Thirty Years since the Fall of Communism: Visual Narratives, Memory and Culture

A joint project of the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology, the Faculty of Letters, and the Cross-border Faculty of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, the conference is intended as a cultural forum for imparting knowledge and research on the textuality and representation of recent, lived history, from different yet interrelated angles:

•  History and Memory Studies
•  Political Sciences
•  Cultural Studies 
•  Film Studies
•  Literary criticism
•  Philosophy
•  Sociology
•  Cultural Anthropology, etc.

With obvious propagandistic aims, the feature films and documentaries produced in the Eastern Bloc would ‘rewrite’ the history in the making, providing their home audiences with the image of a system that should have been perceived as victorious against the evils of the corrupt, capitalist West, and as a blessing for the ones fortunate enough to be under the protection of the Party.

Equally worth commenting on are the few cultural products of the age that escaped censorship in their attempt to fight the regime, either by subtle insertion of subversive elements in the communist visual propaganda or by ‘emigration’ to a free world that was more than willing to find out what was going on behind the Iron Curtain.

Following the 1989 revolutions, the fall of the Berlin Wall and, lastly, the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, cultural memory has been set in motion to ‘show and tell’ how communism really was, in visual artefacts which have painted ‘the age of horrors’, 1945-1989, as even darker than it had actually been. With freedom of expression newly guaranteed, art creators have, since then, struggled to re-textualize the imposed narratives of the recent past, thus re-producing a history of communism.

Without any claims to historical truth(s), we hereby invite individual contributions to an academic debate within the framework of an event that will hopefully shed some light on the way in which communism was culturally represented before and after 1989 in the former communist states and in the West.

A special panel will be dedicated to aspects of overcoming the communist trauma and regaining a sense of national identity through culture in the former Soviet states, with special emphasis on Moldova and Ukraine.

You are, therefore, kindly invited to submit an abstract of maximum 250 words for an individual presentation or a 500-word proposal for a panel or workshop to oana.gheorghiu@ugal.ro by October 25, 2019. Notification of acceptance will be sent by November 1, 2019.

The presentations can be delivered in English, French or Romanian. However, the papers sent for publication will be in English.

Publication

Following the standard procedure of blind peer review, a selection of papers will be published in a collective volume with PETER LANG (Germany), a renowned publishing house that has already expressed its interest in the topic. Papers equally qualitative that will fall outside the scope of the volume will be published in thematic issues of the journals edited by the organizing faculties:

•  CULTURAL INTERTEXTS (www.cultural-intertexts.com), indexed with ERIH+ and Ebsco, under evaluation by Clarivate Analytics - Arts & Humanities Citation Index;
•  ACROSS (www.across-journal.com), indexed with MLA, CEEOL and Index Copernicus