Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the Global Age

Description

This volume is a critical exploration of the geopolitical hierarchies of global culture, which foregrounds Eastern European, Russian, and Central Asian languages and cultures. It highlights the cultural production of these regions, routinely marginalized in global politics, while also promoting novel and innovative approaches to the analysis of geopolitical narratives.
Contributions cover a broad range of cultural practice in the Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Latvian, Serbian, Chukchi, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Chinese, and English languages. The multilingual materials include blockbuster films, digital visuals, print fiction and (social) media, TV series, rap music, blogs and discussion forums, museum exhibitions, and everyday cultural practice. Drawing on popular geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, and subaltern geopolitics, the book presents highly interdisciplinary case studies which disclose the links between popular cultural production and global or regional hierarchies, probe into the everyday reproductions of gendered power relations in geopolitical narratives, and bring to light the very question of marginality as a geopolitical position.

Sanna Turoma is Professor of Russian Language and Cultural Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Her publications
include Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia ( 2010), Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. w/M. Waldstein (2013).
Saara Ratilainen is Senior Researcher at Aleksanteri Institute, Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, University of
Helsinki, Finland.
Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus is Lecturer in Estonian at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Introduction: Whose geopolitics? Narrating experiences beyond the Anglophone world (Saara Ratilainen, Sanna Turoma, and Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus)
Part I: Contesting Global Hierarchies
Chapter 1: Chernobyl and the Geopolitics of Ecological Crisis (Sanna Turoma and Mika Perkiömäki)
Chapter 2: Between the Russian and American Empires: The Sense of Place of an Arctic Peninsula in Yuri Rytkheu’s Novel The Chukchi Bible (Eeva Kuikka)
Chapter 3: A Double-Edged Sword? Nationalist Blockbusters of China and Russia (Tatu Laukkanen)
Chapter 4: The East Will Rise Again: Gone with the Wind in the USSR and Russia (Michael Denner)
Part II Mobility and Belonging
Chapter 5: Alter-geopolitical Lives: Slow Violence, Dispossession and Indignance in Rural Ukraine (Kathryn Cassidy and Inga Freimane)
Chapter 6: Writing the Difference: Geopolitical Imaginaries in Polish Travel Blogging (Kinga Polynczuk-Alenius)
Chapter 7: Geopolitical Marginality in the Age of Globalization: Blogger Maria Dubrovskaia’s travels across Eurasian Spaces (Saara Ratilainen)
Chapter 8: Everyday Geopolitics of Uzbek Migrants in Russia and Their Left-behind Families in Uzbekistan (Sherzod Eraliev and Rustam Urynbojev)
Part III: Identities and Bodies Displaced
Chapter 9: Narrating the Geopolitics of Displacement: Marina Palei’s “Khutor” and the Scale of the Body (Marja Sorvari)
Chapter 10: Deterritorialization of Literary Identity: Exile and New Aesthetic Strategies in Today’s Ukrainian Literature (Ilya Kukulin)
Chapter 11: Alternative Geopolitics of Urban Space: The “Attractive Sadness” of Soviet Housing Projects (Mikhail Suslov)
Chapter 12: Geopolitics of “Eastern” bodies in European cultural heritage (Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus)
Conclusion
Index

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