Author: Simon Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351387758
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Belarus is often regarded as "Europe’s last dictatorship", a sort-of fossilized leftover from the Soviet Union. However, a key factor in determining Belarus’s development, including its likely future development, is its own sense of identity. This book explores the complex debates and competing narratives surrounding Belarus’s identity, revealing a far more diverse picture than the widely accepted monolithic post-Soviet nation. It examines in a range of media including historiography, films and literature how visions of Belarus as a nation have been constructed from the nineteenth century to the present day. It outlines a complex picture of contested myths – the "peasant nation" of the nineteenth century, the devoted Soviet republic of the late twentieth century and the revisionist Belarusian nationalism of the present. The author shows that Belarus is characterized by immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic polyphony, both in its lived history and in its cultural imaginary. The book analyses important examples of writing in and about Belarus, in Belarusian, Polish and Russian, revealing how different modes of rooted cosmopolitanism have been articulated.
Author: Stanley Bill
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822990199
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was once the largest country in Europe—a multicultural republic that was home to Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Although long since dissolved, the Commonwealth remains a rich resource for mythmakingin its descendent modern-day states, but also a source of contention between those with different understandings of its history.Multicultural Commonwealth brings together the expertise of world-renowned scholars in a range of disciplines to present perspectives on both the Commonwealth’s historical diversity and the memory of this diversity. With cutting-edge research on the intermeshed histories and memories of different ethnic and religious groups of the Commonwealth, this volume asks how various contemporary conceptions of multiculturalism can be applied to the region through a critical lens that also seeks to understand the past on its own terms.
Author: Elena A. Korosteleva
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000883167
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This book presents a comprehensive overview of current developments in Belarus. It explores how there has been an upswelling of popular support for the idea that Belarus must change. It highlights how the old regime, aiming to retain the Soviet legacy, reluctant to reform, presiding over worsening economic conditions and refusing to take measures to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, has been confronted by increasing bottom-up social mobilisation which demands a transformation of state-society relations and a new sense of Belarusian peoplehood. The book outlines how the current situation has developed, considers how the present demands for change are deep seated and long brewing trends, and reveals much detail about many aspects of the growing societal mobilisation. Overall, the book demonstrates that, although the old regime remains in power, Belarusian society has changed fundamentally, thereby bringing great hope that change will eventually come about.
Author: Julie Fedor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319665235
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 519
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Book Description
This edited collection contributes to the current vivid multidisciplinary debate on East European memory politics and the post-communist instrumentalization and re-mythologization of World War II memories. The book focuses on the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eastern Europe – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – the epicentre of Soviet war suffering, and the heartland of the Soviet war myth. The collection gives insight into the persistence of the Soviet commemorative culture and the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the post-Soviet space. It also demonstrates that for geopolitical, cultural, and historical reasons the political uses of World War II differ significantly across Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, with important ramifications for future developments in the region and beyond. The chapters 'Introduction: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus', ‘From the Trauma of Stalinism to the Triumph of Stalingrad: The Toponymic Dispute over Volgograd’ and 'The “Partisan Republic”: Colonial Myths and Memory Wars in Belarus' are published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. The chapter 'Memory, Kinship, and Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the “Immortal Regiment” Movement' is published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
Author: Félix Krawatzek
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110733501
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
This volume contends that young individuals across Europe relate to their country’s history in complex and often ambivalent ways. It pays attention to how both formal education and broader culture communicate ideas about the past, and how young people respond to these ideas. The studies collected in this volume show that such ideas about the past are central to the formation of the group identities of nations, social movements, or religious groups. Young people express received historical narratives in new, potentially subversive, ways. As young people tend to be more mobile and ready to interrogate their own roots than later generations, they selectively privilege certain aspects of their identities and their identification with their family or nation while neglecting others. This collection aims to correct the popular misperception that young people are indifferent towards history and prove instead that historical narratives are constitutive to their individual identities and their sense of belonging to something broader than themselves.
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Subcommittee on European Affairs
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
Author: Ralf Remshardt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000913643
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 978
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Book Description
This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters, this book’s first part contains a comprehensive listing of European nations, the second part charts responses to thematic complexes that define current European performance, and the third section gathers a series of case studies that explore the contribution of some of Europe’s foremost theatre makers. Rather than rehearsing rote knowledge, this is a collection of carefully curated, interpretive accounts from an international roster of scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance gives undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and practitioners an indispensable reference resource that can be used broadly across curricula.
Author: Mark Lipovetsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197508219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1081
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. In forty-four chapters, an international group of leading scholars introduce readers to a web of subcultures within the underground, highlight the culture achievements of the Soviet underground from the 1930s through the 1980s, emphasize the multimediality of this cultural phenomenon, and situate the study of underground literary texts and artworks into their broader theoretical, ideological, and political contexts.
Author: Andrey Makarychev
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137490950
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
The edited volume explains why sport mega events can be discussed from the viewpoint of politics and power, and what this discussion can add to the existing scholarship on political regimes, international norms, national identities, and cultural narratives. The book collects case studies written by insiders from different countries of post-Soviet Eurasia that have recently hosted— or intend to host in the future —sporting events of a global scale. Contributing authors discuss cultural, political, and economic strategies of host governments, examining them from the vantage point of an increasing shift of the global sport industry to non-Western countries. Mega-events often draw domestic lines of cultural and social exclusion within host’s polities. It is these ruptures and gaps this volume explores, contributing to a better understanding of the intricate interconnections between global institutions and national identities.
Author: Franziska Exeler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501762753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war? Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.
