Bloodlands Fiction: Cultural Trauma Politics and the Memory of Soviet Atrocities inBreaking Stalin's Nose,A Winter's Day in 1939andBetween Shades of Gray

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Oziewicz

The field of trauma theory emerged in the 1990s out of the confluence of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and Holocaust studies. It soon consolidated into a trauma paradigm with hegemonic pretensions, which was ill-equipped to recognise traumatic experiences of non-Western and postcolonial groups or nations. It likewise tended to dismiss from trauma fiction any narratives that deviated from the aporetic model of normative trauma aesthetic. These limitations were exposed by the postcolonial turn in history and memory studies, which made it incumbent upon trauma theory to expand its focus to other literatures that bear witness to the so-far neglected, minoritarian trauma traditions. This essay introduces one such tradition, which is the recently emerged body of historical fiction about Soviet deportations, atrocities, genocide and other forms of persecution meant to subdue or eliminate entire ethnic or national groups in Eastern Europe between 1930 and the late 1950s. The genre of Bloodlands fiction, as I have called it elsewhere,1first exploded in national literatures of Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s, after fifty years of suppression of cultural memory under the Communist regimes. About a decade later works of Bloodlands fiction became available in English, often written by diaspora authors. Starting with a challenge to the conventional definition of trauma fiction, this essay argues for a wider model that accommodates genres including Bloodlands fiction. Readings of Breaking Stalin's Nose (2013) by Russian American Eugene Yelchin, A Winter's Day in 1939 (2013) by Polish New Zealander Melinda Szymanik and Between Shades of Gray (2011) by Lithuanian American Ruta Sepetys are used to illustrate some of the key features, textual strategies and cognitive effects of Bloodlands fiction as a genre of global trauma fiction.

sjesr ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-281
Author(s):  
Mehreen Zafar ◽  
Dr. Muhammad Ahsan ◽  
Dr. Zahoor Hussain

The current study aims to explore the traumatic experiences of female characters of Sophia Khan’s Yasmeen. M. Balaev (2014) identified “the concept of trauma as pathological and unspeakable” in the genre of trauma fiction. The insights Bloom’s Psychological Trauma Theory (1999) provided the theoretical framework for the descriptive and critical textual analysis of the novel which in turn disclosed the traumatic experiences of leading female characters, Yasmeen, Irenie, Celeste and Mehrunissa. The current study is in the qualitative paradigm of research and suggested through findings that the female characters are suffering from various traumatic experiences resulted through the loss, distrust, immoral values, and re-enactment; the teenage young characters, Irenie and Celeste can dilute the trauma by dissociating the emotions whereas Yasmeen and Mehrunissa, the adult characters cannot cope their traumatic experiences.  Though the traumatic experiences of all characters are separate in content and degree but the traumatic experiences of ‘Evolution’s legacy’, emotions of loss, and ‘Learned helpless’, constrained actions, are common to all female characters.


Open Theology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 208-223
Author(s):  
Kirsi Cobb

Abstract The story of Lot’s daughters’ incest with their father in Genesis 19:30–38 has been variously understood as a myth, a trickster tale, and an androcentric phantasy. In this paper, I will use insights gained from trauma theory, as well as from the characters of Emily and Moira in the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to evaluate the daughters’ actions. Studying the characters in the final form of the text, the women undergo traumatic experiences as their father offers their bodies to be raped (Gen. 19:7–8) and they witness the destruction of their home (Gen. 19:24–25). Consequently, they engage in what could be described as a traumatic re-enactment with their father, where the roles of the perpetrator and the victim are reversed, and the continuation of the patriarchal line is simultaneously guaranteed. Read in conjunction with the fates of Emily and Moira, the daughters’ experience could be summarized in Emily’s observation, “Look at what they’ve turned us into.” In the lives of all the women, the experience of cumulative and direct trauma influenced their decision making as well as the choices they had available. This leaves the audience in a moment of uncertainty, where evaluating the women’s actions becomes a complex, even an impossible prospect.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Bocsi ◽  
Hajnalka Fényes ◽  
Valéria Markos

In this article, the motives for voluntary work and work values in higher education contexts are examined in a cross-border region in Central Eastern Europe. Our goal is to find out what kind of relationship exists between different types of volunteering and work values among young people. In the theoretical section, we deal with the definition of volunteering in the education system, the types of and motives for students’ volunteering, and finally, the relationship between the work values and voluntary work of students. In the empirical section, we created cluster groups based on students’ motives for volunteering, and we examined differences among countries. Then we revealed the factor structure of the work values of students and analyzed the relationship between cluster groups and factors with variance analysis. Five cluster groups were identified: “careerists with postmodern features,” “unmotivated,” “highly motivated,” “volunteers in an anti-volunteering climate,” and a “helping new type volunteers” group. There were only slight differences among countries, as most respondents are characterized by mixed motivations. An interesting result is that the most frequent group is “the volunteers in an anti-volunteering climate” in all the countries examined, especially in Ukraine, so the culture of volunteering is not popular enough in this region of Central Eastern Europe. Regarding the relationship between work values and volunteering, we have found that these two fields (work values and volunteering) are closely related.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Fuentes ◽  

Since granted world heritage status by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1982, Old Havana has been the site of contested heritage practices. Critics consider UNESCO’s definition of the 143 hectare walled city center a discriminatory delineation strategy that primes the colonial core for tourist consumption at the expense of other parts of the city. To neatly bound Havana’s collective memory/history within its “old” core, they say, is to museumize the city as ”frozen in time,” sharply distinguishing the “historic” from the “vernacular.”While many consider heritage practices to resist globalization, in Havana they embody a complex entanglement of global and local forces. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 triggered a crippling recession during what Fidel Castro called a“Special Period in a Time of Peace.” In response, Castro redeveloped international tourism—long demonized by the Revolution as associated with capitalist “evils”—in order to capture the foreign currency needed to maintain the state’s centralized economy. Paradoxically, the re-emergence of international tourism in socialist Cuba triggered similar inequalities found in pre-Revolutionary Havana: a dual-currency economy, government-owned retail (capturing U.S. dollars at the expense of Cuban Pesos), and zoning mechanisms to “protect” Cubanos from the “evils” of the tourism, hospitality, and leisure industries. Using the tropes of “heritage”and “identity,” preservation practices fueled tourism while allocating the proceeds toward urban development, using capitalism to sustain socialism. This paper briefly traces the geopolitics of 20th century development in Havana, particularly in relation to tourism. It then analyzes tourism in relation to preservation / restoration practices in Old Havana using the Plaza Vieja (Old Square)—Old Havana’ssecond oldest and most restored urban space—as a case study. In doing so, it exposes preservation/ restoration as a dynamic and politically complex practice that operates across scales and ideologies, institutionalizing history and memory as an urban design and identity construction strategy. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications of such practices for a rapidly changing Cuba.


Author(s):  
Veronica De Pieri

January 27, 1945: the Red Army set Auschwitz concentration camp free, making this date the liberation day for thousands of inmates, victims of the Nazi’s idea of a master race. August 15, 1945: Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan on Japanese radio after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. XX century witnessed two of the most abominable atrocities of human history whose repercussions still affect not only German and Japanese societies, involved at first place, but also each individual’s consciousness too. Over the past decades different studies have been investigating these indelible marks on history on many levels: historical, political, sociological, psychological and even artistic approaches were called into question in the search for the truth about Shoah and atomic bombing catastrophes. This study offers a different perspective on the topic by comparing the poetical responses of two representatives of the so-called Shoah Literature and Atomic Bombing Literature: Primo Levi and Tamiki Hara. Both authors, although the space-related distance and the different nature of the traumatic experiences they witnessed, gave birth to similar poetical responses under the title of Se questo è un uomo (“If this is a man”) and Kore ga ningen na no desu (“This is a human being”).This research sets itself the ambitious goal to demonstrate how, regardless of territorial, cultural and stylistic boundaries, a similar human response toward catastrophe can be detached in the literary productions of Levi and Hara: a comparison on stylistic, figurative and expressive level reveals the analogous literary solutions adopted by the authors to depict human’s frailty in front of trauma. Both authors answer the literary imperative of writing: their commitment unveils the aim to bear witness and to convey memory to the future generations. Words, enriched by authors of allusive and critical meanings, represent an effective and necessary means to keep alive and to preserve the traumatic memory. The literature of the catastrophe, then, becomes a language that unites, rather than divides, different societies. It serves as an universal mouthpiece for victims’ experiences to prevent Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happen again. Submission date: September 2017.


