“Belonging” in Post-Communist Europe: Strategies of Representations in Kapka Kassabova's Street without a Name
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.2.46Abstract
In her book Street without a Name, Kapka Kassabova, a Bulgarian author living in Scotland, combines a memoir of her childhood in communist Bulgaria with a travelogue about later return visits to her – now post-communist – native country. In this study, the discontinuous, fragmented and heterogeneous narrative of her autobiographical text is interpreted as an attempt to find an appropriate mode of sharing intimate knowledge of life in communism with a wider reading public in (primarily) Western English-speaking countries. It is demonstrated that Kassabova, writing from the perspective of an expatriate, emphasizes both the uniqueness of life in communist Bulgaria and the commonality of many experiences and values as well as their compatibility with those held by many people in Western countries. By employing a hybrid textual form, she succeeds in rendering her experiences as a child and teenager in communist Bulgaria and as a transnational migrant into the structures, metaphors and themes of a transnational “liquid modernity”, thus appealing to a broad multinational readership.Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2013 Gabriele M. Linke

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.