Revising Postsocialism

This article reflects on the current explanatory value of concepts such as postsocialism and Eastern Europe by exploring how they are represented in contemporary art projects in Estonia. Through an overview of recent exhibitions in which I collaborated with local artists and curators, the research considers generational differences in relation to cultural discourses of the postsocialist experience. Methodologically, artists and curators were not simply my informants in the field, but makers of analytical knowledge themselves in their practice. Exhibitions were also approached as contact zones, whereby new cultural forms are simultaneously reflected and constructed. Critically, this inquiry gathers new ways of representing and conceptualising cultural changes in Estonia and novel perspectives of interpreting the relations to the Soviet past. The focus is put on art practice because of its capacity of bringing together global and local frames of reference simultaneously. The research also draws attention to the inbetweenness of the first post-Soviet generation (those born near the time of the breakup of the USSR); they are revising established cultural forms as well as historical representations through mixing practices, and therefore updating traditional ideas of identity and attachment to places.

No Longer Lost on the Human Highway:

In recent years, Canadian/US singer, songwriter, and author Neil Young’s production shows increased signs of environmental awareness, manifested in his promotion of biofuels, critique of genetic manipulation, biotechnology, and ecocide, as well as in his warm attitude to non-human animals. These issues are dealt with in detail in his recent memoir Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars (2015), as well as on his recently released albums such as The Monsanto Years (2015) and Earth (2016). While this interest in the natural world could be seen as a simple expression of a 1960s countercultural hippie world view, this essay will propose a different reading of the meaning of animals and the non-human in Young’s Special Deluxe by placing it in the context of human–animal studies and its critique of anthropocentrism. By reading the memoir’s representations of non-human animals in tandem with the emphatic role of the environment on Young’s recent albums, this essay argues that Young’s recent work reveals an increased concern for relationality and non-humans in human life and thus problematizes modernity’s insistence on anthropocentrism and human mastery over nature. Based on the critique of modernity and its anthropocentric hierarchies presented by human–animal studies scholarship (Haraway 2008; Armstrong 2008; Marvin and McHugh 2014), it is suggested that Young’s work foregrounds an explicit concern with the non-human world through its increasing focus on the relationality of the human and the non-human, and their mutual interdependence. The importance of non-human others, especially dogs, to the memoir’s narrator is addressed in detail, and the close transspecies relationship seen as an example of the emotional significance of non-human others in everyday life. Keywords: Neil Young, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, environmentalism, human–animal studies, anthropocentricism

Critical Future Studies and Age: attending to future imaginings of age and ageing

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine newfutures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

Performative Memory

Though scholars in memory studies often deal with different aspects of cultural memory, it is rare to find any systematic framework to which memory adheres to and which would explain the emergence and maintenance of memories in general. In this article, I use the concepts of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, namely interpellation, subject constitution, repetition, sedimentation, citationality and subversion, to show how she could provide a procedural account of memory formation. To illustrate how this might work, I look at how Turkey has chosen to commemorate the failed coup of July 2016 by interpreting some examples of such memory through Butler’s theories. In doing so, I show that Butler, rather than introducing new concepts to the field, offers a systematic framework that can relate scholars to one another by transposing their concepts onto Butler’s theory.

Notes on the Location of Happiness

This article explores the world making capabilities of travel writing (Goodman 1978; Youngs 2013). The premise is that literary products are key elements in the configuration of the world itself and that specifically authors of travel accounts mediate the world to their readership at home (Archetti 1994). By highlighting three different examples of travel writing, the article discusses the persistent notion of the tropical island as an actually existing paradise on earth. More specifically, the discussion focus around the notion that happiness exists in places to which one can travel to. The examples at hand are two eighteenth century travel logs one French and one English; Louise-Antoine de Bougainville’s from 1772 and William Bligh’s from 1792, while the third and final example is a contemporary Swedish travel piece written by Anders Mathlein and first published in 2001.

