Day 2, Saturday, February 25th, 2023, WPU 837 and LIVESTREAMES (ALL TIMES IN EST)

Panel 2

Literature and Films of Eurasia (virtual)

Moderated by: Dr. Eva Lovra (Fulbright Visiting Professor at Pitt in Hungarian Studies)

Papers

Gabriela Vieru (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași), Performing Gender and Sexual Identity in Romanian and Moldavian Postsocialist Novel

Decolonizing Post-Cold War Hierarchies: Research Practices and Fictional Discourses

Thu, October 19, 10:45am to 12:30pm EDT (5:45 to 7:30pm EEST), Virtual Rooms, VR11

Brief Description

The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, started in February 2022, and the EU-USA response to it revealed once again the instability of the post-Cold War structures of power, reviving the dormant issues of imperialism, subalternities, and dependencies. In the current conflictual geo-political climate, the old West vs. East divide lines changed their trajectories from the Cold-War period and gave rise to new political configurations, aspirations, and neo-imperial narratives in Eastern Europe and beyond. The process of postsocialist decolonization in Eastern Europe obtains newfound relevance not only at the social and political level but, more importantly, at the level of knowledge structures and artistic discourses. This panel offers a plurivalent perspective on decoding and decolonizing post-Cold War historical narratives and theory commons, by critically analyzing structures of power and “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams) in research practice, fictional, autofictional, and autoethnographic discourses. While the first paper investigates the recent research patterns, divides, and multidirectionalities in memory studies, the next three presentations tackle the issue of decolonization by exploring communist anti-Russianism, postsocialist Westalgia, and postimperial trauma, and using as a test-case Romanian and Moldovan contemporary literature. 

The panel is organized within the projects The Novel of Memory in Postcommunism: Subgenres, Generations, Transnațional Networks, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-1429, funded by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization from Romania and A Transnational History of Romanian Literature, ID: 101001710, funded by the European Research Council.

Chair

Mihai Iovanel, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U of Iasi (Romania)

Papers

De-Centering Memory Studies: Divides, Inequalities, and Multidirectional Approaches - Andreea Mironescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U of Iasi (Romania); Doris Dumitru Mironescu, Lucian Blaga U of Sibiu

Anti-Russianism as Communist Anti-Communism - Stefan Baghiu, Lucian Blaga U of Sibiu (Romania); Mihai Iovanel, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U of Iasi (Romania)

The Politics of Westalgia: Decolonization and Self-Colonization in the Romanian Post-Communist Coming of Age Fictions - Cosmin Borza, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U of Iasi (Romania)

Post-Imperial Writing Practices: Autoethnography, Women, and Queer Writing in Moldovan and Romanian Literatures - Adriana Stan, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U Iași (Romania)

Discussant

Agnieszka Mrozik, Institute of Literary Research, PAS (Poland)

Session Manager

A. M. LaVey, The Ukrainian Museum (NYC) / The New York Public Library

Research Panel B

The Novel of Memory in Romania: Internal Dynamics and Transnational Networks

Chair

Andreea Mironescu (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași)

Papers

Mihai Iovănel (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași / G. Călinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory, Bucharest), Ideological and Dialogical Devices of Migration in post-1989 Romanian Literature

Cosmin Borza (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași / Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, Cluj-Napoca), (Sub)genres in Transit: Labelling the Romanian Memory Novel

Alina Moroșanu, Andreea Mironescu (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași), Is There a Correlation between Genre, Generation, and Gender? Doing Literary Research with Statistical Tools

Gabriela Vieru (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași), Travelling Memory and the Geopolitics of Translations