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

Aliaksandra Razor, California State University, Long Beach,
“‘Non-Russian’ Women as the “Other” in the Works of Contemporary Russian Female Writers”
Tomasz Kitlinski, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University
“Sexual Othering in Eastern Europe: The Cultural Representation of Women and Gays as Abjects and Resistance to It”
Ileana Orlich, Arizona State University
“Articulating Otherness in Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums: Gender, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Ceausescu’s Romania”
Vlatka Velcic, California State University, Long Beach
“New Voices for the Traditional ‘Other’: Women Writers in Croatia”

Saturday, March 25

Halim Kara, Bogazici University, Istanbul
“The Strength of the ‘Weak:’ The Balkans in Ömer Seyfettin’s Prose Fiction”
Eva Hudecova, University of Minnesota
“The Emperor’s ‘New Europe’: The Eastern European Search for Identity and Agency in a Contested Region”
William Martin, University of Chicago
“Us Folks, Them Folks: Otherness in Sylwester Chęciński’s Film Comedies Sami Swoi and Kochaj albo rzuć”
Matt Beckner, California State University, Long Beach
“The Privileged Other: The Father Figure in Danilo Kis’s Autobiographical Novels”

Sunday, March 26

Marina Antic, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Provincialism, the Highest State of Primitivism: New Primitives and the Othering of Rural Identity in Yugoslavia”
Mark Olague, California State University, Long Beach
“From the “Other” Europe to the “New” Europe: The Evolution of the Post-Dissident Writer in Eastern Europe”
Evelyn Preuss, Yale University
“The Other of the Other: Eastern Europe Looks Back”
Ioanna Zlateva, Duke University
“Between Vampires and Gypsy Punk—Afterlives of Communism”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

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