Panelists sought; ACLA 2013 =?windows-1252?Q?=93From_the_East=94=3A_?=Mapping the Post-socialist City

[Rad Borislavov]

Dear colleagues,

The paper proposal submission deadline for the annual ACLA conference
has been extended until November 15, 2012. If you would like to make a
submission, you can do so here http://acla.org/submit/index.php


“From the East”: Mapping the Post-socialist City

Seminar Organizer(s):
Rad Borislavov (Miami University)

Twenty years ago Chantal Akerman’s powerful documentary From the East
captured in elegiac tones the rapidly disintegrating social fabric in
Eastern Europe and Russia.  Akerman’s long takes and desolate
urbanscapes were an apt commentary on the crises that swept through
post-socialist societies in the early 1990s.  In the years following
the revolutions of 1989-1991, cities in the former Soviet bloc and
European Russia have experienced unprecedented growth at the same time
as they have faced new and daunting challenges.  Berlin, Moscow,
Prague, Kiev, Warsaw, Sofia, Tallinn, to name just a few of the cities
which have undergone drastic changes, have become sites of contested
memory and competing historical narratives, focal points of urban
crises and bustling centers of cultural exchange against the
background of proliferating social identities.
This seminar will examine some of the numerous changes to the cultural
landscape of the post-socialist city.  How have post-socialist cities
fared in the transition period?  Can we speak of “winner” and “loser”
cities?  What hybrid identities have emerged as a result of two
decades of change in these newly-globalized urban centers?  How have
public spaces/public writing re-defined the urban experience in
post-socialist cities in the last two decades?  What utopian/dystopian
discourses about the city persist?  What strategies of cognitive
mapping are best suited for exploring the post-socialist city today?
What expatriate communities have emerged in the last two decades in
major post-socialist cities?
Possible topics may include:
cinema/sound and the city
memory
history
street art
new media and the city
gentrification
Ostalgie
SEMINAR KEYWORDS: city, post-socialism, urban culture, memory, 1989,
socialist, expatriate, film, new media, Russia, Eastern Europe

-- 
Rad Borislavov
Visiting Assistant Professor & Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of GREAL/Havighurst Ctr
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056
tel. 224-628-5114

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