Central
European University A Program
for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals
in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University
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Central
European University A Program
for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals
in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University |
          
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NEW COURSE SYLLABUSdownload course description with readings (85 kB .doc) Cultural Diversities East and West: Postcommunism, Postcolonialism and EthnicityJuly 22 – August 2, 2002 Course director:
Resource persons:
Short biographies Avital H. BLOCH is a Research Professor at the Center for Social Research, the University of Colima, Mexico, and the Director of its American Studies Program. She received her Ph.D., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in U.S. History from Columbia University, New York, and B.A. in History, Sociology, and Social Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She received various grants and fellowships, such as Israel-America Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, the Annenberg Foundation, twice the Salzburg Seminar, the Stuttgart Seminar on Cultural Studies, and Mexico National Council for Science and Technology. Dr. Bloch has specialized in contemporary U.S. history, with a focus on postwar American intellectual and cultural history, political and social ideologies, multiculturalism, and feminist history. She has published widely in Mexico, U.S., and Europe, and presented papers in major conferences in the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Germany, England, Russia, Poland, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Guatemala, and Ecuador. She is Board of Directors member of the Peace History Society, of the Canadian Association for American Studies, and a member of the American Studies Association, American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. Réka-Mónika CRISTIAN is a lecturer at the American Studies Department of the Institute of English and American Studies, József Attila University, Szeged, Hungary. She holds an M.A. degree in English and American Literature and Culture (Jozsef Attila University, Szeged), a B.A. in Romanian Literature and Culture (Juhász Gyula College, Szeged). Her Ph.D. dissertation (Szeged University) concerns the semiotic interface of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee’s dramaturgy. She currently teaches various courses, with an emphasis on Postcolonial Theory, American Drama, Film Semiotics and Gender theory. Her interests also include postcommunist literature and film in the ex-Yugoslav space, multiculturalism and women’s issues in multiethnic regions. A native of Transylvania, she is a frequent contributor to the bilingual magazine Convieţuirea/Együttélés, fostering Hungarian-Romanian cultural dialogue. She is a Member of the "Hungarian Women's Lives" Research Group, of ESSE and of the Institute of English and American Studies (IEAS). She received grants from Stuttgart Seminar, USIS, SUISS and the British Council. She participated in academic events in Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Scotland and Germany. Byron LINDSEY is an Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature and Chair of Russian Studies at the University of New Mexico. Ph.D., 1973, Department of Russian Literature, Cornell University. Professor Lindsey is a critic and translator of contemporary Russian prose, including The Loss, a collection of Vladimir Makanin’s works that won the Eugene Kayden National Translation Award in 1997. Teaching a wide range of courses and seminars on the Russian classics, as well as in the Comparative Literature/Cultural Studies program at the University of New Mexico, his special interests are postcolonial theory, existentialism, Bakhtin, and Russian postmodernism. He was a senior Fulbright lecturer at Moscow State University and at the Kazak Pedagogical University in Almaty, Kazakstan, in 1988-89, a Fellow in the Stuttgart Seminar on the Translatability of Cultures in 1998, and a member of the faculty of the National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on Russian opera in 2001. Shawn O'HARE is an Assistant Professor of English at Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, Tennessee). Ph.D., 1996, Florida State University. He is the Editor of Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing, and was previously the Assistant Editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies. His essay "Paul Muldoon's Native American Fascination," in Politics and Poetry in Northern Ireland, and a book about novelist Jennifer Johnston will appear in 2002 from The Liffey Press, Dublin. He has also published work about Roddy Doyle, Deirdre Madden, Frank O'Connor, Joseph O'Connor, James Plunkett, and Colm Toibin. O'Hare has twice served as a Fellow at the Salzburg Seminar, receiving a grant from the Mellon Foundation to participate in the Contemporary Novels session, and a grant from the Freeman Foundation to attend the United States and Asian Values symposium. He has a developing research interest in Latino issues in the United States, and, in particular, how Latino writing is affecting U. S. literature. At Carson-Newman College, he teaches Modern and Post-modern literature, U. S. Ethnic literature, and literary theory. Adrian OŢOIU is the author of 6 books, including a novel, two volumes of short stories, a cultural guide to