Cultural Formations of Postcommunism

Cultural Formations of Postcommunism PDF

Author: Michael D. Kennedy

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 9780816693139

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

OC TransitionOCO is the name typically given to the time of radical change following the fall of communism, connoting a shift from planned to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy. Transition is also, in Michael KennedyOCOs analysis, a culture in its own rightOCowith its own contentions, repressions, and unrealized potentials. By elaborating transition as a culture of power and viewing it in its complex relation to emancipation, nationalism, and war, KennedyOCOs book clarifies the transformations of postcommunism as well as, more generally, the ways in which culture articulates social change."

Russian Culture At The Crossroads

Russian Culture At The Crossroads PDF

Author: Dmitri N Shalin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-12

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0429966059

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The reexamination of values that began during the USSRs last years continues today in the search for a new Russian culture, one rooted in the pre-Soviet past but dynamic and evolving. Multi-textual, polyphonic, and contradictory, the current Russian cultural discourse is richly reflected in these essays by a diverse group of authors from Russian and American academic and cultural circles. The chapters explore specific cultural domains, surveying Russian and Soviet beliefs and behaviors, and highlighting the range of choices that Russians are facing at this critical juncture. }During the waning years of Soviet power, glasnost laid bare the distress of people trapped in a system they despised but felt powerless to change. The reexamination of values that began then continues today in the search for a new Russian culture, one rooted in the pre-Soviet past but dynamic and evolving, enabling Russians to meet the challenges they face in the contemporary world. Multi-textual, polyphonic, and contradictory, the current Russian cultural discourse is richly reflected in these essays by a diverse group of authors from Russian and American academic and cultural circles. Each chapter focuses on a particular cultural domain, surveying the historical origins of Russian beliefs and behaviors, exploring their Soviet and post-Soviet permutations, and highlighting the range of choices that Russians are facing at this critical juncture. The decisions they make will shape their society and culture for generations to come.Illuminating the universal significance of the Soviet experience, this volume raises provocative questions about the social, political, and economic sources of cultural change.

Envisioning Eastern Europe

Envisioning Eastern Europe PDF

Author: Michael D. Kennedy

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9780472105564

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Explorations of cultural change in the former Soviet bloc

The Post-communist Condition

The Post-communist Condition PDF

Author: Aleksandra Galasi?ska

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9027206287

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on discourses in one national context of post-communist transformation. Proposing a macro-micro approach to discourse analysis and transformation, it examines a spectrum of topics including Polish history, with its 'interpreters'; changes in political bodies and the media, policies of the Catholic Church and the Institute of National Remembrance; xenophobia and anti-Semitism, with the emergence of unemployment and homelessness; experiences of new gender relations and migrations. In effect, drawing upon unique sets of data, the book shows how post-communist transformation can be understood through analyses of the changing public and private discourses. It shows Polish post-communism as a fragile and uneasy transformation, with people and institutions struggling to make sense of it and of life within it. The volume will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists: discourse analysts, sociologists, modern historians and political scientists, as well as to the informed lay public.

Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe

Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe PDF

Author: Dorota Kołodziejczyk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1317286006

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions

Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions PDF

Author: Mitchell Alexander Orenstein

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2008-07-06

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780822973447

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

When Vladimir Putin claimed "outside forces" were at work during the Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004, it was not just a case of paranoia. In this uprising against election fraud, protesters had been trained in political organization and nonviolent resistance by a Western-financed democracy building coalition. Putin's accusations were more than just a call to xenophobic impulses-they were a testament to the pervasive influence of transnational actors in the shaping of postcommunist countries.Despite this, the role of transnational actors has been downplayed or dismissed by many theorists. Realists maintain that only powerful states assert major influence, while others argue that transnational actors affect only rhetoric, not policy outcomes. The editors of this volume contend that transnational actors have exerted a powerful influence in postcommunist transitions. They demonstrate that transitions to democracy, capitalism, and nation-statehood, which scholars thought were likely to undermine one another, were facilitated by the integration of Central and East European states into an international system of complex interdependence. Transnational actors turn out to be the "dark matter" that held the various aspects of the transition together. Transnational actors include international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, corporations, banks, foundations, religious groups, and activist networks, among others. The European Union is the most visible transnational actor in the region, but there are many others, including the OSCE, NATO, Council of Europe, the Catholic Church, and the Soros Foundation. Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions assembles leading scholars to debate the role and impact of transnational actors and presents a promising new research program for the study of this rapidly transforming region.

European Cultural Memory Post-89

European Cultural Memory Post-89 PDF

Author: Conny Mithander

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 9401208891

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume is the first comprehensive mapping of how practices of cultural memory in post-communist countries and other late newcomers to the European Union have been affected due to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. The essays cover Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, the unified Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden as well as Europe’s significant Other, Russia. The practices analysed range from films, novels and theatre to museums and state organizations such as memory institutes and pedagogical campaigns.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes