CFP: Escaping Transition. Narratives of Post-Communism in Bulgaria and Romania

[Lilya Kaganovsky]

Collection: Escaping Transition. Narratives of Post-Communism in  
Bulgaria and Romania
Edited by Lilya Kaganovsky and Miglena Ivanova
Abstract Deadline: 15 September 2008

The recent Romanian film, "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" (dir.  
Mungiu, 2007), shows us a day in the life of two women, Otilia  
(Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), as they prepare for and  
handle the consequences of an illegal abortion, during the last years  
of the Ceausescu regime. Set in 1987 the film, as Iona Uricaru has  
pointed out, is part of “a new historiographic tendency in post- 
socialist Romania that seeks to testify about the past without  
vehemence or nostalgia.”

We seek essays of 6,000 to 8,000 words for a collection that explores  
the post-1989 cultural landscapes in Bulgaria and Romania as reflected  
in literature and film, music and popular culture, the fine and  
performing arts. We welcome submissions that focus on post-1989  
reevaluations of Bulgaria and Romania’s literary and cultural canons  
and interrogate their importance for community building after  
communism and in the context of the European integration. We are  
interested in the following themes: 1989, post-communism; post- 
colonialism; the Cold War; transition; translation; the EU; bi- 
lingual/ multi-lingual writing; history; memory; new media; new  
Europe; minor literatures; ethnic, national, and gendered selves;  
violence; fragmentation; the past; the future; the local; the global.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

	• “New Media”: What are the new forms for engaging with the present,  
evaluating the past, and responding to the post-1989 return of  
collective, public, or personal memory?

	• “New Europe”: How are cultural loyalties (re)shaped in grasping and  
resisting, articulating and visualizing individual and cultural  
experiences of becoming “European”?

	• “Minor Culture in a Globalizing World”: What implications does  
“minor culture” carry for the new internationalist processes and  
transnational migrant experiences characterizing Romanian and  
Bulgarian cultural production?

	• “1989”: What anxieties have shaped the post-Communist and post-Cold- 
War transitions in the private and public arenas? What role does 1989  
continue to play in the cultural imaginary?

	• “The Past is the Future”: What are the implications of maintaining  
and even highlighting cultural differences as a counterbalance to  
boundary-blurring practices of EU integration? To what extent are the  
symbolic reassertions of boundaries necessary through cultural  
practices and revitalization of religious traditions?

	• “Who Are We?”: How do the interactions between the local, regional,  
and Europeanizing identity-shaping frames of exclusion and inclusion,  
difference and similarity complicate, challenge, and reconfigure  
cultural representations of gender, economic, ethnic, national,  
regional, rural and urban identities?


We thank you for your attention to this project and would be grateful  
should you forward the call for papers to any parties who might be  
interested. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Abstracts (500 words) and vita to Lilya Kaganovsky at  
lilya at illinois.edu and Maggie Ivanova at mivanova at coastal.edu by 15  
September 2008; completed essays to be included in the volume by 1  
December 2008.
  

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