Document Type
Article
Abstract
The essay posits post/communist Eastern Europe as a neocolonial terrain to show how contemporary discursive underpinnings of global capitalism and liberal democracy have been shaped by a combined Orientalist demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures. It analyzes how old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-articulated in narratives that define a European or civilizational ideal as an essentially liberal-democratic project against the discursive palimpsest of totalitarian, barbarian, and Oriental communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to justify transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in post-communism. These developments increasingly provincialize Eastern Europe through suppressing its communist histories and legacies, placing it in an economically and politically subordinate position with respect to the EU and US, and continuing its dependence on the West as a point of reference for a definition of its identity. Intersecting insights from postcolonial, Marxist, and deconstruction theories, the essay focuses on texts written by Eastern European anti-communist dissidents and exiles, or else by authors who ethnically and linguistically straddle the borders between civilization and the "Wild East" as they map Eastern locales and present post/communism to (largely) Western audiences. As with texts emerging in a traditionally post/colonial situation, exile or incessant border crossing in these texts frequently signify fragmentation and disjunction in terms of national, cultural, or linguistic identification. The essay, therefore, examines the discursive conditions that prompt Nabokov, Brodsky, Kundera and others to simultaneously present themselves as native, Eastern European experts and emancipate themselves – and their homelands – as civilized, Enlightened, or Westernized. Importantly, the authors' attempts to articulate such seemingly oppositional identities create discursive openings for recognizing and analyzing the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. These are valuable for deconstructing the basic concept of Eastern Europe, and exposing Eastern Europeans' preoccupation with their reflections in the Western mirror and the concomitant tradition of self-Orientalization.
Repository Citation
Kovačević, Nataša. "Orientalizing Post/Communism: Europe's 'Wild East' in Literature and Film." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1–28. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss4/17