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The result of a project initiated and coordinated by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, research for this volume was conducted by a group of twenty anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and literary critics from Romania, United States, and Great Britain. Employing interdisciplinary methods and using a wealth of previously unexplored archival and oral sources, the authors managed to produce the most solid monograph to date on the process of collectivization in Romania. Book jacket.
The COURAGE Handbook ushers its reader into the world of the compellingly rich heritage of cultural opposition in Eastern Europe. It is intended primarily to further a subtle understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of cultural opposition and its legacy from the perspective of the various collections held in public institutions or by private individuals across the region. Through its focus on material heritage, the handbook provides new perspectives on the history of dissent and cultural non-conformism in the former socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The volume is comprised of contributions by over 60 authors from a range of different academic and n...
What is Eastern Europe and why is it so culturally and politically separate from the rest of Europe? In Long Awaited West, Stefano Bottoni considers what binds these countries together in an increasingly globalized world. Focusing on economic and social policies, Bottoni explores how Eastern Europe developed and, more importantly, why it remains so distant from the rest of the continent. He argues that this distance arises in part from psychological divides which have only deepened since the global economic crisis of 2008, and provides new insight into Eastern Europe's significance as it finds itself located - both politically and geographically - between a distracted European Union and Russia's increased aggressions.
"This book is a history of East Central Europe since the late eighteenth century, the region of Europe between German central Europe and Russia in the East. Connelly argues the region, for which it is frequently hard to define exact boundaries and which is sometimes treated country-by-country in a way seemingly separate from the broader trends of European history, was one of shared experience despite most of the peoples being divided by linguistic, geographic, and political barriers. Beginning in the 1780s, an unwitting Habsburg monarch -- Joseph II -- decreed that his subjects would use only German, as he hoped to mold a common nationality using German over the disparate subjects. Instead, ...
Focusing on youth, family, work, and consumption, Ambiguous Transitions analyzes the interplay between gender and citizenship postwar Romania. By juxtaposing official sources with oral histories and socialist policies with everyday practices, Jill Massino illuminates the gendered dimensions of socialist modernization and its complex effects on women’s roles, relationships, and identities. Analyzing women as subjects and agents, the book examines how they negotiated the challenges that arose as Romanian society modernized, even as it clung to traditional ideas about gender. Massino concludes by exploring the ambiguities of postsocialism, highlighting how the legacies of the past have shaped politics and women’s lived experiences since 1989.
In the decade after 1945, as the Cold War freeze set in, a new Europe slowly began to emerge from the ruins of the Second World War, based on a broad rejection of the fascist past that had so scarred the continent's recent history. In the East, this new consensus was enforced by Soviet-imposed Communist regimes. In the West, the process was less coercive, amounting more to a consensus of silence. On both sides, much was deliberately forgotten or obscured. The years which followed were in many ways golden years for western Europe. Democracy became embedded in Germany, and eventually triumphed over dictatorship in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Britain and France faced up to the necessity of dec...
This volume addresses the question of ‘identity’ in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of ‘sub-cultures’ over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as ‘ethnic group’, ‘majority’ or ‘minority’. Instead, a ‘sub-culture’ is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.
Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture opens a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world. It relies on the concept of translocality to explore this corpus, offering new readings of contemporary Hungarian films as well as urban fiction and poetry in English. Calling attention to the role of affect in imagining city space, the volume investigates György Pálfi’s Taxidermia, Béla Tarr’s Family Nest, Teju Cole’s Open City, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, and Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights, among many other urban narratives. Contributors examine both widely explored emotions and under-researched affects, such as shame, fascination, and the role of withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture. Contributors: Tamás Bényei, Imola Bülgözdi, Fanni Feldmann, Zsolt Győri, Ágnes Györke, Brigitta Hudácskó, György Kalmár, Anna Kérchy, Márta Kőrösi, Jennifer Leetsch, Katalin Pálinkás, Miklós Takács, Pieter Vermeulen.
An encyclopedic guide to 20th-century communism around the world The first book of its kind to appear since the end of the Cold War, this indispensable reference provides encyclopedic coverage of communism and its impact throughout the world in the 20th century. With the opening of archives in former communist states, scholars have found new material that has expanded and sometimes altered the understanding of communism as an ideological and political force. A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism brings this scholarship to students, teachers, and scholars in related fields. In more than 400 concise entries, the book explains what communism was, the forms it took, and the enormous role it pla...
The histories of European unification and of West European democracy during the second half of the twentieth century have often been considered as separate or even antagonistic processes with the institutions of European integration being regarded as bastions of bureaucratic rule. A More Democratic Community challenges this assumption and argues that European integration benefited from the democratic accountability of member states while contributing to the validation of national democratic institutions. However, it also unveils a paradox: as integration deepened, it diminished the power of national parliaments, sparking a democratic accountability crisis within the Community. This insightful volume sheds light on pivotal reforms addressing Europe's perceived democratic deficit.