Mapping Other Europes

How do we imagine Europe? How are its internal divisions discursively and imaginatively produced and represented? Oftentimes, ‘Europe’ is construed as uniformly privileged, and/or conflated with ‘the West,’ Western Europe, or the EU. East Central Europe, it seems, remains elusive to the cultural imagination of ‘the West’: unknown or invisible, assumed homogeneous within itself, and understood as the provenance of undesirables. Engaging conversations in world literature studies and adapting post-colonial/decolonial theory for (post-)Soviet contexts, I argue for the need to locate narratives about and from this region that counter or resist those that are dominant, and relegate East Central Europe to the (‘backward’ or ‘uncivilised’) periphery. When we think Europe, I propose a twofold shift in focus: in the first place, through an analysis of some of the cultural products of writers from the region formerly subsumed by the Soviet Union; in the second, by looking to perspectives on this region from the global South, with India and South Africa as particular instantiations. I look to the work of Milan Kundera, Herta Müller and Libuše Moníková for a refiguring of the imaginative map of Europe from within it; and I read Rabindranath Tagore, Nirmal Verma, Bhisham Sahni and I. Allan Sealy from India, and Laurens van der Post, Pauline Podbrey and Alex La Guma from South Africa, amongst others, to draw out the imaginative constitution of this space from perspectives in the global South. These writers and their work co-produce the imaginative map of Europe, and suggest important counter-voices to those that evoke East Central Europe as a region wild and unknown. They create and foster alternative imaginings of ‘Europe’ as both descriptive and normative category, and suggest lines of movement and connections that bypass ‘the West’, undermining notions of it as civilizational and cultural centre or origin.

(include but are not limited to):

• World Literature Studies
• Post-Colonial Theory
• South African Literature
• Cold War Literature
• Geo-Criticism
• Literary Mapping
• Translation