Maramures, and a 2-volume critical study on Romanian postmodern prose. His books were repeatedly shortlisted for national literary prizes, and the novel The Skin of the Matter (1996) won 3 national awards. Adrian Oţoiu received his PhD from Babeş-Bolyai University Cluj with a dissertation on Transgressive Strategies in the Fiction of the Generation of the Eighties. He is a lecturer at North University Baia Mare, Romania, where he teaches Modern and Postmodern American Fiction, Narratology, Translation studies. His interest in ethnicity dates back from the 1980s when he shot several documentary films on the traditions of the Land of Maramures. His articles and prose reflect an interest in minority issues (Romanian-Hungarian relations, lefthandedness), popular culture and liminal phenomena. He has received grants from Salzburg Seminar, Stuttgart Seminar, Trieste Joyce School, and the Byron Society of America. He took part in conferences in the U.S., Germany, Austria, Italy and Malta. His work-in-progress includes a study on car culture in Romania for Reaktion Books (UK) and one on the reception of James Joyce in Romania for Continuum Press, London. Clare THAKE-VASSALLO lectures in the department of English at the University of Malta. She holds a degree in English Literature and Linguistics with Philosophy from the University of Malta. She was awarded a scholarship to read for a Ph.D. in Semiotics at the Institute of Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Italy. She prepared her thesis on Literary Semiotics, The Pact in the Text, under the guidance of Prof. Umberto Eco. Her main interests include studies on literary and cultural genres, post-colonial theory, contemporary British and American Literature, and semiotics. She lectures on all of these topics at the University of Malta. Dr Thake Vassallo has participated in a number of conferences in Italy and in Malta where she has presented papers in semiotics and literary theory. She also participated in the Salzburg Seminar on The Contemporary Novel in 1998. In November 2000 she co-organised a Festival of Mediterranean Literature. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of PBS, the National TV and Radio Station, since January 2000. Course objectives
Course Rationale This course aims to consider the concept of ethnicity in its cultural determinations across the traditional divide East/West. The collapse of the former Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European satellites has unleashed centrifugal energies that had once been contained by the centripetal forces of the doctrine of "socialist internationalism". In the wake of this political "thaw", a flood of new nationalisms (often echoing long ignored interethnic ambiguities) has swept most of the "new democracies", from Chechenya and TransNistria, to Kosovo and Slovakia. Often fuelled by religious fundamentalism, by irredentist nostalgia or by the mere apprehension of the différence and the misconstruction of the Other, such nationalist frustrations could not be vented out against a former oppressor (as was the case of former colonies), because this had disintegrated as well, and then they were quite predictably re-directed against the different Other, whether neighbor or co-national. Whether they took the savage form of ethnic cleansing or the mild form of censorship of independent media, such reactions have proved equally counter-productive and disastrous. Being itself a highly sensitive barometer to such change, the whole field of culture – and especially the arts and the media – has been torn between conflicting loyalties ; between the desire to reflect the ‘general human’ and the devotion to the new nationalisms, between parochialism and globalism. Opinion leaders, journalists and artists alike had to zigzag between the pitfalls of populist discourse and had to negotiate between the temptation of new nationalisms and the stern demands of European integration. For many observers of the Eastern and Central European scene, such evolutions bear much in common with the issues revealed by postcolonial theory. Despite the sensible differences between the historical circumstances in which the process of liberation took place in the former colonial world and the Eastern block, numerous similarities. still reside and invite further critical contemplation. Obviously, this does not mean that we should take the concepts elaborated by postcolonial theory and juxtapose them mechanically with the still hesitant ideas of postcommunist thought. Nor does this mean that the solutions offered by multiculturalism could automatically applied to a sensibly different set of problems. Yet, paralleling particular case studies from the two hemispheres might reveal resembling issues and ambiguities and suggest similar solutions. Moreover, while economically the new Eastern democracies have still a long way to go until they might boast to have reached an acceptable western standard, the media and the arts were much faster to synchronize with the West. Indeed, the eastern European arts and means of communication have entered the era of postmodernity shortly after their western counterparts. Course structure This course will be offered by 6 scholars who will engage in a East-West dialogue that should lead the student to discover both the differences and similarities between situations as varied as the romanticized Caucasus colonized by Russia ; the Chicano immigrant to the United States and the displaced populations of former Yugoslavia ; the often-ignored