[Bilimsel Haber] Review: Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze. (Bloomington, 2004)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: "Serguei Alex. Oushakine" <sao15@columbia.edu>



Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an 
East-West Gaze.
Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Elena Gapova,  eds.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 320. $60.00 (cloth);
$30.00 (paper).

This book is a collection of essays which seeks to extend the field of
post-socialist cultural studies by presenting Eastern European societies 
to an
academic audience through theoretical frameworks that it can understand 
whilst,
at the same time, uncovering "some of the inherent biases and limitations of
these theories" (25). The collection treads new ground by bringing to 
the fore
the work of scholars whose own life trajectories leave them somewhere 
"between"
Eastern Europe and "the West" and, particularly, by paying significant 
attention
to these authors' own positionality. In this sense the book achieves its
objective of reaching beyond "the primitive opposition of East/West" and
re-presenting this engagement as a "hybrid and dialogic project" (30). Some
authors are more aware than others of the relations of power which structure
this dialogic project, however, and the retention of the notion of dialogue
itself remains an inhibitor in any radical move beyond the notion of a 
binary
relationship.

The partial nature of the escape from this binary is evident in the 
slippage in
terminology throughout the book between recognition of the experience of
individual countries, of specific regions, and of individual and community
experiences of change, and the desire to generalize the discussion to 
that of a
more generic "post-socialist," "post-communist," or "Eastern European" 
space.
Moreover, while the intention of the editors is to provide "thick 
description"
and bring local intellectual currents into dialogue with those in the 
West, many
of the chapters are deeply concerned with North American identity and
experience. This is central to the Andaluna Borcila chapter which 
discusses the
way representations of Eastern Europe participate in the production of
narratives of both Eastern European identity and American identity and 
of Anca
Roscu's chapter on Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts." It is also a key sub-theme 
of David
Houston's essay on Frank Gehry's Netherlands National Building in 
Prague, Halina
Filipowicz's chapter on the marketing of Polish theater in the post-1989 
period
as well as of the contributions by Silverman and Krainak (see below). 
Given the
commitment of the collection to taking seriously the authors' positionality
and the underlying premise that "the other" is always partially constitutive
of new cultural identities in the post-socialist space, this is 
understandable.
In some contributions, however, the slippage between notions of "the West,"
"America," and of "diasporic experiences" is problematic; in Borcila's 
chapter a
set of very specific representations of Romania are re-presented as 
narratives
of Eastern Europe as a whole whilst the significance of these 
representations
for re-embedding tropes of American identity is generalized to "the West."

The book is full of theoretical allusion but the level of sustained 
engagement
with cultural theory is not uniform. To be fair, the reader is warned in the
introduction that some chapters are "artistic texts" rather than "'properly'
scholarly pieces." However, while Krainak's article is put in the "artistic"
basket, it is perfectly accessible and meaningful to the humble 
academic, whilst
other chapters such as that by Magdalena Zaborowska on reading 
"constructions of
history" through reconstructions of the Warsaw cityscape are linguistically
dense but evidentially thin. The final chapter by "Benni Goodman"-which does
come with the "artistic" warning label -is a reminder that cultural studies
comes in many different shapes and forms; this is not a chapter to be read
between exam scripts. In sharp contrast, Mark Andryczyk's discussion of the
Bohemian set of Lviv in the early 1990s is essentially descriptive of the
phenomenon and fails to engage with either western subcultural theory or 
with
more culturally sensitive writings by post-socialist scholars such as 
Aleksei
Yurchak's work on irony in (sub)cultural practice. Andryczyk's 
respondents thus
appear to the reader as "untainted" by the commercial aspects of 
post-socialist
cultural production in a way that sits ill at ease alongside more critical
readings of the workings of both socialist and (globalized) post-socialist
spheres of cultural production by other contributors (see, for example,
Silverman's contribution and Johnston's piece on heteroglossia and 
linguistic
neo-colonialism in post-socialist Poland). Vera Sokolova also provides an
interesting overview of the representation of women and sexuality in the
post-socialist Czech Republic, but one that sits within a theoretical 
framework
that is assumed rather than explored. Lisa Whitmore's chapter tracing the
destination of marginalized authors and artists associated with the 
Prenzlauer
Berg scene after 1989 is also essentially descriptive and opportunities to
explore clear thematic commonalities between this chapter and those by 
Krainak
and Andryczyk are not taken by any of the three authors.

There are also some real gems in the collection-in particular those chapters
which pick up on the fascinating articulations between emergent 
post-socialist
identities. Elena Gapova's contribution, for example, explores the 
articulation
between class and national identity through a discussion of the role of 
language
in intellectual discourse on Belarusian nationhood. Carole Silverman's
discussion of the "reinvention" of Bulgarian female singing, in contrast,
focuses on the intersection of gender and class in post-socialist 
identity in a
nuanced and thoughtful piece. Indeed, both Silverman's chapter and that of
Rainer Gries on the re-branding of East German consumer products in the 
early
1990s provide extremely successful case studies which allow the 
exploration of a
range of complex relations of production, consumption and identity (gender,
national, global-local).

As with all edited volumes there is a certain unevenness in scope and 
quality of
contributions and, arguably, the editors of this particular collection might
have guided the reader better through the thematic continuities and internal
ruptures that become apparent in the process of reading. However, this 
is the
nature of the genre and the positive side of the coin is that almost every
reader will find their own personal "gems" within this wide-ranging 
collection
of essays on contemporary culture in post-socialist societies.

Hilary Pilkington
Centre for Russian and East European Studies, The University of Birmingham


Modernism/modernity 12.3 (2005) 543-545



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