Remembering the Future: (Re)Constructing Memory and Realities in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Balkans

In Goodbye, Lenin (2003), the young hero Alex Kërner struggles to recreate the daily life of East German in his apartment to preserve the familiar and comforting environment of pre-unification Berlin -- despite its flaws-- for his ailing mother. But in his deceptive, sometimes coercive, attempts to shield her from the reality of a transformed German state, Alex admits, “The GDR I created for her increasingly became the one I wished for.” The reflective nostalgia, using Boym’s dichotomy, that Alex employs a familiar and potent nostalgia-trauma-memory paradigm. Whether through Boym’s post-Cold War lens (The Future of Nostalgia, 2001), Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic proposition of “becoming is an antimemory” (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987), or any other conceptual frame, the geopolitical and cultural transformations in post-Berlin Wall, post-Soviet, post-Cold War spaces trigger a wide-ranging array of critical explorations.

Recent events, including the invasion of Ukraine, political schisms in Poland, Hungary, and The Czech Republic, the ongoing ethnic and religious conflicts in the countries of former Yugoslavia, and the rise of nationalism in Russia, among many others, offer a multitude of literary and filmic texts, along with other cultural products, to explore and interrogate the trauma(s) and memory(ies) within these regions. This seminar invites proposals from all related disciplines interested in examining the intersections and interstices of nostalgia, trauma, and memory in any region(s) of the Balkans, Eurasia – including Russia, and Eastern Europe. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

Text as trauma and recovery
The role of memory in processing trauma
Reflective and restorative nostalgias as tools of constructing narratives of trauma
Memoir, war, and recovery
Cultural products, including kitsch, in (re)constructed memories
The nonhuman, posthuman, and transhuman in traumatic transformations
Filmic portraits of trauma and (re)construction of memory
Critical memory studies and regional conflict