contributors

Articles by Madina Tlostanova

1. Stockholm as the Baltic hub

   There are few clearer examples of how cultural exchanges across the Baltic Sea have evolved than the annual Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm, which took place for the tenth time this year.

2. The Baltic: An Endangered Sea

   Will the Baltic be sick or healthy in 2030? The World Wildlife Fund addressed the future of the sea in a seminar at this year’s Baltic Sea Festival.

3. Way forward or new global solution? Report from the Stockholm Water Week

   Stockholm – Ministers and high level government officials, scientists, chief economists, heads of UN bodies and participants from over 200 convening organizations and 100 nations met at the World Water Week in Stockholm in August 2012. They debated and showcased solutions to ensure that the planet’s limited water resources are efficiently used to meet the basic needs of growing populations.

4. Reinterpreting a Bulgarian past. The dialectics of dictates and dictatorships

   Roumen Daskalov, Debating the Past, Modern Bulgarian History – from Stambolov to Zhivkov, Budapest: Central European University Press 2011 367 pages, Original Bulgarian edition 2009

5. Raoul Wallenberg: Myths and truths

   A hundred years have passed and Raoul Wallenberg is currently the subject of much publicity.

6. Fear and loatHing in lithuania

   As an EU-member, Lithuania has to a large extent set up institutional mechanisms to combat homophobia. It has implemented anti-discrimination laws that are roughly in line with EU norms. At the same time, the country does not allow same-sex marriage, fails to recognize same-sex partnership (or indeed any form of civil partnership), and does not allow homosexual couples to adopt children. A still greater problem, note the authors, is that the political and cultural climate remains deeply hostile towards homosexuality and towards recognizing the rights of individuals of a minority sexual orientation.

7. The land, the sea and the water in between On the liquefaction of culture

   Even though the sea is characterized by its transgression of all borders, the founding of Sealand has shown that one can transform the sea into some sort of land, into Sea-Land. Because the sea is dislocated, one can set up a location. Because it is not the realm of defined territories, one can declare part of it as a territory and thereby align it with the land and the terrestrial idea of a state. But if one does, it is no longer “sea” in the strong sense of the word,1 but rather a symbolic aggradation of the sea — just sealand.

8. Cia Rinne and the soundpoetic event Listening for other languages

   For many of its practitioners, creating sound poetry means vigorously demonstrating the here and now of the poem, which has no counterpart in text; encouraging the people in the audience to place trust in their own listening rather than look to a text for answers; and by extension challenging the idea of an object which lends itself to ownership, or can be saved to experience later.

9. The truncated road movie: Thomas Brasch and the Berlin Wall

   Brasch’s novella does two things: it presents lives smothered by incarceration, and it also places the reader on the other side of the barrier, as a witness to the road movie that crashes into the Wall.

10. Sofi Oksanen’s “Purge” in Estonia

    The post-Soviet Estonian politics of memory have centered on the themes of national suffering and heroism, which function as a “dominant narrative and state-supported memory regime”. The fixation on victimhood has served as a screen memory18 for avoiding questions about the Holocaust in Estonian territory and the collaboration of Estonians in Soviet rule.

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