1978 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry C. Olson ◽  
Philip A. Dover

Although much has been written about deception in advertising, no studies have been reported in which a deception and its impact on consumers were demonstrated empirically. The authors present a behavioral definition of deception and illustrate its operationalization in the context of a longitudinal experiment in which the effects of an explicit, deceptive product claim on a variety of cognitive variables were measured both before and after product trial. Issues related to the measurement of deception seriousness are emphasized. The basic approach appears generalizable to nonexperimental studies of real-world deception.


1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
P Bishop

The attitude towards rhetoric, metaphor, and imagery is identified in this paper as being central both to the definition of postmodernism and to any postmodern scholarship. It is also claimed that questions about the relationship between archetypal psychology and geography mirrors the wider postmodern phenomenon of comparative knowledges. By focusing on radical criticism of contemporary heritage movements it is shown how archetypal psychology can help to deepen metaphorical reflection on such crucial issues as fantasy, theory, history, and memory. In particular, it is insisted that such reflections should themselves avoid philosophical abstraction and stay as close as possible to the logic of imaginative discourse.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Örnebring

This article argues that the traditional political science definition of clientelism is insufficient for explaining how the media fit in with clientelistic systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It is suggested that a broader understanding of clientelism, looking in particular at how media are used as elite-to-elite communication tools as well as elite-to-mass communication tools, better explains the place of the media in the clientelistic systems of the CEE nations. Empirically, it is based on a set of 272 elite and expert interviews conducted across ten CEE countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) in 2010 and 2011. The article presents some general findings on the nature and character of the linkages between political elites and the media, and the extent to which such linkages can be considered clientelistic. Then follows a discussion of specific practices of media instrumentalization, charting the many ways in which the media can function as a resource in conflicts and negotiations between clientelistic elite networks, directly as well as indirectly. Particular attention is given to the phenomena of advertorials and kompromat.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-280
Author(s):  
Natalia Tomczewska-Popowycz

The purpose of the study is to explore the challenges of defining what is commonly known as “ethnic tourism”. Provided here a review, comparison, integration and systematization of the definitions of the phenomenon, its facets and characteristics. In particular, such variations as sentimental tourism, ethnic tourism, nostalgic tourism, diaspora tourism, genealogy tourism, are ancestral tourism subjected to a comparative analysis. The study is based on a systemic literature review and qualitative and frequency analysis of the definitions of the phenomenon. The literature search was not limited to publications by Ukrainian authors, but included Polish and Russian available relevant literature on the topic. Offered a new definition of ethnic tourism and other definition connected with ethnic aspects. The lack of clear definitions and differences in understanding significantly impeding the development of his area of tourism. This study gives rise to more function in operation of this type of tourism in theory and practice.


Author(s):  
Steven Beller

In addition to the ‘irrationalist’ critique of ‘Jewish’ modernity that informed some antisemitism, there was another, ‘rational’ side to antisemitism. ‘The perils of modernity’ considers the irony that the biggest threat to Jews in Central and Eastern Europe was the modernization of society given the form that this modernization took. The influence of racial theory was also closely bound up with the much increased prestige of nationalism in early 20th-century Europe. Once the definition of modernity had shifted to the more ‘organic’ and collectivist model, in which the ‘reactionary rationalism’ of biological thinking—and race—played such a large role, Jewish difference became racially defined, and hence impossible to overcome.


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