Histories, societies, spaces of dialogue. Post-dependence studies in ...

debates on postcoloniality, social inequalities of late capitalism, and new social identities emerging from thesephenomena. It is important to do so with an adequate academic language capable of grasping these realitiesthrough theoretical categories comprising a comparative perspective both in disciplinary and in cultural terms.We invite papers from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as transdisciplinary approachesresponding to the questions listed below:- strategies of dealing with, codifying, and (re-)interpreting the past (both recent and more distant) – nostalgia,sentimentality, willed and/or unconscious amnesia; post-1989 sites of commemoration/remembering/forgetting;- the center-periphery relation as diagnostic of the transforming format and function of the state; theresurgence of the local and the discovery/recreation of multiple histories of the place;- narratives of historical breakthrough; instances of “epistemic violence” connected with these breakthroughsor takeovers;- contemporary marginalized groups emerging as a result of social stratification and the phenomenon of nonnormativeidentities, privileged and underprivileged groups in social narratives;- cultural and political complexities of the post-communist transition process;- the border status of Central and Eastern Europe as inscribed within the project of European modernity;Western discourses on Eastern and Central Europe after communism and ambivalent attitudes toward the"new" Europe;- the effects of the mutual intersecting and overlaying of these phenomena and processes.We propose to ground the inquiry into the above-listed areas into some larger theoretical categories, such as:Post-dependence studies – evaluation of the term, its theoretical apparatus, its comparative potential fordiagnosing the socio-cultural situation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe; Post-dependencestudies vis-à-vis postcolonialism and studies on postcommunism.The Other Europe – what significance has Philip Roth’s label today? The past and present mechanisms ofconstructing the European “Other”. Self-othering at work in post-communist/post-socialist countries ofCentral and Eastern Europe vis-à-vis the west?The Postcolonial/ Postcommunist connection - Categories from postcolonial studies in historicaldiscourse and historiographic thought in Central and Eastern Europe; ideological uses of postcolonialcategories, especially as a new language for the national(ist) paradigm; theorizingpostcommunist/postsocialist transformation beyond the patronizing/didactic bias of development and othertheories of modernization; attitudes to real socialism of the left in the West; intellectualresponsibility/accountability.

The affect of post-dependence – emotional aspects and the affective charge of postcommunist/postdependencetransformation, social phenomena of nostalgia, melancholia, anger and frustration,ressentiment.(Un)translatability of cultural difference – difficulties in communicating cultural uniqueness/difference.Where does the object of inquiry resist translation into theoretical/received paradigms? Effectivetranslational strategies for dealing with cultural difference in the target language.Activating cultural memory - any study of the “post” situation becomes necessarily an adventure inspectrology – a knowledge of how the past lags in the present. What haunts current studies in postdependence,post-Soviet, post-socialism and so on? Re-membering the forgotten/falsified past; strategies ofcultural survival, remembering and reconstructing memory in cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. (Non-)antagonistic relation between such social/cultural/political phenomena as commemorating, memory,remembering.Challenges of transnationality and globalization – how do we bring the multiple “posts” studied at themoment in the contexts of Central and Eastern Europe into the force field of globalization? Revisingmethodologies of critical thinking within the area of history, culture, literary canons to build new viablecomparative models of investigation.Localism and globality – reflections in culture, politics and literature of Central and Eastern Europeancountries, vis-à-vis the increasing mobility and émigré population of the E-C European countries. Thehistories of local migrations, transregional communities and contacts, of Eastern European borderlands andtheir multicultural social tissue active long before the contemporary post-colonial, late-modernmulticulturalism; local and translocal cosmopolitanisms of “provincial Europe”; new migrations.Commonality of feelings and sensitivities - is there an Eastern European regional, transnationalsensibility/solidarity that allows us to see this category in terms of a subject of critical thinking, which wouldcorrespond with Arjun Apadurai’s idea of “community of sentiment” creating a new locality in global flows?Conference languages are English and Polish. Selected papers will be published in two books in respectivelanguages, which means that at least some of the texts will come out both in the original language and intranslation.Please send paper abstracts of ca. 300 – 500 words with keywords and a short bio- note by 30th November 2012to:d_kolodziejczyk@hotmail.comh.gosk@uw.edu.plThe organizing committee:Dr. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, University of Wrocław, Poland;Prof. Hanna Gosk, Warsaw University, Poland;Prof. Ewa Kraskowska, Poznań University, Poland;Dr. Cristina Sandru, Literary Encyclopedia, UK.Prof. Bożena Karwowska, University of British Columbia, Canada.