Deadline for Submissions: March 01, 2017
CALL FOR PAPERS
for Studies in Slavic Cultures XIV
Late Socialism: Second-World Modernity in Global Circulation
This volume of Studies in Slavic Cultures invites contributions that explore the culture of Late Socialism from a transnational perspective. Taken to be the period from the death of Stalin to the beginning of Perestroika (mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), Late Socialism is not merely a transitionary phase between a totalitarian regime and the liberalizations of impending collapse. Rather, it is a period with rich potential to explore the particularity and comparability of second-world modernity in a cross-cultural framework.
This period is marked by increasing international contacts and cross-cultural transfers not only with the Western world, but also with the cultures and subcultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Scholarship on Russo-Soviet culture often oscillates between two overreaching claims. On the one hand, some Slavists interpret Russo-Soviet culture, history, and politics as sui generis, invoking a long tradition of an exceptionalist Russia, as “neither East nor West.” On the other hand, a competing tendency has insisted upon a comparitivist Russia, one in which Russia belongs to the same temporal-spatial modernity as Europe, yet inevitably therefore “backward” on a shared scale of cultural development.
Taking insight from Michael David-Fox’s Crossing Borders, which convincingly deconstructs this binary opposition in favor of an alternative lens “marked by webs of meaning, multicausal explanations, and pluralistic rather than exclusionary interpretive frameworks,” we invite articles that examine the particularities of Late Socialist culture, putting them into diverse geopolitical and cross-cultural constellations. Continue reading “CFP: Late Socialism: Second-World Modernity in Global Circulation (Studies in Slavonic Cultures)”