Left Perspectives on Discipline I: Cultures of Comparison

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable investigates comparative methodology in East European studies to think beyond traditional area studies. We approach East Europe as a site, model, and unit of comparison, exploring its potential for studies of comparative regionalisms, world-systems analysis, and transnationalism. In recent years, scholars have highlighted the advantages of East Europe “as method” when engaging conceptual questions that range from intersections between coloniality and imperiality; cultural hybridity; complexities of racial identification; experiences of peripherality; and socialist internationalisms. Many of these studies challenge established West-centric models by considering East Europe in relation with other peripheralized regions, while also positioning it as a thinking subject that contributes new epistemologies rather than a studied object that is the site of epistemic othering.
Our roundtable tackles the Convention theme, liberation, as a mode of critical epistemology that seeks to overcome the peripheralization of East Europe area studies as it also reconstructs comparative histories of liberation and gestures towards new collaborations. We explore cultures of comparison through a variety of lenses: the emergence of Comparative Literature as a discipline in East Europe; transnational and “translational” cultures of nonaligned literary solidarities; the global circulation of Naive art as a valence of nonaligned modernism; and including refugee and forced migration from East Europe to the US in comparative refugee studies. We propose different modes of “creolizing” the conventional national analytical lens to include transnational contexts and connections. This panel hopes to contribute to the field of New Yugoslav Studies.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State U

Roundtable Members

• Natasa Kovacevic, Eastern Michigan U

• Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State U

• Bojana Videkanic, U of Waterloo (Canada)