CALL FOR PAPERS -- SOYUZ SYMPOSIUM AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (fwd)

[Kevin Eric Laney]

Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS -- SOYUZ SYMPOSIUM AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Please forward to your center announcement lists:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Soyuz, the Research Network for Post-Communist Cultural Studies and the
Department of Anthropology at Columbia University present The Seventh
Annual Symposium on Cultural Studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia

"OUT OF THE RUINS: CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE SOVIET AFTERMATH"

March 27-28, 1998
Columbia University

Empires leave ruins. The title of our symposium evokes the by-now popular
image of the toppled ruins of socialist monuments to Lenin, the Worker and
the Peasant, and other emblems of Soviet cultural authority.  But the
social shards, cultural fragments and political artifacts of the former
system have now become the stuff from which new forms of the quotidian are
emerging. In such an aftermath, cultural ruination and regeneration are
appearing in unlooked-for places and unlikely guises.  Ruins are the
landscape of the uncanny. While the crumbling of states and societies that
attended the events of 1989 and 1991 led many theorists to predict an end
to history and the inevitable transition from socialist cultures to
liberal capitalist ones, post-Soviet culture has yet to experience the
predicted metamorphosis into familiar forms. The processes of ruination
and regeneration now taking place are resulting in hybrid forms, novel
articulations of the local with the global, and the collision of received
histories with their unscheduled presents. While socialist states have
exited the political stage, the many and various histories of the peoples
of the former Soviet Bloc remain, as do the subjects, knowledges and
structures that accompanied them. Out of the ruins slouch new rough
beasts.  Soyuz proposes the Seventh Annual Symposium of Cultural Studies
in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as a step in understanding the cultural
negotiation of ruins now taking place in the former Soviet Bloc.

We are interested in papers from across the disciplines that concern
cultural studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The proposed papers may be
up to 25 pages in length and are to be presented at the symposium in a
cultural studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The proposed papers may be
up to 25 pages in length and are to be presented at the symposium in a
strict 20-minute format. Preference will be given to those abstracts that
address the symposium's metaphors of cultural ruination and regeneration
and which concern cultural and/or ethnographic sensibility.

A one-page abstract and curriculum vitae can be sent to:
David Koester, Dept of Anthropology, Columbia University, NY, NY  10027.
The deadline for abstracts is January 10, 1998.  Decisions concerning
acceptance will be made by February 1st, 1998.  Regrettably, no financial
assistance will be available for participants.

Please send inquiries to David Koester at: dk24 at columbia.edu
or Cathy Wanner at: cew10 at email.psu.edu.

[Please do not respond to this message by automatic reply.]

Sponsored by the Columbia Univeristy Dept. of Anthropology, Soyuz, the
Harriman Institute of Columbia University and the Columbia Graduate
Anthropology Alumni Association.