Suchergebnisse

Minor Planets is a performance by Vlatka Horvat for five performers who work to make sense of themselves and their relation to each other as they traverse an impoverished landscape of detritus, wooden planks and fabric scraps. Using decidedly inadequate resources, and locked in a decaying set of rules and mischievous games, the five negotiate a place for themselves, making and re-making the world they inhabit. Beginning initially with research into the Russian Revolution, the project draws on my experience of living through the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its legacy of confusion and opportunism. Looking at how people deal with structural collapse, the piece speaks to the broader landscape of uncertainty that marks current events. Minor Planets is co-comissioned by HAU – Hebbel am Ufer and HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt; and presented by HAU Berlin in the programme of their 'Utopian Realities' platform, part of the larger "100 Years of Now" research project, funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and overseen by HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

In the twentieth century, nationalism has become an unwritten yet strong hegemonic rule that prescribes and defines cultural configurations of statehood. In the context of post-socialist and post-colonial transformations in "expanding" Eastern Europe, nation building is a complicated and incoherent process: the nation's canonic attributes may contradict the cultural and historical "circumstances" of the development of a particular nation. This article questions a complicated dynamic between theoretical frameworks of nationalism and their applications in Eastern European states, such as in Belarus. More specifically, it argues against the discursive conceptualization of Belarus as a "nonexistent" or "undeveloped" nation. This article suggests rethinking nation building in Belarus in relation to the notion of major/minor developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The author implies that the unusual mode of Belarusian nationalism is not only a part of a struggle for domination between different intellectual groups in Belarus; it is also an issue of relying on traditional scholarly paradigms of nationalism that may no longer suffice. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright the American Council of Learned Societies.]

A leading Polish novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki is the author of Kompleks polski which came out in Zapis 3 two years ago, after it had been turned down by the censor, and which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will be publishing in the USA under the title of A Polish Complex. When writing his next novel, Minor Apocalypse, an Orwellian tale that takes place in Poland in the not-too-distant future ( possibly even in 1984), Konwicki decided not even to submit it to the censorship but to write it directly for Zapis, the unofficial and uncensored journal. The novel, from which extracts are printed below, then came out as Zapis 10. Its hero, a writer, is visited by two elderly dissidents on the day when the Communist Party leadership puts forward a proposal that Poland should be incorporated into the Soviet Union. His visitors suggest that he protest against this by setting fire to himself in a public place. Rejecting their scheme, he nevertheless acquires a can of petrol and goes on a tour of Warsaw, meeting a number of characters, many of whom are recognisable as the real people the author used as his models ( the film director Andrzej Wajda and the dissident Jacek Kuroń are perhaps the best-known examples). His encounters, and the realisation of what conditions in the country are really like, make the hero change his mind, and he decides to carry out the self-immolation on the steps of the Warsaw Palace of Culture.

"Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past"--