CREEES Professional Resources Forum

Deadline: September 30, 2022

Please consider taking part in the panel on historical trauma and national healing at the NeMLA conference in Niagara Falls, NY, March 23-26, 2023.

Panel Title: “Mythology of Historical Trauma and National Healing in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Cinema.”

Description: This panel reflects on the cinematic representations of historical traumas in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema and their impact on the Russian collective memory and national identity.

From the final years of the Soviet Union and up to the present, Russia has been struggling how to address the problem of its “usable past” (Van Wyck Brooks) by reconciling the need for national atonement for its bloody history with the national pride for the astounding resilience of its people. Cinematic attempts to process historical traumas and possibilities for national healing (such as Abuladze’s “Repentance,” Lungin’s “Battle for Afghanistan”, Konchalovsky’s “House of Fools,” German’s “Khrustalyov, my car!” among others) expose the unresolved national identity crisis. Mythology of historical traumas on the screen is typically represented in two ways: it either solidifies the state narrative and serves its political agenda or it is reassessed in films, frequently festival films, that are often rejected by Russian mass audience as West-oriented because of the perceived national self-flagellation and belittlement.

Deadline: November 1, 2022

2-3.2.2023 University of Turku, Finland 

Travelling has always been connected with fundamental social and political changes taking place in societies. Throughout history, one of the countries that people have chosen to leave, move away or have been expelled from, but also a country which they have been going back to, is Russia/the Soviet Union. There is an obvious link between the large transformations that have taken place in Russia since the time of perestroika in the 1990s until the ongoing war in Ukraine and the restrictions of civil rights such as freedom of speech, and the increased mobility out of Russia. 

The conference takes these transformations as starting points in examining how individuals reflect on and recall the Soviet/Russian home country in literary presentations, addressing the history of mobility, emigration, family, gender, ethnic or religious background in face of their collective memory in their new place of residence. The meeting points for the proposals are the concepts of travelling/mobility/exile and (post-, trans-/cross-cultural) memory. The focus is on women’s fictional texts and memories from the 1980s until today that allow the presentations to address and to acknowledge [e]migrating women writers as mediators of ideas and memories in trans-/cross- cultural contexts. The aim of the conference is to focus on gender in the process of the transformation of cultures through ideas that travel, and to pay special attention to women’s contribution to the cultural transfer and mobility of ideas and memories which have not been sufficiently studied and documented. We expect presentations addressing published fictional texts by women who have moved from the Soviet and Russian territories into new areas, and by writing they have created and processed memories of moving and of resettling in a new country/location of residence. We are especially interested in memories of women emigrants and travellers to the Nordic countries, Germany, Great Britain, the US, France and Israel.