Minor Nation

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Pershái

In the twentieth century, nationalism has become an unwritten yet strong hegemonic rule that prescribes and defines cultural configurations of statehood. In the context of post-socialist and post-colonial transformations in “expanding” Eastern Europe, nation building is a complicated and incoherent process: the nation’s canonic attributes may contradict the cultural and historical “circumstances” of the development of a particular nation. This article questions a complicated dynamic between theoretical frameworks of nationalism and their applications in Eastern European states, such as in Belarus. More specifically, it argues against the discursive conceptualization of Belarus as a “nonexistent” or “undeveloped” nation. This article suggests rethinking nation building in Belarus in relation to the notion of major/minor developed by Deleuze and Guattari. The author implies that the unusual mode of Belarusian nationalism is not only a part of a struggle for domination between different intellectual groups in Belarus; it is also an issue of relying on traditional scholarly paradigms of nationalism that may no longer suffice.

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceslav Ciobanu

This article provides an insider’s view of Gorbachev’s policy “perestroika and glasnost” as it related to the former Central and Eastern European socialist countries. The author describes Gorbachev’s relations with the leaders of communist parties of the Warsaw Treaty. A participant in many of Gorbachev’s meetings with his counterparts, the author analyzes the emergence of democracy and market reforms in these countries. He observed two distinct groups of socialist leaders, one relatively progressive and reform oriented and the other consisting of hardliners with traditional views opposed to any political and economic change. The author describes their attitude toward Gorbachev’s reforms. Based on his personal experience with the Soviet leader, the author also identifies some of the characteristics that made Mikhail Gorbachev one of the most distinguished leaders of the twentieth century, based on his personal experience with the Soviet leader. The author’s description highlights lesser-known aspects of Gorbachev’s performance that complete a portrait of this complex person.


2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden

ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.


Author(s):  
Rossella Di Rosa

      L’elaborato si propone di analizzare il pensiero ecologico di Anna Maria Ortese, concentrandosi su Alonso e i visionari, testo che, seppur trascurato dal pubblico e dalla critica, può essere considerato il manifesto dell’intera poetica ortesiana. Il credo dell’autrice è infatti rivolto ad annullare la differenza tra umano e non umano, a combattere per l’inclusione dell’animale nel circolo etico, a difendere i diritti di tutti gli esseri viventi e non viventi, alla ricerca di una forma di pensiero più inclusiva e che si fondi su nuovi valori come l’amore, la pietà, la partecipazione al dolore e il “soccorso” a tutte le creature e alla Terra stessa. Propongo di rileggere Alonso e i visionari da una prospettiva ecologica al fine di dimostrare non solo come l’autrice partecipi al dibattito su “La questione animale” al centro degli studi sull’animalità, ma come anticipi spesso riflessioni e considerazioni di filosofi e pensatori del Novecento, tra cui Agamben, Cavalieri, Derrida, Deleuze e Guattari. Abstract      This essay aims to analyze Anna Maria Ortese’s ecological thought, which significantly distinguishes her last novel, Alonso e i visionari. I believe that the novel, which has been overlooked both by critics and by readers, can be considered as the manifesto of the author’s poetics. Indeed, it summarizes the writer’s tenets, devoted to annulling the difference between human and nonhuman world, to struggling for the animal’s inclusion in the moral community, to proposing an understanding of intelligence that combines reason, compassion, and care for both human and nonhuman beings as well as for the entire planet Earth itself. I suggest reading the novel from an ecocritical perspective to illustrate how Ortese anticipates Braidotti’s posthuman thought, and provides original theoretical frameworks and criteria for exploring fundamental issues of “The Animal Question” even before such themes commanded the attention of prominent twentieth-century philosophers such as Agamben, Cavalieri, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari. Resumen      Este ensayo analiza el pensamiento ecológico de Anna Maria Ortese y examina la novela Alonso e i visionari, que puede ser considerada como el manifiesto de la obra ortesiana, aunque la obra no tuvo gran éxito de público ni de crítica en el momento de su publicación. El credo de la autora pretende invalidar la diferencia entre humano y no humano, luchar por la inclusión de los animales en el círculo ético, defender los derechos de todos los seres, buscar una tipología de pensamiento más inclusiva y que se base no solo en la razón sino en nuevos valores como el amor, la piedad, la participación en el dolor y la ayuda a todas las criaturas que lo necesiten, lo que la autora llama emblemáticamente “soccorso”. Mi trabajo sugiere una lectura de la novela desde una perspectiva ecocrítica para mostrar que Ortese participa en el debate conocido como “La cuestión de los animales,” y de la misma manera, anticipa el pensamiento de Braidotti sobre el posthumano y algunas consideraciones de destacados filósofos del siglo XX, como Agamben, Cavalieri, Derrida, Deleuze y Guattari.


