Ksenia Robbe - Böcker

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.

The subject of motherhood is interwoven with themes of survival, power and identity. It is also at the heart of any consideration of women’s writing.Conversations of Motherhood sensitively charts common themes, intersecting experiences and related tropes within the cultural specificities of South African society. Exploring this space, in turn, provides a lens for cross-cultural reading that draws on various local ways of knowing and the workings of agency.‘Dialogics’, the critical approach developed here, lies at the intersection of transnational feminist criticism, a postcolonial critique of modernity and a close exploration of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. This method offers striking rewards when comparatively pairing Zoë Wicomb with Pamphilia Hlapa, Sindiwe Magona with Marlene van Niekerk, Ellen Kuzwayo with Antjie Krog and Elsa Joubert with Wilma Stockenström.

Un)timely Crises explores how ‘crisis’—as a narrative, concept, grammar, and experience—structures time and space. Drawing from across disciplines and geographical contexts, (Un)timely Crises reimagines the relation of ‘crisis’ with ‘critique’, proposing future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis.

Un)timely Crises explores how ‘crisis’—as a narrative, concept, grammar, and experience—structures time and space. Drawing from across disciplines and geographical contexts, (Un)timely Crises reimagines the relation of ‘crisis’ with ‘critique’, proposing future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis.

This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.