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  ”Sweden is stepping out of the colonial closet”

  By Påhl Ruin on 13 juni, 2017

  Sweden’s indigenous people, the Sami, have struggled for years to get more attention. With little result. But now something is happening.

  Category: Features

• 

  The Blue and White pin that matters

  By Andrea Petö on 13 juni, 2017

  The founders of CEU, politicians, including PM Orban, had a common dream back then. That dream was that we would build a free and successful country where not party apparatchiks, but academics decide who can study at a university, and what institution can call itself a university.

  Category: Features

  

  CEU’s fate a symbol of what went wrong

  By Péter Balogh on 13 juni, 2017

  In Hungary, the amount of protest to follow the announcement of Lex CEU was probably underestimated by the government, yet one relatively unexpected feature was that even a number of influential conservative public figures went against the prime minister and showed their support for CEU.

  Category: Features

Just in

• Ukrainian popular culture In the context of Bakhtin’s philosophy of laughter & the postcolonial perspective:

  The paper is a study of the Ukrainian popular culture based on the material of the Ukrainian TV comedy shows which emerged after 1991. They are: Maski Show, Gentlemen Show, Verka Serduchka, Fajna Ukrajna, Vital’ka, and Evening Kvartal. These TV shows have not been investigated by Western, nor Ukrainian scholars. The Ukrainian TV comedy shows are examined in the context of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and of the ideas of the Australian Slavic scholar M. Pavlyshyn who has elaborated the concepts anticolonialsim and postcolonialism in relation to contemporary Ukrainian culture.

  By Viktoriya Sukovata Inga kommentarer till Ukrainian popular culture

• A discussion on the Bakhtin Circle

  Paromita Chakrabarti and Yulia Gradskova discuss the Bakhtin Circle with five experts in the field: Caryl Emerson, university professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures, Princeton University; Lakshmi Bandlamudi, professor of psychology at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York; Ken Hirschkop, professor of English at the University of Waterloo, Ontario; Craig Brandist, professor of cultural theory and intellectual history and director of the Bakhtin Centre, at the University of Sheffield; and Galin Tihanov, the George Steiner professor of comparative literature at Queen Mary University of London.

  By Paromita Chakrabarti Inga kommentarer till A discussion on the Bakhtin Circle

• the story of e-Estonia A discourse-theoretical approach

  This paper traces the emergence of various digital technology-driven policy ideas in Estonia during the last two decades. The article is specifically concerned with the idea of e-Estonia, a signifier that is widely used as shorthand to denote Estonia’s success in developing digital solutions in government, public management, business, education, etc. The paper analyzes the idea of e-Estonia to disclose, contextualize, and critically explain the particular discursive practices that constitute the e-Estonia discourse. It offers a discourse-theoretical reading of e-Estonia in terms of different types of discursive ‘logics’. Finally, the paper argues for the importance of recognizing what is at stake in the act of naming e-Estonia.

  By Rene Mäe Inga kommentarer till the story of e-Estonia

• Crisis of the responsible word

  Juxtaposing the postcolonial in-betweenness of critical discourse with Bakhtin’s idea of hybridized, collusive and hidden dialogicality, the postcolonial memoir can be read as the self’s mapping of a paradigm shift in contemporary times. The postcolonial memoirs become a site of contested, unsettling and endless renegotiations. I shall read South Asian-American diasporic writer Meena Alexander’s 1993 Fault Lines: A Memoir and the revised 2003 version as dialogic texts. Alexander’s memoirs engage, contest and alter each other to disrupt the possibility of singular meanings and absolute truth. Instead, the texts offer a conflicting and incommensurate idea of the past and a fractured yet intensely interconnected vision of the present.

  By Paromita Chakrabarti Inga kommentarer till Crisis of the responsible word

• Witchhunt in northern Sweden A Bakhtinian approach

  The Russian Byzantinist Sergei Averintsev writes in a critical article about laughter in Bakhtin’s interpretation of popular medieval culture that Bakhtin makes laughter too absolute and that he was wrong in maintaining that it has nothing to do with violence. I apply the reasoning of both authors on a historical phenomenon: the witch trials in Sweden, focusing on one precise geographical place. There seem to be many factors behind the witch trials, but their cultural manifestations demonstrate the qualities of reverse or carnival, culture although without having laughter as their main feature, and including violence as a main element.

