Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe

Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Cristina Şandru

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317285991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence.

This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re-writing of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; and concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonisation, dislocation, hegemonic discourse, minority, and subaltern cultures.

Taken together, this volume suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of postcommunist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of the Soviet brand of imperialist rule in the form of communism in East-Central Europe can function as an ideological moderator in Third-World oriented, Marxist-inspired, postcolonial discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Spectres haunting: Postcommunism and postcolonialism
• 2. Postsocialist ≠ postcolonial? On post-Soviet imaginary and global coloniality
• 3. Local and global frames in recent eastern European literatures: Postcommunism, postmodernism, and postcoloniality
• 4. Postcolonialism, postsocialism and the anthropology of east-central Europe
• 5. Belated alliances? Tracing the intersections between postcolonialism and postcommunism
• 6. Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating eastern European experiences for an African audience
• 7. Andrukhovych’s Secret: The return of colonial resignation
• 8. Counter-discourse and the postcolonial perspective: The Polish Complex by Tadeusz Konwicki
• 9. Meat
• Index