Cristina Sandru - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Announcements by Cristina Sandru
Books by Cristina Sandru
This study explores the literary-cultural relation of Eastern Europe – particularly its communist... more This study explores the literary-cultural relation of Eastern Europe – particularly its communist legacy and post-communist trajectory – to postcolonial studies, interrogating the extent to which postcolonialism can function as an enabling theoretical construction that can help illuminate instances of ‘mind-colonisation’ in non-Third World contexts. It argues that colonisation is to be understood principally as a condition of ideological domination that has engendered similar forms of literary and cultural resistance; consequently, it offers a comparative framework which enables a reading in differential contexts of texts that ostensibly have little in common, but which, on close examination, reveal a shared imaginative space, rhetoric and narrative agency.
Structurally, the book consists of two interrelated parts. Part one is a critical discussion of the ideologies, cultural imaginaries and representational practices articulated in a diverse range of representative postcolonial and post-1945 East-Central European texts; these are shown to share, despite dissimilar conditions of production, uncannily related narrative modes and thematic emphases. The second part is a comparative literature case-study which discusses two authors whose work is both highly representative of the cultural formations I compare (Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie) and, at the same time, highly controversial.
The book thus straddles three main disciplinary areas: East-Central European studies, Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature. This is one of its major strengths, for it brings into dialogue fields of inquiry which, more often than not, tend to rationalise their lack of interest in each other’s problematics by elaborate arguments of historical and cultural incompatibility.
My approach, on the contrary, capitalizes on points of confluence (among which the construction of colonialism/communism as ambivalent processes, triggering differential moments of resistance, accommodation and complicity; post-imperial symptomatologies; exile and immigration) and analogous cultural nodes (the role of memory in the re-writing of the past; resistance as a complex of doubly-inscripted or overcoded discourses, ranging from overtly oppositional to carnivalesque and magical realist). Postcolonialism is not used as an ‘interpretive matrix’ for a unified theory of post-communism; rather, the study aims to show how these two different “posts”, both marking the wake of an empire, can inform each other within the space of differential ideological and cultural contexts, and thus work towards a more open and nuanced response to post-1989 geopolitical polarizations.
This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of p... more This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a geo-historical comparativism that seeks to move beyond present narrow definitions. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as transformations of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, objectifying gaze, collective memory and trauma, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism. Together the studies map the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art, the latter highlighted through accompanying illustrations.
by stuart murray, Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard, Mrinalini Greedharry, Simon B Obendorf, John C Hawley, Pasi Ahonen, Cristina Sandru, Eva Bischoff, Jennifer Wenzel, and Sharae Deckard
This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, di... more This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.
Contents:
Introduction Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray Part 1: Disciplinary Constellations: New Forms of Knowledge
1. Capitalizing on English Literature: Disciplinarity, Academic Labor and Postcolonial Studies Claire Westall
2. Dangerous Relations? Lessons from the Interface of Postcolonial Studies and International Relations Simon Obendorf
3. Managing Postcolonialism Mrinalini Greedharry and Pasi Ahonen
4. Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form John C. Hawley
Part 2: Case Studies: Geocultures, Topographies, Occlusions
5. Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies Patrick Williams
6. Facing/Defacing Robert Mugabe: Land Reclamation, Race and the End of Colonial Accountability Ashleigh Harris
7. Staging the Mulata: Performing Cuba Alison Fraunhar
8. Amongst the Cannibals: Articulating Masculinity in Postcolonial Weimar Germany Eva Bischoff
9. Postcolonial Postcommunism? Cristina Sandru
Part 3: Horizons: Environment, Materialism, World
10. Neoliberalism, Genre and the "Tragedy of the Commons" Rob Nixon
11. Reading Fanon Reading Nature Jennifer Wenzel
12. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan 13. If Oil Could Speak, What Would It Say? Crystal Bartolovich 14. Inherit the World: World-Literature, "Rising Asia" and the World-Ecology Sharae Deckard
Papers by Cristina Sandru
Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia This work reflects upon a facet of memory tha... more Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia This work reflects upon a facet of memory that has a special resonance for those of us entangled by the long histories of colonialism and decolonisation -nostalgia. 1 Nostalgia is a cultural phenomenon that in an uncanny way connects people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries, yet remains to be fully understood or explained. I call it uncanny, because I cannot think of a better word for describing the strange mix of individual and social desires that prompts the search for past experiences that constitutes nostalgia, and which seems to become prominent at certain critical stages of human history -such as the rise of industrialisation, when the writings of the European Romantics challenged what they perceived was happening in the world by exploring -as Rousseau and Wordsworth explored -the restorative, nurturing potential of memory for the threatened individual; or, nearer our own times, the rise in migration and exile accompanying the end of empire and the disasters of the twentieth century, explored in the writings of those, from Conrad and Joyce to Naipaul and Coetzee, whose fictions represent the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2009
Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders, 2012
With more than a nod to Milan Kundera’s concept of ‘imagology’, developed most fully in his 1991 ... more With more than a nod to Milan Kundera’s concept of ‘imagology’, developed most fully in his 1991 novel Immortality, this chapter attempts a selective reading of Salman Rushdie’s fictional use of modern technologies of representation to interrogate public and private constructions of place, history and identity. From their earlier incarnations as instruments of ideological control in Midnight’s Children and Shame to the pervasive ‘colonization by images’ featuring in novels such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, various techniques of visual representation appear as deeply ambivalent metaphors for contemporary society’s excessive reliance on signifying systems. Photography, film and advertising (with its twin-sister, propaganda) are constant presences in Rushdie’s novels; in this chapter, I read them as both instruments of cultural critique and symptoms of leveling globalization, both potential preservers of memory and magnifying (often distorting) lenses of an obsessive contemporary pursuit of fame and immortality.
The Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol. 48, no 2, May 2012
Introduction to our co-edited special issue
Re-Routing the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in... more Re-Routing the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in line with recent trends in critical theory, reconnecting the ethical and political with the aesthetic aspect of postcolonial culture.
Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, and mapping new directions in postcolonial studies, the volume includes sections on:
• New growth areas from cosmopolitan theories and the utopian to diaspora and transnationalism
• New subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and postcolonialism in new locations (Eastern Europe, China)
• New theoretical perspectives on globalization (fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’)
Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of current concerns in the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
Contributors include: Bill Ashcroft, Anna Ball, Elleke Boehmer, Diana Brydon, Simon Gikandi, Erin Goheen Glanville, James Graham, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Victor Li, Nadia Louar, Deborah Madsen, Jeffrey Mather, Nirmala Menon, Kaori Nagai, Jane Poyner, Robert Spencer and Patrick Williams.
This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical realism in East-Central European lite... more This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical realism in East-Central European literature during the 1980s are an integral part of the larger subversive poetics of the final decades of Communist totalitarianism. It relies on Bakhtin's invaluable conception of the polyphonic novel and the carnivalesque. The article focuses on the works of Czech writer Milan Kundera and a number of Romanian novels that metaphorically dramatize the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control. This study highlights an aspect seldom remarked on by scholars of East-Central European literature: namely, that "indirect" or "allegorical" literary fictions often constituted the only available form of oppositional discourse in highly Stalinized Communist regimes.
Book Reviews by Cristina Sandru
Polity Press 2011 289pp ISBN (pb): 978-0-7456-5130-9
Review article of Narratives of the European Border: a History of Nowhere. BY RICHARD ROBINSON. P... more Review article of Narratives of the European Border: a History of Nowhere. BY RICHARD ROBINSON. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007. Published in English: the Journal of the English Association, vol. 57, no. 218 (2008).
Conference Presentations by Cristina Sandru
The paper will delineate briefly the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance in the pos... more The paper will delineate briefly the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance in the post-1945 cultures of East-Central Europe, with particular focus on literary and filmic modes (from documentary realism to dystopian vision, from historiographic metafiction to magical realism and black humour). Its main focus will be the distinct but interrelated types of what I have termed ‘overcoded fiction’ – i.e. texts which centre on an ‘absent cause’ that cannot be openly expressed in words, and whose gravitational centre rests on the significant silences and implicit statements that inhabit their visible textual surface. The interpretive framework will borrow from and build on postcolonial reading practices, particularly on their thematization of mimicry, liminality, ambiguity and textual ambivalence, appropriating the critical paradigms from which they emerged and adapting them to the communist/post-communist context. Reflecting the indistinct cultural borderlines of the colonial/ postcolonial model, postcommunism will not be restricted to a post-1989 ‘transition’ space, but will define a range of cultural practices that Havel had called post-totalitarian, and which emerged as a response to communist ideological colonisation both before and after the nominal fall of communist political regimes.