  By Per-Arne Bodin Inga kommentarer till Witchhunt in northern Sweden

• subversive artistic practices visualizing resistence in the republic of macedonia

  The article discusses subversiveness in visual arts and how its practitioners oppose, transgress and seek changes in the existing social order. This art often employs forms of activism which affect public spaces, such as squares, streets and crossroads, aimed at involving the public in existing societal problems and challenges. The focus is on the recent events in the Republic of Macedonia where artists are intervening in the social and political conditions. Identifying these practices in the Republic of Macedonia contributes to wider debates that highlight engaged forms of artistic actions.

  By Tihomir Topuzovski Inga kommentarer till subversive artistic practices

• Bordering Pomerania Boundary-defining and demographic transgression in a geopolitically contested region

  This study focuses on three aspects of the geography of Pomerania: The definition of the area, in terms of bordering and containment, its governance, particularly in relation to the third aspect, its demography, in terms of which religious and ethnic groups were allowed in or expelled from the area. In the long history of Pomerania, groups in the area also changed religion or ethnicity.

  By Thomas Lundén Inga kommentarer till Bordering Pomerania

• The grotesque body in Indian comic tradition An aesthetics of transgression

  The paper examines the comic in relation to the figuration of the grotesque body in Sanskrit tradition in India. It is pursued with two objectives: firstly, to explore bodily figurations in the Indian comic tradition, and, further, to enquire the parallel elaboration of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque that celebrates the laughing body. A reading of a 14th century Indian text Hāsyārnava provides the ground for the elucidation. The paper elaborates on how the “distorted, deformed and diseased” body which Bharata refers to, the “grotesque body”t as Bakhtin says, institutes hāsya and carnivalesque discursively. The bodily desire pursued is pushed to the limits, resulting in rapture through a transgressive act.

  By Rajni Mujral Inga kommentarer till The grotesque body in Indian comic tradition

• CEU’s fate a symbol of what went wrong

  In Hungary, the amount of protest to follow the announcement of Lex CEU was probably underestimated by the government, yet one relatively unexpected feature was that even a number of influential conservative public figures went against the prime minister and showed their support for CEU.

  By Péter Balogh Inga kommentarer till CEU’s fate a symbol of what went wrong

• The Blue and White pin that matters

  The founders of CEU, politicians, including PM Orban, had a common dream back then. That dream was that we would build a free and successful country where not party apparatchiks, but academics decide who can study at a university, and what institution can call itself a university.

  By Andrea Petö Inga kommentarer till The Blue and White pin that matters

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• reviews

  1. Serfdom in Russia 150 years later. Structures live on

     Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO) [New Literary Observer] (2016) no. 5–6.

  2. Russian Literature since 1991. The past is part of the future

     Russian Literature since 1991, Eds. Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 320 pages.

  3. The Belarusian Maidan A new social movement

     Vasil Navumau, The Belarusian Maidan in 2006: A New Social Movement Approach to the Tent Camp Protest in Minsk, Polish Studies in Culture, Nations and Politics, vol. 5, edited by Joanna Kurczewska and Yasuko Shibata, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016, 260 pages.

  4. Imagining the Åland Islands. A sea of peace

     Deborah Paci, L’archipelago della pace: Le isole Åland e il Baltico (XIX-XXI secolo) [The Archipelago of Peace: The Åland Islands and the Baltic Sea (19th-21st centuries)], Milan: Unicopli, 2016; 236 pages.

  5. An innovative guidebook to St. Petersburg. Breaking through the invisibility of Muslim history and culture

     Renat Bekkin and Almira Tagirdz-hanova, Musulmanskii St. Peterburg.Istoricheskii putevoditel. [Muslim St. Petersburg: Historical Guidebook; The Life of Muslims in St. Petersburg and Its Suburbs] Renat Bekkin and Almira Tagirdzhanova. Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2016, 639 pages.

  6. All reviews