Reluctant Siblings.
Notes on the Analogy between Postcommunist and Postcolonial Subalterns
lecture by
Bogdan Stefanescu
University of Bucharest
The talk proposes to present the Romanian debates on the benefits of a comparative approach to the two types of collective domination. Postcolonialism and postcommunism scholars alike commonly dismiss any association between their fields by invoking the different historical, economic, and cultural contexts of colonization and communization and of their aftermath. However, this speaker will argue that postcolonialism and postcommunism are structurally related and can be treated as complementary varieties of (post)imperialism. Among other things, this means that a foreign or foreignized oppressor violated the identity of such victim-cultures that are now seeking recovery in a post-traumatic interval. This commonality licenses two-way contaminations between postcommunist and postcolonial studies and calls for methodological and ideological revisions on both sides. The focus of the discussion will be on the human subject and on discursive representations of the situation in an effort to illustrate the importance of discourse studies as one point of convergence between postcommunism and postcolonialism as reluctant subaltern siblings.
Dr. Bogdan Stefanescu (English Department, University of Bucharest) has recently been focusing his research on nationalism and the comparative study of postcolonialism and postcommunism from the perspective of discourse and cultural studies. He teaches MA courses in the rhetorical construction of national identity and the comparative study of postcommunism and postcolonialism, and has lectured widely on literature, critical theory, translation studies and rhetoric.
Bogdan Stefanescu is a founding member of the Romanian Society for British and American Studies where he was on the Directors' Board between 1992–1994. Between 2005-2007 he served as deputy director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and he is currently the editor-in-chief of University of Bucharest Review (http://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/). Dr. Stefanescu is a guest researcher with Pasts, Inc./History Department at CEU.
March 5 17:30
Nádor u. 11, Hanák Room