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Soviet postcolonial studies is an emerging field of critical inquiry, with its locus of interest in colonial aspects of the Soviet experience in the USSR and beyond. The articles in this collection offer a postcolonial perspective on Baltic societies and cultures – that is, a perspective sensitive to the effects of Soviet colonialism. The colonial situation is typically sustained by the help of colonial discourses which carry the pathos of progress and civilization. In Soviet colonial discourse, the pathos of progress is presented in terms of communist value systems, which developed certain principles of the European Enlightenment and rearticulated them through Soviet ideology. This collec...
Postcolonial studies is a well-established academic field, rich in theory, but it is based mostly on postcolonial experiences in former West European colonial empires. This book takes a different approach, considering postcolonial theory in relation to the former Soviet bloc. It both applies existing postcolonial theory to this different setting, and also uses the experiences of former Soviet bloc countries to refine and advance theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and presenting insights and material of relevance to scholars in a wide range of subjects, the book explores topics such as Soviet colonality as co-constituted with Soviet modernity, the affective structure of identity-creation in national and imperial subjects, and the way in which cultural imaginaries and everyday materialities were formative of Soviet everyday experience.
Explores why American Romantic writers and contemporary continental thinkers turn to art when writing about ethics.
Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites--multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions--that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, howev.
This book explores shifting forms of continental colonialism in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to the present. It offers an interdisciplinary approach bringing together historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to contribute to a critical historical anthropology of colonialism. Though focused on the modern era, the volume illustrates that the colonial paradigm is a framework of theories and concepts that can be applied globally and deeply into the past. The chapters engage with a wide range of topics and disciplinary approaches from the theoretical to the empirical, deepening our understanding of under-researched areas of colonial studies and providing a cutting edge contribution to the study of continental and internal colonialism for all those interested in the global impact of colonialism on continents.
This book outlines an innovative approach to the study of literature called pragmapoetics, a philosophy of poetic utterances. The book posits that studies are as much a branch of linguistics as they are of the philosophy of language and mind, and considers the poetic self-referential function a profound feature of life and intentionality. As a structuralist thinker, the author is drawn towards graphical definitions for their greater elucidative power. This collection contains three sections: “General Poetics,” “Pragmapoetics,” and “Estonian and Comparative Poetics,” consisting of nineteen of the author’s works from 1996 up to 2022, which best represent his approach.
A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is the final part of the project, following Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century', and Volume II...
The Baltic Crusades in the thirteenth century led to the creation of the medieval Livonia. But what happened after the conquest? The contributors to this volume analyse the cultural, societal, economic and technological changes in the Baltic Sea region c. 1200–1350. The chapters focus on innovations and long-term developments which were important in integrating the area into medieval European society more broadly, while also questioning the traditional divide of the Livonian post-crusade society into native victims and foreign victors. The process of multilateral negotiations and adaptions created a synthesis which was not necessarily an outcome of the wars but also a manifestation of universal innovation processes in northern Europe. Contributors are Arvi Haak, Tõnno Jonuks, Kristjan Kaljusaar, Ivar Leimus, Christian Lübke, Madis Maasing, Mihkel Mäesalu, Anti Selart, Vija Stikāne, and Andres Tvauri.
Exploring life writing from a variety of cultural contexts, Haunted Narratives provides new insights into how individuals and communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences and haunting memories. From the perspectives of trauma theory, memory studies, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy, and post-colonial studies, the volume stresses the lingering, haunting presence of the past in the present. The contributors focus on the psychological, ethical, and representational difficulties involved in narrative negotiations of traumatic memories. Haunted Narratives focuses on life writing in the broadest sense of the term: biographies and autobiographies that deal with trau...
Recent events in Ukraine and Russia and the subsequent incorporation of Crimea into the Russian state, with the support of some circles of inhabitants of the peninsula, have shown that the desire of people to belong to the Western part of Europe should not automatically be assumed. Discussing different perceptions of the Ukrainian-Russian war in neighbouring countries, this book offers an analysis of the conflicts and issues connected with the shifting of the border regions of Russia and Ukraine to show how ’material’ and ’psychological’ borders are never completely stable ideas. The contributors – historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists from across Europe – use an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to explore the different national and transnational perceptions of a possible future role for Russia.