Imagined Memories of Liquid Transitions: Manifestations in (Post-)Soviet / Post-Socialist Popular Cultures and Visual Arts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Around the time of the Soviet and state socialisms’ collapse cultural production registered and generated a hope for and an anxiety over a possible creation of collective memories from the former ‘second’ and ‘first’ worlds. This panel explores the preemptive nostalgia for these envisaged memories in popular cultures and contemporary art from Ukraine, Latvia, Russia, and post-Yugoslav and North American diasporas. Employing intermedial and comparative focality, panelists excavate the vivid imaginations of what these memories could have been and invite a consideration of what the current meanings of these memories are. Challenging the master narratives of transition, the panel considers a range of cultural artefacts that signal and grasp the alternate shared anticipations and remembrances of the futures; this scope includes popular songs, bestsellers, and TV series from the Ukrainian 1990s, Latvian-language documentaries from the times of perestroika, restoration of Latvia’s independence, and Latvia’s westernization in the 21st century, contemporary folk song translations from and into Tajik, English, and Russian, and queer resistance artworks from post-socialist Yugoslav space and its diasporas. The panel, thus, contributes to the conceptuality of non-linear and oscillating (post-)Soviet / post-socialist temporalities and spatialities in the global context.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Kerstin Klenke, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)

Papers

• Memories of the Future: A Dream of America in Ukrainian Cultural Production of the 1990s - Iuliana Matasova, New Europe College Romania

• Looking Back on Perestroika: Three Eras in the History of Latvian Cinema - Vincent Kancans, U of Minnesota

• Cosmopolitan Lines of Flight: Song Translations by Arkady Kots Band, Manizha, and Daniel Kahn - Mark Simon, Bielefeld U (Germany)

• Legacies of Queer Desire in Contemporary Art of the Post-Yugoslav Space and its Diasporas - Jasmina Tumbas, SUNY Buffalo

Discussant

• Kerstin Klenke, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)

Session Manager

• Anastasia Felcher, Central European U Austria