This study explores the literary-cultural relation of Eastern Europe – particularly its communist... more This study explores the literary-cultural relation of Eastern Europe – particularly its communist legacy and post-communist trajectory – to postcolonial studies, interrogating the extent to which postcolonialism can function as an enabling theoretical construction that can help illuminate instances of ‘mind-colonisation’ in non-Third World contexts. It argues that colonisation is to be understood principally as a condition of ideological domination that has engendered similar forms of literary and cultural resistance; consequently, it offers a comparative framework which enables a reading in differential contexts of texts that ostensibly have little in common, but which, on close examination, reveal a shared imaginative space, rhetoric and narrative agency.
Structurally, the book consists of two interrelated parts. Part one is a critical discussion of the ideologies, cultural imaginaries and representational practices articulated in a diverse range of representative postcolonial and post-1945 East-Central European texts; these are shown to share, despite dissimilar conditions of production, uncannily related narrative modes and thematic emphases. The second part is a comparative literature case-study which discusses two authors whose work is both highly representative of the cultural formations I compare (Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie) and, at the same time, highly controversial.
The book thus straddles three main disciplinary areas: East-Central European studies, Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature. This is one of its major strengths, for it brings into dialogue fields of inquiry which, more often than not, tend to rationalise their lack of interest in each other’s problematics by elaborate arguments of historical and cultural incompatibility.
My approach, on the contrary, capitalizes on points of confluence (among which the construction of colonialism/communism as ambivalent processes, triggering differential moments of resistance, accommodation and complicity; post-imperial symptomatologies; exile and immigration) and analogous cultural nodes (the role of memory in the re-writing of the past; resistance as a complex of doubly-inscripted or overcoded discourses, ranging from overtly oppositional to carnivalesque and magical realist). Postcolonialism is not used as an ‘interpretive matrix’ for a unified theory of post-communism; rather, the study aims to show how these two different “posts”, both marking the wake of an empire, can inform each other within the space of differential ideological and cultural contexts, and thus work towards a more open and nuanced response to post-1989 geopolitical polarizations.
This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of p... more This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a geo-historical comparativism that seeks to move beyond present narrow definitions. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as transformations of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, objectifying gaze, collective memory and trauma, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism. Together the studies map the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art, the latter highlighted through accompanying illustrations.
by stuart murray, Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard, Mrinalini Greedharry, Simon B Obendorf, John C Hawley, Pasi Ahonen, Cristina Sandru, Eva Bischoff, Jennifer Wenzel, and Sharae Deckard
This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, di... more This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.
Contents:
Introduction Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray Part 1: Disciplinary Constellations: New Forms of Knowledge
1. Capitalizing on English Literature: Disciplinarity, Academic Labor and Postcolonial Studies Claire Westall
2. Dangerous Relations? Lessons from the Interface of Postcolonial Studies and International Relations Simon Obendorf
3. Managing Postcolonialism Mrinalini Greedharry and Pasi Ahonen
4. Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form John C. Hawley
Part 2: Case Studies: Geocultures, Topographies, Occlusions
5. Gaps, Silences and Absences: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies Patrick Williams
6. Facing/Defacing Robert Mugabe: Land Reclamation, Race and the End of Colonial Accountability Ashleigh Harris
7. Staging the Mulata: Performing Cuba Alison Fraunhar
8. Amongst the Cannibals: Articulating Masculinity in Postcolonial Weimar Germany Eva Bischoff
9. Postcolonial Postcommunism? Cristina Sandru
Part 3: Horizons: Environment, Materialism, World
10. Neoliberalism, Genre and the "Tragedy of the Commons" Rob Nixon
11. Reading Fanon Reading Nature Jennifer Wenzel
12. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan 13. If Oil Could Speak, What Would It Say? Crystal Bartolovich 14. Inherit the World: World-Literature, "Rising Asia" and the World-Ecology Sharae Deckard
Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia This work reflects upon a facet of memory tha... more Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia This work reflects upon a facet of memory that has a special resonance for those of us entangled by the long histories of colonialism and decolonisation -nostalgia. 1 Nostalgia is a cultural phenomenon that in an uncanny way connects people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries, yet remains to be fully understood or explained. I call it uncanny, because I cannot think of a better word for describing the strange mix of individual and social desires that prompts the search for past experiences that constitutes nostalgia, and which seems to become prominent at certain critical stages of human history -such as the rise of industrialisation, when the writings of the European Romantics challenged what they perceived was happening in the world by exploring -as Rousseau and Wordsworth explored -the restorative, nurturing potential of memory for the threatened individual; or, nearer our own times, the rise in migration and exile accompanying the end of empire and the disasters of the twentieth century, explored in the writings of those, from Conrad and Joyce to Naipaul and Coetzee, whose fictions represent the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2009
Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders, 2012
With more than a nod to Milan Kundera’s concept of ‘imagology’, developed most fully in his 1991 ... more With more than a nod to Milan Kundera’s concept of ‘imagology’, developed most fully in his 1991 novel Immortality, this chapter attempts a selective reading of Salman Rushdie’s fictional use of modern technologies of representation to interrogate public and private constructions of place, history and identity. From their earlier incarnations as instruments of ideological control in Midnight’s Children and Shame to the pervasive ‘colonization by images’ featuring in novels such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, various techniques of visual representation appear as deeply ambivalent metaphors for contemporary society’s excessive reliance on signifying systems. Photography, film and advertising (with its twin-sister, propaganda) are constant presences in Rushdie’s novels; in this chapter, I read them as both instruments of cultural critique and symptoms of leveling globalization, both potential preservers of memory and magnifying (often distorting) lenses of an obsessive contemporary pursuit of fame and immortality.
The Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol. 48, no 2, May 2012
Introduction to our co-edited special issue
Re-Routing the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in... more Re-Routing the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in line with recent trends in critical theory, reconnecting the ethical and political with the aesthetic aspect of postcolonial culture.
Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, and mapping new directions in postcolonial studies, the volume includes sections on:
• New growth areas from cosmopolitan theories and the utopian to diaspora and transnationalism
• New subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and postcolonialism in new locations (Eastern Europe, China)
• New theoretical perspectives on globalization (fundamentalism, terror and theories of ‘affect’)
Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of current concerns in the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.
Contributors include: Bill Ashcroft, Anna Ball, Elleke Boehmer, Diana Brydon, Simon Gikandi, Erin Goheen Glanville, James Graham, Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Victor Li, Nadia Louar, Deborah Madsen, Jeffrey Mather, Nirmala Menon, Kaori Nagai, Jane Poyner, Robert Spencer and Patrick Williams.
This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical realism in East-Central European lite... more This article demonstrates how the specific forms of magical realism in East-Central European literature during the 1980s are an integral part of the larger subversive poetics of the final decades of Communist totalitarianism. It relies on Bakhtin's invaluable conception of the polyphonic novel and the carnivalesque. The article focuses on the works of Czech writer Milan Kundera and a number of Romanian novels that metaphorically dramatize the subtle relation between cultural representation and ideological control. This study highlights an aspect seldom remarked on by scholars of East-Central European literature: namely, that "indirect" or "allegorical" literary fictions often constituted the only available form of oppositional discourse in highly Stalinized Communist regimes.
Polity Press 2011 289pp ISBN (pb): 978-0-7456-5130-9
Review article of Narratives of the European Border: a History of Nowhere. BY RICHARD ROBINSON. P... more Review article of Narratives of the European Border: a History of Nowhere. BY RICHARD ROBINSON. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007. Published in English: the Journal of the English Association, vol. 57, no. 218 (2008).
The paper will delineate briefly the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance in the pos... more The paper will delineate briefly the complex trajectories of complicity and resistance in the post-1945 cultures of East-Central Europe, with particular focus on literary and filmic modes (from documentary realism to dystopian vision, from historiographic metafiction to magical realism and black humour). Its main focus will be the distinct but interrelated types of what I have termed ‘overcoded fiction’ – i.e. texts which centre on an ‘absent cause’ that cannot be openly expressed in words, and whose gravitational centre rests on the significant silences and implicit statements that inhabit their visible textual surface. The interpretive framework will borrow from and build on postcolonial reading practices, particularly on their thematization of mimicry, liminality, ambiguity and textual ambivalence, appropriating the critical paradigms from which they emerged and adapting them to the communist/post-communist context. Reflecting the indistinct cultural borderlines of the colonial/ postcolonial model, postcommunism will not be restricted to a post-1989 ‘transition’ space, but will define a range of cultural practices that Havel had called post-totalitarian, and which emerged as a response to communist ideological colonisation both before and after the nominal fall of communist political regimes.