At the Intersection of Narrative and Affect: The Art of Memory in Belarus, Hungary, and Poland

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Historical events from the past continue to shape the present, both as narratives—constructed and mediated through (auto)biographical and historiographical accounts—and as affect, transmitted through embodied encounters and shared emotions. Nationalist governments often ideologically frame certain historical narratives to foster affective communities, encouraging people to feel and remember the past in similar ways. However, artworks and museums, by creating affective and embodied encounters with the past, can challenge these seemingly unified collective memories. This interdisciplinary panel focuses on the Central-East European countries of Poland, Hungary, and Belarus, examining how historical narratives and the present affective modalities mutually constitute, counterpoint, or complement one another through various mediums and art forms.
Anna Krakus, in her study of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, analyzes the “narrative panic” in Polish political and museological spaces surrounding the commemoration of Polish aggression and victimhood during World War II. Maya Nadkarni explores the complex cultural memory— spanning from a contentious, unresolved burden of guilt and shame to a source of retro pleasure—in the 2022 HBO series The Informer, which centers on a student coerced by communist state security into spying on his classmates in 1985 Hungary. Rita Kompelmakher explores how memory and historical trauma shape narrative production about the ongoing war in Ukraine, analyzing theatrical works created with and by exilic communities from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Finally, Aniko Szucs interrogates how the critical dystopias of 21st-century Hungarian theatre mobilize the affective memory of Soviet oppression to create performances of resistance.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Aniko Szucs, CUNY Queens College

Papers

• Unmasking the Informer?: Memory, Authenticity, and the Politics of Knowledge about the Socialist Past - Maya Nadkarni, Swarthmore College

• Where do we Put the Ulmas?: Political History and the Museum of the Second World War in Poland - Anna Krakus, U of Copenhagen (Denmark)

• To Remember Is to Resist: Memory as a Means of Resistance in Contemporary Hungarian Dystopian Theatre - Aniko Szucs, CUNY Queens College

• Diasporic Performative: Memory and Affect in Emigre Theater from Belarus and Ukraine - Margarita Kompelmakher, Alliance Theatre

Discussant

• Lora Maslenitsyna, Yale U