Pipe Dreams of the Nouveaux Riches

World expos are occasions for the type of rhetorical display known as "epideictic," and as such, they provide glimpses into how a nation wants to be seen at a particular point in time. In this article, I probe into Norway’s pavilion at the 1992 expo in Seville, Spain, for answers to what Norway wanted to be in the early 1990s. I will argue that Norway’s pavilion, a “deconstructed structure” that centered on a somewhat ambiguous pipe, signals a country in the process of reinventing itself under the aegis of petroleum. More specifically, I suggest that Norway’s ’92 pavilion can be read as an early instantiation of rhetorical techniques that would later become key to Norway’s claim to being both a leading petroleum producer and an environmental frontrunner. The pavilion itself pulled off this balancing act in much the same way that politicians and others would later learn to handle it – by techniques of rhetorical association and dissociation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969 [1958]). Having chosen “the cycle of water” as the overarching theme for the exhibition, the makers of the pavilion (the largest sponsor of which was the state oil company, Statoil) managed to make petroleum safe by renaming it “offshore” and by associating it, also in many other ways, with water. The pavilion’s deconstructive architecture can thus be understood as an early validation of the rhetorical practice of “putting together” and “taking apart” to make new things that serve the nation’s interests – in this case a “cycle of water” in which petroleum was a natural part. Although I posit only similarity, and not causality, the rhetorical techniques of Norway’s ’92 pavilion were in this way strikingly similar to what later became a stock argument, e.g. that Norway offers “the world’s cleanest petroleum” (see Ihlen 2007).

Sweden, South Africa and the business of partnership in the 1990s

This article examines the background and ambitions of the large-scale Swedish-South Africa Partnership Week that was rolled out across South Africa in November 1999. The Swedish delegation was spearheaded by Prime Minister Göran Persson and consisted of 800 Swedes; high-level ministers, diplomats, civil society representatives and business leaders. The analysis places particular emphasis on the involvement of Swedish multinationals and the central role played by the public relations agency Rikta Kommunikation. Its focus lies on the broader pedagogical function that the Week was intended to have, primarily from a Swedish point of view. I argue that the stated aim to forge an economic partnership between Sweden and South Africa as the logical extension of decades of historical political solidarity was a means of ensuring that citizens learned to understand the pressures and demands of the new era of globalisation. The foreseeable end of Swedish aid to South Africa was to be the dawn of self-sustaining economic relations; “business interests” – for so long derided by the anti-apartheid activists – were henceforth to lead the way. In light of this, I conclude by arguing that the official launch and marketing of a bilateral partnership in 1999 can be seen as part of a government-funded effort to adapt Swedish internationalism to a new era.

1994 – a temporal and scalar exploration of a Norwegian climax

This article explores ‘1994’ as a cultural-historical ‘moment’ in order to tease out the layered manifestation of ‘Norway’ in a globalizing world. With offset in the oral testimonies, news coverage, reports, analysis and memories of people experiencing and contextualizing the two events of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and the Norwegian referendum on membership in the EU, the article pursues their meaning along several temporalities and on multiple spatial scales. The argument is that ‘1994’ marked a symbolic climax and watershed moment for Norwegian (cultural) patriotism and the dispersion of what ‘Norway’ meant in a national, Nordic, European and global context. But the climax’s meaning were fragmented across time and space, and the monolithic moment has increasingly come to be filled with silences, anxieties and frustrations. Indeed, the Norwegian climax of 1994 dissolved in commercialism, mediatized fragmentation, Europeanization and globalization. The recognition that neither the ‘uniqueness’ of the ‘best Olympic Winter Games ever’ nor the ideational and historical significance of the Norwegian ‘no’ was received as intended by the sender, makes their temporal manifestations in the national context all the more significant: The simultaneous resurrection and burying of these twin events of the 1994-climax can thus be understood as a significant catalyst of Norway’s cultural and political myopia through a period of hasty, tumultuous and increasingly troublesome globalization.

‘Nordic Nineties’: Norwegian and Swedish self-understanding in the face of globalization

‘Nordic Nineties’: Norwegian and Swedish self-understanding in the face of globalization

Stories of Siblinghood

This article analyzes newspaper representations of Nordic neighboring countries at the 1994 winter Olympics. Held in Lillehammer, Norway, the games constituted an enormous sporting success for the Norwegians, while neighboring Finland and Sweden fared much worse, which led national media in all three countries to contemplate on the discrepancy. Focusing on the tension between national and macro-regional Nordic identities, this article argues that media neighbor-images did in fact not compromise the seemingly collision-bound norms of “national rivalry” and “Nordist friendship”. Instead, the two norms informed and enforced each other through the key concept of humor, which created a safe media space for an Olympic dramaturgy of “siblinghood” to play out in. The analysis complements previous research on Nordic identity through highlighting the importance of emotion, popular cultural narratives, and intra-national neighbor relations for the construction of Nordicness.