Suchergebnisse

Anthropogenic climate change necessitates rethinking the role of academic scholarship. This article addresses the question of Soviet subjecthoods from the perspective of one's affective connection to natural environments, while keeping in mind the multiscalarity of subjecthood. It traces a genealogy of environmentally-attuned selfhoods in the late Soviet-era sociocultural imagination and positions this model within the context of present-day understandings of subjecthood in Soviet studies. Soviet-era subjects did not make sense of their lives, aims and accomplishments solely in relation to the Soviet state, but also in relation to things closer at hand and in relation to ideas and conditions of a global and planetary scale. In Alberts Bels's and Jaan Kaplinski's writings, the environmentally conscious subject emerges as multiscalar: a subject who identifies both with its direct, affectively experienced environment, but who also realizes the boundedness of local, global, and planetary processes. The ethical attitude of reverence for life, promoted by Albert Schweitzer, together with the widely shared concern about both local-level environmental damage and the future of the planet provide the context for late Soviet multiscalar naturecultural subjecthood.

This essay investigates Soviet-era homesites in the Baltic states as combinations of home imaginaries and people's affective, sensorial relationship to the materiality of their home space. The aspect of relationality is foregrounded: the primary level of meaning-making as regards one's quotidian home life, the article suggests, takes place at the level of comparative spatial intimacies—that is, in relation to one's own bodily movement in space and the objects, locations, impressions, but also the ideas, norms, and values encountered and embedded in these movements. Home experience unfolds on the scene of comparative studies, where different homes form dialogues and chains of movement in space. Both intimacies and imaginaries emerge as multiscalar, being deeply personal and closely family related, but also generational and class related, and including also transnational and/or officially endorsed ideas and values. The scene of comparative intimacies is exemplified on the basis of three homesites: Soviet prefab apartment buildings, pre-Soviet farm homes, and Soviet-era summer homes. The common homing model in the Soviet-era Baltics included at least two, if not three homely sites: while most people lived in urban environments, summer vacations were typically spent in a pre-Soviet farm home or in a recently built summer home. Of these different homescapes, each supported their inhabitants' identities in their own specific ways, each offered a different regime of spatial sensibilities, a different combination of sensations, relationscapes, and imaginaries. The essay accommodates methods of geopoetics and includes analysis of fictional texts, life writing, and the embodied presence of the author.

How do Estonians imagine themselves as a nation? According to a popular Estonian essayist, a proper Estonian digs his garden on Mondays and mines his bitcoins on Tuesdays. This article focuses on Estonian imaginaries to study the grounding structures of Estonian identity-creation in the 2010s and it articulates the core of a canonized understanding of Estonian identity as "eco-digital nationhood." The article explores Estonia's eco-digital national model as produced by an aesthetic screening, supported by a Western gaze adapted for local purposes of positive identity creation. In Estonia, international approval (for its reputation as a digital nation) has fostered a national self-image of living in a digital state. Technological advancement combined with idealizations of natural environments have sometimes produced "eco-ambiguous" results, as in efforts to encounter nonhuman life-worlds without leaving one's own comfort zone. In other instances, the eco and the digital function as two alternating modes of selfhood, the eco-part sometimes finding expression in the narratives of ethnic particularism, the digital part figuring Estonia as a herald of western modernism prudently adapting itself to the digital future. Discrepancies between the eco-digital imaginary and the many less flattering elements of Estonian actuality highlight selective (self-)representative strategies in narratives of national success. Nation building here emerges as a metonymic process, wherein certain parts of culture are foregrounded to represent the whole—while other parts, including substantial parts of the Soviet heritage (material, demographic, social, psychological) languish as unsuitable to be framed.

Traumatic body, word, and otherness: Refugees and deportations in the 1940s Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic This essay analyses some instances of Estonian life-writing in order to investigate the question of collective trauma in the Soviet-era Baltics, and especially in Estonia. I suggest that it is precisely the combina­tion of wounded body, word and otherness that forms the basis of collective, or national trauma. In working through or acting out the traumatic as a repetitive event, the affective charge in the wounded body will find its expression through the unconditional rejection of the Other. This intimate liaison between the negative affective charge that is experienced in the body and the Other that is figured in the imagination is disseminated in discursive form. The link between the national Other and one's bodily vulnerability is established in a way that resists rationalization: for those who lived through the trauma of deportations, the Other becomes transfixed in a structure of trauma in a way that cannot be negotiated. Травматическое тело, слово и другое: беженцы и депортации в 1940-х годах в Эстонской Советской Социалистической РеспубликеВ статье анализируются некоторые примеры эстонских биографических писаний, чтобы исследовать вопрос о коллективной травме в странах Прибалтики в советскую эпоху, особенно в Эстонии. Полагается, что именно комбинация раненого тела, слова и другой при­роды составляет основу коллективной или национальной травмы. При работе или разыгры­вании травматического как повторяющегося события, эмоциональный заряд в раненом теле находит свое выражение через безусловное отклонение Другого. Эта интимная связь между от­рицательным аффективным зарядом, который испытывается в теле и Другoм, фигурирующим в воображении, распространяется в дискурсивной форме. Национальная связь с Другим и физиологической уязвимостью устанавливается таким образом, который не подлежит рацио нализации: для тех, кто пережил травму депортаций, Другое становится запертым в структуре травмы таким образом, что оно не обсуждается.

This article endeavors to open a new critical space for Soviet studies and for nationalities studies more generally. Through analyses of recent trends in Soviet studies, the article dismantles the frequently used opposition between subjective and objective approaches to Soviet empire and suggests instead that truths and categories, whether considered "subjective" or "objective," are constructed discursively, through legitimizing certain interpretive models over the others. The article also argues against disciplinary avoidance of "what is" questions (e.g. "what is a nation?") and claims that an excessive concern for (re)producing essentialism should not hinder scholarly inquiry. Several new lines of inquiry for the study of the Soviet empire are suggested and also applicable in nationalities studies more generally: research on the role of symbolic violence in manufacturing consent and research concerning the role of affect in producing linkages between the performative life of a singular human being and the pedagogical discourse of a nation or empire. The article also offers an analysis of the Soviet Union as an empire in becoming and it advocates for postcolonial approaches within Soviet studies. The practical dimensions of Soviet rule are exemplified with data from the Baltic borderlands in the postwar years.

Frontcover -- Titel -- Impressum -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Monika Albrecht: German Multiculturalism and Postcolonialism in Comparative Perspective -- Isabel Hoving: Dutch Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism and National Identity: Society, Theory, Literature -- Sarah De Mul: The Role of Subnational Identity in Belgian (Post-) Colonialism -- Kirsten Thisted: Imperial Ghosts in the North Atlantic -- Yves Clavaron: »La Francophonie« and Beyond -- Paulo de Medeiros: Post-Imperial Europe: First Definitions -- Florian Krobb: Defining Germanness Overseas -- Heike Bartel: Colonial Myths - Classical Texts in (Post-) Colonial Perspective -- Liesbeth Minnaard: Of a Chinese Merchant and a Chinese Monster -- Axel Dunker: Recent German Novels on Colonialism in International Perspective -- Dirk Göttsche: Memory and Critique of Colonialism in Contemporary German and English Historical Novels about Africa -- Iulia-Karin Patrut: Conceptualizing German Colonialisms within Europe -- Marijan Bobinac: Cultural Transfer in the Habsburg Empire -- Milka Car: Literary Legacies of the Habsburg Empire in a Postcolonial Perspective -- Anneli Saro: Superimposed Soviet Colonialism -- Epp Annus: Layers of Colonial Rule in the Baltics -- Notes on the Contributors -- Backcover.