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This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women's narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second and third generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Adopting the idea that the text itself becomes a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process and visual text. The last part questions the past in relation to trauma and identity displacement in the countries where abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the people lives.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe - Simona Mitroiu.- 2. The Transmutative Turn: Legacies of Loss and Love at the Source - Hannah Kliger with Bina Miriam Kliger Peltz and Frieda Lorberbaum Kliger.- 3. 'Narrative achieves an amplitude': Research-Creation, Postmemory, and the Aesthetics of Transmission - Sasha Colby.- 4. Entangled Memories of Expulsion and Resettlement in post-1945 Germany and Poland: Dialogue in Two Voices - Linda Warley and Eva C. Karpinski.- 5. Eva Hoffman's Exit into History: Shifting Subject Positions - Alina Sufaru.- 6. Inherited displacement and relational remembering in Once My Mother by Sophia Turkiewicz - Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams.- 7. Non-human Displacements: Narrative Remediations of Autobiography and Postmemory in Herta Müller's Writing - Mihaela Ursa.- 8. Dubravka Ugresic: Boundaries of (Post)Memory, Self and Nation - Vanja Polic.- 9. Gender-Structured Transmission of Post-Displacement Memory in Contemporary Poland - Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper.- 10. Postmemory and Women's Displacement in Socialist Albania: Historical Methodologies as Response - Davjola Ndoja and Shannon Woodcock with Eriada Çela and Edlira Majko.- 11. Inheriting and Re-imagining Rights: Assessing References to a Soviet Past amongst Young Women in Neoliberal and Neo-conservative Russia - Vikki Turbine.
About the author
Simona Mitroiu is Senior Researcher at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Romania. She is the editor of the volume
Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe(Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). Her research focuses on European culture, identity narrative, remembrance process in the former communist states, memory and life writing.
Report
"This collaborative project will encourage other researchers interested in the history of population displacement and its effects on the formation of identities in postsocialist and postcolonial societies." (Tomas Balkelis, Biography, Vol. 42 (4), 2019)
"The present volume proposes a large variety of approaches to the politics of memory in Central and Eastern Europe, contributing with valuable insights on roots and routes of the past. Personal stories are intertwined with academic writing in comprehensible and conscious research, not losing sight of the structures of remembering because identity defines the next generations and could be easily manipulated." (Maria Farâma, Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Vol. 5 (1), July, 2019)
