: The East European Perspective (2017–2021) / Interview with curator Tomáš Glanc
Full text linkMinor archives, meta histories. GLASS Faculty Roundtable
Full text linkA round table on minor histories, or minority histories, or "subaltern pasts", with Dipesh Chakrabarty (History, Chicago), Nira Wickramasinghe (LIAS - Modern South Asia, Leiden), Ksenia Robbe (LUCAS - Literary Studies, Leiden), Wayne Modest (Research Centre for Material Culture), moderated by Ethan Mark (LIAS - Japan Studies, Leiden
We Were Hungry, but We Were Also Free: Narratives of Russia’s First Post-Soviet Decade on Instagram
Full text linkThe first post-Soviet decade occupies an important place in the Russian collective memory. Associated with the transition to democracy, but also economic hardships and violence, it constitutes a complex amalgamation of traumatic and nostalgic recollections. The ambiguous role of the 1990s memories is further complicated by their intense instrumentalization by the Kremlin for consolidating the public support as well as their counter-instrumentalization by the civil society for criticizing the revival of authoritarian tendencies in Russia. Under these circumstances, it is important to understand how the remediation of narratives about the first post-Soviet decade is influenced by social media platforms capable of both countering and reinforcing hegemonic discourses about the past.
With this aim, the chapter examines how trauma and nostalgia associated with the 1990s are remediated via Instagram. Using a sample of Instagram data, it examines whether memory remediation on the platform reflects the above-mentioned intense politicization of nostalgia and trauma associated with this period and how this remediation is affected by the consumption-oriented nature of Instagram. The chapter’s findings demonstrate that Instagram is primarily used for showcasing cultural products associated with the 1990s and expressing a yearning towards childhood and teenage years that coincided with the post-Soviet transition. Despite the absence of explicit political statements, however, nostalgic content on Instagram can still be seen as a form of challenging the hegemonic narrative of the 1990s as a time of misery and hardships
Introduction
Full text linkThis collectively written essay in four parts makes an original contribution to crisis research by exploring how crisis narratives structure time and space, that is, the ways ‘crisis’ as a framework, concept, rhetoric, affective, and discursive structure forms or taps into specific chronotopes. In our hyper-interconnected times, the simultaneous experience of many transversal crises—past and present, global and local, chronic and short-lived—is particularly acute. This simultaneity and transversality of crises invite rigorous theorization, critical responses, and finding new languages to speak to this complexity. Through Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, we broach questions of crisis, time, and space, as experienced, imagined, and represented across various contexts, including Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Chronotopes of crisis partake in complex constellations of meanings, discourses, and affective structures that call for interdisciplinary engagement. This book combines several disciplinary perspectives to consider how contemporary crises—economic, environmental, social, political, humanitarian—trigger memories of earlier narratives, traumas, or practices of resistance, and how they foster or foreclose visions of the future. Reading crisis through the chronotope, we also revisit the relation of crisis with critique, aiming to address problematic mobilizations of crisis today and discern future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis
Epilogue:The Ends of Crisis
Full text linkCrisis has no end. Or at least, it might seem like it, with the term ‘crisis’ qualifying all spheres of life: from climate, politics, and health to economy and education. It might be tempting to declare that ‘all is in crisis.’ While capturing the sense of urgency and the necessity of attending to the overlapping crises, the very notion of crisis can also foreclose critical analysis and action. This book’s unique contribution to understanding how ‘crisis’ operates as “a blind spot for the production of knowledge” is in outlining some concrete chronotopes of contemporary crises and reflecting on the logic of their production. We approach these chronotopes as grammars, genres, modes of experience, and forms of critique, and inquire into the possibilities they create or close off.If crisis today often works to minimize choices and dissent and narrow the space of the future, producing a present without alternatives, this book traces crisis in time-space configurations that, to speak with Hamlet, are “out of joint” with the present: in this porous out-of-jointness, that is, the untimeliness of crisis, alternative chronotopes, present, past, and future, become manifest
Introduction
Full text linkAfter discussing a number of classifications of and approaches to the phenomenon of nostalgia, the editors stake out their own position by providing a functional definition of the term and outlining the overall methodology of the volume. Nostalgia is defined as a discursive practice stemming from a (shared) feeling of loss and potentially serving any political agenda. The individual chapters focus on the working of nostalgia, its interaction with other forms of remembering and its (political) instrumentalization. The editors then introduce a further distinction that is vital to the entire volume: they differentiate between nostalgic sensibilities (feelings of longing) and nostalgic technologies (discursive techniques of nostalgia shaping a sense of connectedness to a past). Grouped in three different sections, the chapters in the volume are briefly discussed, as well as the tripartite structure itself. The section on “Affect” explores attitudes and emotional responses to “nostalgic triggers,” especially among marginalized groups; the section on “Appropriation” looks at instances of nostalgia where feelings of loss are co-opted by the state, or by actors sharing in its restorative rhetoric; finally, the section on “Contestation” investigates dissenting manifestations of nostalgia that challenge or subvert nostalgic discourses linked to state ideologies
Conflictive Cultural Narratives in the Collective Memory of the Spanish Transition:The Case of Trampa para Pájaros by José Luis Alonso de Santos
Full text linkIn this study, we explore three related research questions: a) how is thecultural narrative of the collective memory in the Spanish transition configuredfrom a twofold perspective based on the theoretical notions of‘multidirectionalmemory’(Rothberg 2009, 2019) and‘agonistic memory’(Bull and Hansen 2016) inTrampa para Pájaros’s text; b) how the study of metaphoricity inTrampa paraPájaroscontributes to understanding the conflictive complexity in the regimes ofmetaphor that have articulated the dominant conceptual architecture of the Span-ish transition’s memory; c) in which waysTrampa para Pájarosfacilitates a re-thinking of mediations of the Spanish transition in the public discourse and howsuch insight can be transposed to other similar cases. Today, this play reads as atragedy in which the humanity of all characters and situations brings to the forethe extraordinary density of angles and perspectives that were canceled by thedominant cultural narratives of the‘two Spains’and the oblivion. In this regard,it is possible to argue thatTrampa para pájaroswas foregrounding the principlesof multidirectional memory and agonistic memoryavant la lettreand was genu-inely innovating in the field of not only the Spanish transition memory but alsoin the possibilities of re-engineering the democratic process in Spain and in itsrelation to the wave of the democratization that internationally took place in the 1990s
Remembering Transitions:Local Revisions and Global Crossings in Culture and Media
No full textThis volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies
- …
