History, Memory and Reshaping Identity in Post-Communist Literatures (CLCWeb. Comparative Literature and Culture)

Call for Papers - Special Issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (December 2017): History, Memory and Reshaping Identity in Post-Communist Literatures - Ed. Simona Antofi and Nicoleta Ifrim, 'Dunarea de Jos' University of Galati, Faculty of Letters, Romania, Intercultural Communication and Literature Research Centre

            This volume is intended for both scholars and a general readership interested in contemporary aspects of post-communist literatures from East-Central Europe which witness a special relation between History, Memory and reshaped identity (be it personal or collective). Papers are invited to analyze strategies of remembering communism in different types of discourse, from autobiographical recollections to collective representations which re-define the post-traumatic status of the Eastern intellectuals in relation to the 'rediscovered' West and their transition dilemmas. The post-Soviet cultural practices work as an identity-oriented interface of shared experience mirroring different attitudes towards the communist legacies: the nostalgic revival of the past, adjusting specific structures of othering or voicing out difference, recollection of forms of anti-communist struggle, reliving experiences of trauma through rewriting history, the oscillation between memory and amnesia, identifying ways of resistance within the discursive practices, exile and its traumas etc. Thus, the volume proposes a critical dialogue on ideologies, cultural imaginaries, practices of remembering the communist past, strategies of accommodation or resistance in post-Soviet East-Central cultures by use of memory and identity-oriented praxis.

Please send abstracts in 200 words with the authors contact information by 1 June 2017 to nicodasca@yahoo.com.

Deadline for sending the papers in extenso - 25 July 2017 to nicodasca@yahoo.com.

Journal site - http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/