ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This panel proposes to continue inquiries from previous ACLA conferences which invited the application of post-colonial theories and concepts to the literature and culture of Eastern Europe and related geographical spaces. In previous sessions we discussed the classical empires (the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian) and their cultural influences. Last year’s panel focused specifically on echoes of the “Soviet Empire” on Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. Working within the theme of this year’s conference, we can surmise that the empires roaming through the past and looming in the present of Eastern Europe have created not only Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia as a specific kind of Eastern “Other,” as opposed to the more “Human” West (i.e., enlightened, democratic, progressive, etc.), but also that Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia have at different times created their own hierarchies of “Others” (i.e., gypsies, various Asian peoples, etc.). These processes are recorded and reflected, however obliquely, though literary and cultural production, and conversely literature and culture also actively participate in the othering process. We invite papers on various aspects of Othering of and in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia. We are interested in the ways that traditional empires “Othered” the peoples of Eastern Europeans, the Balkans, and Eurasia, but also the way in which Eastern Europeans “Other” each other in contemporary literature and culture. We are specifically interested in papers that explore how this creation of “Others” relates to themes of nationalism, violence, class, gender, and identity.

Friday, March 24

Tarek El-Ariss, New York University
“Other Subjects: Greeks and Orientals in Chateaubriand’s ‘Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem”
Mykola Polyuha, University of Western Ontario
“‘Baked and Eaten Tovarisch’: Ezra Pound and the Eastern European Other”
Rebecca Gould, CUNY Graduate Center
“Georgia’s Others”
Arianna Varga, Indiana University Bloomington
“Dezso Kosztolanyi and the Bulgarian Train Conductor: The Strange Case of Othering the Self in a Linguistic Game”

Saturday, March 25

Alexei Lalo, University of Texas, Austin
“Decolonizing History and Linguistic Consciousness as a Discourse of Countering the Big Russian (Br)Other: The Case of Belarus”
Al Baum, California State University, Long Beach
“In One Ear and Out the Other: The Representation of Roma Culture in Eastern European Film”
Tom Garza, University of Texas, Austin
“Dark Others: Russia’s New Vampires in Visual Media”
Cheryl Toman, Case Western Reserve University
“Feminism, Nationalism, and Othering in the Works of Dubravka Ugresic and Evelyne Accad”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Othering of (and Othering within) Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia