Old and New Discourses and Ideologies of Power: Postsocialist Perspectives

Old and New Discourses and Ideologies of Power: Postsocialist Perspectives<

April 9-10, 2010
Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Everyday life in the socialist states before 1989 was undergirded by the strong ideological domination of state governance. Such domination took many forms: from the imposition of one linguistic variant of everyday speech upon another and the control of media to the prominence of party slogans in public spaces and the censorship of political humor and arguably subversive art forms.

Today, for the most part, the slogans are off the walls and into edited volumes formatted as collections of humor. The whispered political joke, which could put one in prison, is now replaced by openly expressed consumer complaint and political scandals. And yet, we wonder: what are the hidden continuities of the discourses and ideologies of power (and agency) in the postsocialist contexts? What are the distinct discontinuities? How are old ideological templates reworked for new political realities? How are arts, literature, journalism, and new media implicated in this? Are there new more subtle forms of social and self-censorship which instantiate old ideological templates?

SOYUZ: The Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies calls for papers attending to how old and new discourses and ideologies of power are manifested, challenged, and reconfigured in postsocialist societies. As a departing point, we are interested in language, media, and rhetoric, and the role of art and intellectual elites in the process of such discourses. Additionally, we seek to explore how postsocialist experiences are themselves deployed and marshaled in local and global political discourses in a neoliberal world.

We welcome papers addressing themes including, but not limited to the historical, ethnographic and theoretical explorations of:

• history, literature, and the challenged role of the intellectual
  
• old and new political vocabularies vis-à-vis old and new political realities
  
• advertising, propaganda, and complaint in everyday life
  
• linguistic ideologies revisited
  
• popular genres in language and the arts
  
• new media and the state

This is an interdisciplinary symposium. We welcome papers addressing the above and similar issues through a postsocialist perspective not only from Europeanist scholars, but from North and South American, Asian, and African contexts as well. Graduate students and junior scholars are particularly encouraged to apply.

The symposium will be held on April 9-10, 2010 at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Northwestern University)

Submission Guidelines:

Interested scholars should email a 300-word abstract by February 13, 2010. Please write "Soyuz 2010 submission" in the subject line.
Successful candidates will be notified on March 3, 2010.

Thanks to the support of The Graduate School at Northwestern, SOYUZ has limited funding to support travel and living expenses for some conference participants. All participants, however, should seek funding from their own institutions, as the support from Northwestern will not cover all expenses.

Email proposals and questions to Lora Koycheva, Anthropology Department, Northwestern University:
l-koycheva@northwestern.edu