2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (12) ◽  
pp. 90-98
Author(s):  
I. Barinov

The article investigates nation-building trajectories and civic identity formation in Eastern Europe. The indicated processes in Eastern European states are notably different from those in the Western part of Europe. They are hindered by the specific historical development of these countries and by a set of local characteristics in particular. Quite often, there are such obstacles as unresolved ethnic conflicts and non-involvement of minorities in the building of common political and public practices within the state. The paper aims at assessing the current situation, evaluating international and interethnic regulation practices in the region and their efficiency, working out criteria of a civic nation formation in Eastern European countries. This is, first of all, a question of sociocultural and political consolidation. Social activism and civic participation are also significant factors. Finally, the very nature of nationalism and the use of the “alien image” in relation to other ethnic groups within the state are important. On this basis, the article proposes a typology of the countries according to the stage of a civic identity formation, and assesses possible future developments. Acknowledgements. This article was prepared with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation [grant № 15-18-00021 “Regulating interethnic relations and managing ethnic and social conflicts in the contemporary world: the resource potential of civic identity (a comparative political analysis)”]. The research was conducted at the Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences (IMEMO).


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Tamás Krausz ◽  
Róbert Nárai

In the 1960s, György Lukács—under the slogan Back to Marx!—called for a "renaissance" of Marxism within Eastern Europe. To understand the nature of this renaissance, we have to understand the many important questions that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 raised for the anti-Stalinist left inside Hungary and Eastern Europe more broadly. This interview goes into the attempts to rethink the future of socialism from the Eastern European situation in the second half of the twentieth century, including the political lessons of 1968, the internal fight within the Hungarian Socialist Party, and the continued relevance of V. I. Lenin's Marxism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bohdan Svarnyk ◽  

The features of the origin and development of the pantomime theater in the countries of Eastern Europe in the 60-70s of the XX century are studied on the basis of the analysis of the experimental activities of the founder of the Czech school of classical modern pantomime L. Vialka, the Slovak pantomime M. Sladek, the Latvian artist, actor and director M. Tenisson , Estonian pantomime by A. Traks.The study found that pantomime became widely popular in a number of European and post-Soviet countries in the second half of the twentieth century, but it is a borrowed form because there are similar elementsbetween ancient traditional pantomime productions and some of its European varieties. Borrowing cultural institutions or their individual components is possible only if the host culture has certain favorable conditions for their assimilation. At the same time, the borrowed material noticeably changes in the process of the influence of a whole complex of historical, social, religious and cultural factors, which determine the philosophical and aesthetic specifics of the new phenomenon.


Slavic Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Todorova

This article focuses on the discourse of backwardness as an aspect of what has been recognized as the dominant trope in east European historiography undl the end of the twentieth century, namely nationalism. Through a survey of east European historiographies, it demonstrates how different notions of temporality are employed. Eastern Europe as a whole and the particular problem of east European nationalism have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the pattern of anthropological objects, through structural models of “timeless” theory and method and bracketing out time as a dimension of intercultural study. The article proposes a way to circumvent the trap of origins, which carries backwardness as its corollary, by introducing the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework. This allows the description of a period in terms of linear consecutive developments but also as a dialogical process without overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, and diffusion.


Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Aleksander Łupienko

Historic monuments were one of the vehicles of modern nation building in the nineteenth century. Their role could turn out to be even more exposed in an ethnically mixed territory of central and central-eastern Europe. For the turn of the twentieth-century Polish inhabitants of the capital of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, urban secular historic architecture proved to be such a key tool. The Old Town of Lviv, in itself witness of a centuries-old multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tradition, became the basis for a modern nation-building project, in which local and regional Polish character administrative bodies and social institutions were involved. The project relied on the strengthening of national identity among Lviv's inhabitants by means of securing the ‘Polish character’ of the Old Town, which amounted to reinventing it anew.


Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.


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