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Unlike the benevolent orphan found in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid or the sentimentalized figure of Little Orphan Annie, the orphan in postwar Eastern European cinema takes on a more politically fraught role, embodying the tensions of individuals struggling to recover from war and grappling with an unknown future under Soviet rule. By exploring films produced in postwar Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, Parvulescu traces the way in which cinema envisioned and debated the condition of the post-World War II subject and the ""new man"" of Soviet-style c

"Welcome to the European family!" When East European countries joined the European Union under this banner after 1989, they agreed to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons. In this book, Anca Parvulescu analyzes an important niche in this imagined European kinship: the traffic in women, or the circulation of East European women in West Europe in marriage and as domestic servants, nannies, personal attendants, and entertainers. Analyzing film, national policies, and an impressive range of work by theorists from Giorgio Agamben to Judith Butler, she develops a critical lens

This article employs Lauren Berlant's concepts of cruel optimism and impasse to explain the way the cinematic work of Cristian Mungiu comments on the condition of small East-Central European cultures. The article analyzes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Beyond the Hills (2012) and Graduation (2016), and draws evidence from the narrative structure of these films, gender and social and economic condition of their characters, as well as the audiovisual poetics of their endings. The main point of the article is that Mungiu's films criticize a mental mapping East-Central Europe with origins in the Cold War that imagines it as a region of small nations in the permanent state of danger and in need of urgent protection. Mungiu's films show that this mapping exposes these cultures to inescapable cycles of political abuse. The slow and contemplative endings of Mungiu's films also propose a solution. They gesture toward the development of a condition of political hovering that, as interruption, may enable East-Central European political imaginaries to envision more creative solutions to escape cycles of abuse. This interruption is linked to the memory of 1989 and to the historical openness 1989 created. As a political approach for East-Central European cultures, interruption is a strategy of letting one's political imaginary be inspired to the opening of 1989. ; Celem poniższego artykułu jest przedstawienie sposobu opisu stanu pomniejszych kultur Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej w filmach Cristiana Mungiu. Rozważania te zostały oparte o pojęcia okrutnego optymizmu oraz impasu autorstwa Lauren Berlant. Analizie poddano filmy 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Beyond the Hills (2012) oraz Graduation (2016). Pod uwagę wzięto w szczególności strukturę narracyjną wspomnianych dzieł, płeć bohaterów, uwarunkowania społeczno-ekonomiczne wpływające na ich byt, a także poetykę mediów audio-wizualnych prezentowaną w zakończeniach filmów. Autor argumentuje, że filmy Mungiu stanowią krytykę mapowania wyobrażeniowego na terenach Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej zapoczątkowanego w czasach zimnej wojny, która prezentuje narody zamieszkujące te tereny jako skazane na nieustanne przebywanie w stanie zagrożenia, a co za tym idzie, niewygasającą potrzebę obrony, co naraża je na przeżywanie nieuniknionych cykli politycznych nadużyć. Propozycja rozwiązania przedstawiona jest w powolnych, skłaniających do przemyśleń zakończeniach filmów. Wskazują one na rozwój sytuacji politycznego zawieszenia, która jako zakłócenie statusu quo może pozwolić wyobraźniom politycznym na stworzenie rozwiązań bardziej kreatywnych, pozwalających uniknąć wspomnianych cykli. Przerwa ta wiąże się z pamięcią wydarzeń roku 1989, a także historyczną otwartością, która emergowała w owym czasie. Jako polityczny paradygmat kultur środkowo-wschodnioeuropejskich, zawieszenie jest strategią, która pozwala na zmianę postawy wyobrażeniowej wobec początku roku 1989.

"The book analyzes Transylvania's role in modernity and modernism in juxtaposition with coloniality and inter-imperiality. It does so through an interrogation of the main themes in Liviu Rebreanu's 1920 novel "Ion"--ranging from the land question and capitalist integration through antisemitism and Roma enslavement up to multilingualism, gender relations and religion"--

How are modernity, coloniality, and interimperiality entangled? Bridging the humanities and social sciences, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Historical Transylvania, at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, offers the platform for their multi-level reading of the main themes in Liviu Rebreanu's 1920 novel Ion. Topics range from the question of the region's capitalist integration to antisemitism and the enslavement of Roma to multilingualism, gender relations, and religion. Creolizing the Modern develops a comparative method for engaging with areas of the world that have inherited multiple, conflicting imperial and anti-imperial histories

This article is the authors' response to the Transilvania journal special issue dedicated to Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). The issue (no. 10, 2022) featured articles and review articles on inter-imperiality and decolonial thought, alongside several pieces on world literature and cultural representations of Romania. In response to the critiques formulated by the contributors, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă clarify some aspects and offer further insight into their theories. Since its publication, the book has attracted much deserved attention, being awarded the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and the 2023 Barrington Moore Award from the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

Our article focuses on an instance of cross-media content convergence in state-socialist cultural economies. We deliver a cultural studies intervention addressing the hybrid nature of the cultural economies of the former Soviet Bloc. We show that this instance of convergence was not the effect of a top-down imposition of a policy of state-socialist power, but rather a bottom-up phenomenon, triggered by artistic and economic interests and more specific to capitalism. These interests respond to consumer demand, competition, and box-office success. We borrow the concept of convergence from the writings of Henry Jenkins. Our case study explores a synergy of content between cinema and rock music in 1970s Romania, generating evidence by means of close readings and exploration of reception and production information. Under scrutiny are the adventure film The Immortals (Sergiu Nicolaescu, Romania, 1975) and the music and public presentation of the Romanian band Phoenix. We argue that the inclusion of Phoenix's music in the soundtrack of the film is a key testimony to bottom-up convergence, marking a synergy of discourses that independently developed the same story universe. We show that this synergy took place because the two discourses had the potential to boost each other's artistic and economic performance.

The article includes a preview excerpt, in Romanian, from the introduction of the book authored by Anca Pârvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires, published by Cornell University Press in 2022. This volume espouses an inter-imperial approach focused on Transylvania and takes Liviu Rebreanu's canonical novel Ion as a case study.

Abstract
This article analyzes the differences and overlaps between the dynamics of coloniality and inter-imperiality that have shaped Transylvania since the sixteenth century vis-à-vis neighboring European peripheries and shifting cores, zooming in on how the tensions between different modes of colonial and imperial rule play out in rural settings. We foreground the vantage point of the rural by focusing on a Transylvanian village in 1920 as a global countryside.

Cet article revient sur les résultats obtenus par les expérimentations sur les marchés à prix affichés. Nous proposons une grille de lecture donnée par l'existence ou la nonexistence d'un équilibre de Nash dans la structure de marché qui sert de base aux expérimentations. Nous montrons que, d'une part, les premières expérimentations réalisées n'ont pas tenu compte de cette dimension et que, de ce fait, leur pouvoir conclusif en est très diminué. D'autre part, les expérimentations ultérieures qui présentent, elles, une analyse formelle de l'existence d'un équilibre de Nash ont été réalisées de manière disparate. De ce fait, leurs résultats sont difficilement comparables. Nous concluons cet article en posant quelques jalons pour une recherche future.