paradoxical colonies at the edge of Europe, such as the island republic of Malta (thriving culturally within the language of the former oppressor), but also Georgia and Armenia; the scattered tableau of the Balkans torn by ethnic hatred ; the new nationalisms that distort the cultural dialogue in Transylvania. We have attempted to maintain a balance between East and West issues, and thus 3 of the lecturers will address chiefly the post-Soviet and post-socialist context, whereas the other 3 will tackle the issues of ethnicity and multiculturalism in established Western democracies, as well as the challenges facing the countries having emerged from colonial rule ; one course will attempt cut across the differences between East and West. The 4 scholars engaged in this debate are a well-balanced mix: 3 from Western countries and 3 from Eastern countries, of which three are female and four are male. Interdisciplinarity While preserving a steady interest in the cultural phenomena – thus inscribing this course in the field of cultural studies – the debate will engage various cross-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from the viewpoint of the historian and the ethnographer, to the perspective of the literary theorist and the media analyst. Press articles, literary texts, documentary videos, political pamphlets, ethnic music, TV coverage and commercials will become the starting points of the debates proposed in each of the courses. Target group This course could benefit to various categories of professionals which are actively engaged in the establishing and fostering of the East-West dialogue, as well as in the issues of ethnicity and multiculturalism in their respective home countries. The target-group could therefore encompass cultural policy-makers, cultural managers, young faculty teaching cultural studies, multiculturalism and postcolonial criticism, young researchers with an interest in ethnicity. Course level Due to the complexities of multicultural theory, it is recommended that students possess a minimum of background information prior to course inception. Pending on the availability of time in the pre-course phase, some of this background information will be made available, either online or by mailed reading packages, so as to compensate eventual gaps in the students’ information. The level of analysis offered is intermediate to advanced. Course format The course will consist of a series of lectures alternating with seminars that will problematize the issues discussed previously. In a series of informal forum sessions at the end of these lectures, the students will be invited to parallel/contrast the situations described with the familiar context in their homelands. Very few of the modules of the course might be labeled simply as seminars or lectures, since we have opted for a mixed format, where the initial presentation led by the resource person will be followed by a seminar where relevant issues should be discussed. Student interaction will be initiated during the pre-course phase, which comprises guided readings of recommended bibliography, preparation of case studies observed by students in their own homelands. Student performance assessment Final student evaluation will consist of the elaboration of a research paper that should make good use of the information acquired. We would encourage teamwork, by requiring students from two different countries to team up to produce a comparative study on a particular aspect of their own interest. Depending on the students’ interests, each of the 8 lecturers will supervise a paper in their particular area of expertise. After the completion of the course, we intend to select the best research papers and post them online, where they might attract the interest of a wider audience. Course narrative While most of the courses will offer brief forays into the latest evolutions of postcolonial theory and multiculturalism, yet the theoretical backbone of the course will be provided by a thorough analysis of "Multiculturalism in the United States: The Origins and the Current Debate" offered by Dr. Avital Bloch, director of the Center for Social Research at the University of Colima, Mexico. This course will trace the convoluted history of the making of multiculturalism as a focal concept for the understanding of today’s world, and will present the impact of this concept on ethnic, gender and cultural studies, as well as its relationship with postmodernism. This course has a natural emphasis on the United States, since this is the place where the most animated debates on minority rights, multiculturalism and civil rights originated. Besides its theoretical stance, this course will the the first to tackle the various local issues of multiculturalism in the Western hemisphere. "The New Americans: Latinos/as in the United States" – a course proposed by Dr. Shawn O’Hare (Carson-Newman, USA) – focuses on the most dynamic migrant phenomenon in nowadays U.S.A. and charts the change of the Latinos from a once minority group to a major component in the American melting pot, with important consequences on the monolingual United States. Crossing the Atlantic, we will monitor the postcolonial destinies of a small nation, Malta, that faces the dilemma of defining its national identity, that is, the problematic choice between English – the new "lingua franca" yet the language of the former oppressor, and Maltese – the "small" language of insignificant international penetration, yet crucial in the definition of an individualized