Fwd: Soyuz Conference: Out of the Ruins, Columbia U, March 1998

To: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 1997 14:35:49 -0800
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Subject: Fwd: Soyuz Conference: Out of the Ruins, Columbia U, March 1998

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>

Original sender: Bruce Grant <[email protected]> 

Fwd: Soyuz Conference: Out of the Ruins, Columbia U, March 1998

 
CALL FOR PAPERS
 
Soyuz, the Research Network for Post-Communist Cultural Studies and the
Department of Anthropology at Columbia University present The Seventh
Annual Symposium on Cultural Studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia
"OUT OF THE RUINS: CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE SOVIET AFTERMATH"
 
March 27-28, 1998
Columbia University
 
Empires leave ruins. The title of our symposium evokes the by-now
popular image of the toppled ruins of socialist monuments to Lenin, the
Worker and the Peasant, and other emblems of Soviet cultural authority.
But the social shards, cultural fragments and political artifacts of the
former system have now become the stuff from which new forms of the
quotidian are emerging. In such an aftermath, cultural ruination and
regeneration are appearing in unlooked-for places and unlikely guises.
Ruins are the landscape of the uncanny. While the crumbling of states
and societies that attended the events of 1989 and 1991 led many
theorists to predict an end to history and the inevitable transition
from socialist cultures to liberal capitalist ones, post-Soviet culture
has yet to experience the predicted metamorphosis into familiar forms.
The processes of ruination and regeneration now taking place are
resulting in hybrid forms, novel articulations of the local with the
global, and the collision of received histories with their unscheduled
presents. While socialist states have exited the political stage, the
many and various histories of the peoples of the former Soviet Bloc
remain, as do the subjects, knowledges and structures that accompanied
them. Out of the ruins slouch new rough beasts. Soyuz proposes the
Seventh Annual Symposium of Cultural Studies in Eastern Europe and
Eurasia as a step in understanding the cultural negotiation of ruins now
taking place in the former Soviet Bloc.
 
We are interested in papers from across the disciplines that concern
cultural studies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The proposed papers may
be up to 25 pages in length and are to be presented at the symposium in
a strict 20-minute format. Preference will be given to those abstracts
that address the symposium's metaphors of cultural ruination and
regeneration and which concern cultural and/or ethnographic sensibility.
 
A one-page abstract and curriculum vitae can be sent to:
David Koester, Dept of Anthropology, Columbia U, NY, NY  10027.
The deadline for abstracts is January 10, 1998. Decisions concerning
acceptance will be made by February 1st, 1998. Regrettably, no financial
assistance will be available for participants.
 
Please send inquiries to David Koester at <[email protected]> or Cathy
Wanner <[email protected]>.
 
Sponsored by the Columbia University Dept. of Anthropology, Soyuz, the
Harriman Institute of Columbia University and the Columbia Graduate
Anthropology Alumni Association.

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