Eastern European Exilic Trajectories in Post-1989 Life Writing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.2.60Keywords:
Exile, Eastern Europe, Post-CommunismAbstract
My article offers a comparative analysis of autobiographical works by Susan Suleiman, Andrei Codrescu and Kapka Kassabova with a three-pronged interest. First, I aim to further the discussion about exilic identities emerging from Eastern Europe; second, I show the “shifting national, global imaginaries” that post-1989 Eastern European exiles’ life writing registers; and third, I analyze how Suleiman, Codrescu and Kassabova negotiate affective attachments withtheir “native” Eastern European countries in the aftermath of the Cold War. I consider their life writing important as it captures the overlappings and complicities between apparently opposite regimes — nazism, communism and/or post-communism — and in so doing they animate a historical imaginary of the recent past in Eastern Europe. Their trajectories of exile and return become a lens for the larger variations of exilic subjectivity in post-cold war Eastern Europe.Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2013 Ioana Luca

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.