ethnic profile. Such paradoxes will constitute the core of the course entitled "Questioning Postcolonial Identities" proposed by Dr. Clare Thake-Vassalo (University of Malta). The first part of the course which will interrogate some of the basic assumptions of postcolonial theory, such as its engagement in battles around nationalism, diaspora, migration fluid identity, and hybridization. The second part of the course will analyze Malta’s current troubles (such as its reluctance to join the European Union) as symptoms of the country’s ambiguous relationship with its own colonial past. The course shows to what extent a nation’s unsolved interrogations of the past may influence its present decisions, and how unhealed colonial wounds may easily turn into postcolonial scars. Crossing the former Iron Curtain, another set of courses will explore the way the Eastern European countries coped with the ethnic provocation in their troubled past and the way a multicultural policies are still at a loss to shape the new postcommunist context. Russia’s long-lived political engagement in the Caucasus has produced two versions of the Caucasus: the idyllically distorted image of the exotic Eden in Romantic Russian literature, which completely obliterated the cruel reality of repression the region’s native peoples by the Tsars and Soviet rulers alike. Starting from these sets of images that are hardly overlapping, the course proposed by Dr. Byron Lindsey (University of New Mexico, USA) traces the long line of misrepresentations that have pervaded Russian depictions of the Caucasus. After considering the mirroring of Russia in the colony’s eyes and comparing the versions of the Caucasus posited by post-Soviet postmodern writers, Dr. Lindsey crosses the Atlantic to examine another set of problematic representations: the way Russia is constructed in the American media and popular imagination as another "prisoner of the Caucasus" with possible links to postcolonial stereotypes. The title of Dr. Lindsey’s course sums up this trajectory: "Taking Cultural Captives: Myth, National Identity, and the Other in Russia’s View of the Caucasus and America’s View of Russia." The most dramatic outcome of such long-unsolved ethnic problems was the one that tore the camouflaging veil off the complicated multiethnic Yugoslavia. Analysing literary texts, films, media coverage and propaganda posters, the course Tropes of Multiethnic Yugoslavia proposed by Dr. Réka-Mónika Cristian (Jozsef Attila University Szeged, Hungary) will scrutinize the way the situation of post-socialist Yugoslavia becomes textualized in literary, filmic or musical expressions, thus establishing the concept of a ‘nation as narration’. An important part of the course will attempt to parallel the post-communist experience with the postcolonial and interrogate whether we may apply the postcolonial perspective to post-socialist contexts. The seminar entitled "Us and Them in the Transylvanian Mirror Chamber" will be taught jointly by Transylvanian-born Hungarian Réka Cristian and Romanian Adrian Oţoiu ; in an open dialogue, the two will dramatize the intricacies involved in the interethnic dialogue in Transylvania, and will contrast the current (mis)representations of the Other in the Romanian and Hungarian media in Transylvania. Dr. Oţoiu’s contribution will also expand the debate on the unpalatable theme of illegal migrations to the West, a phenomenon whose history dates back to the early 20th century. A further section will suggest border-crossing and status ambiguity, that is, transgression and liminality, as being central to Romania’s postmodern film and literature. Preparatory phase The preparatory phase of the course is planned to occur mainly online, where the most relevant materials will be posted in advance (2-3 months prior to course start) ; the website will feature a discussion list to provide a forum for exchange between faculty and our prospective students. This is the way the somewhat extensive bibliography required for this course will be made available in several batches. The forum will also enable us to survey our students’ main interests and eventually adapt our proposed discussion points so as to better meet their expectations. Besides, we intend to use the web-based forum as a means to give our students several assignments. One such assignment that we can foresee at this point of our proposal is an empirical collection of materials, such as newspaper clippings, song lyrics, advertisements, proverbs and press releases, that suggest a certain cultural bias against (or in favor of) certain ethnic groups. Extra-curricular activities This three-week course will be furthered by a series of extracurricular activities to be held in the afternoons and weekends. A series of film shows and slide shows will further the students’ background information of the aspects discussed in the seminars (see detailed course syllabus for more details). Three of the lecturers which are ardent photographers (Shawn O’Hare, Byron Lindsey and Adrian Oţoiu) will put up a photographic exhibition featuring pictures taken in their respective countries, that are relevant for the course. Recommended Articles and Books Non-discrimination policy statement Central European University does not discriminate on the basis of – including, but not limited to – race, color, national and ethnic origin, religion, gender or sexual orientation in administering its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.
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