Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena

ended

The proposed project offers a new understanding of transnational memory as a process of translation by focusing on post-Soviet Eastern European attempts to make their local histories of the Second World War and the Socialist regime known globally. It examines these efforts through aesthetic media of memory – literature, film and art – that circulate globally and bring local experiences to global audiences and through the heated public debates that these works of art have provoked in different national and transnational contexts. It argues that the recently reinforced comparative and competitive political discourses about twentieth-century totalitarianisms in Eastern Europe can only be understood by exploring the arts that have developed more productive comparative and translational approaches and can therefore help to untangle the most recalcitrant nodes of confrontational political discourses and addressing the ethical and political complexity of remembering war and state terror. The project innovates methodologically by bringing together transcultural memory studies, translation theory and world literature studies to offer translation as a new model for conceptualising the transnational travel of memories that operates through transcultural memorial forms. What memorial forms have been used to make Eastern European memories intelligible in the global arena? What is gained and what is lost in this translation? What can the different ways that aesthetic acts of memory are received nationally and transnationally tell us about the frictions between these scales of memory and within the national itself? How has the globalisation of memory practices reinforced national memory in Eastern Europe? In providing the answers to these questions the project offers a transnational view of Eastern European attempts to negotiate their entangled histories of twentieth-century totalitarianisms within the global framework.