 | Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond Subjects: Area Studies; Humanities; Language & Literature; Social Sciences; Gender Studies; Gender Studies - Soc Sci; History; Literature; Anthropology - Soc Sci; European History; Women''s & Gender History; Social & Cultural History; Interdisciplinary Literary Studies; Gender; Social & Cultural Anthropology; Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated. Anna Artwińska is a Junior Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture Studies and Chair of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her main research interests are the memory of communism, postcatastrophic representation of the Shoah, the concept of generation, auto/biographical writing and gender, and postcolonial studies. Agnieszka Mrozik is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) in Warsaw, Poland. She is affiliated with two research teams, The Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism, and the Archives of Women. Her main research interests are communism and gender studies, cultural history of women and women's movement in Central and Eastern Europe, women's life writing and literature, critical analysis of media discourse and popular culture. |
