ВЪТРЕШНИТЕ ПРОТИВОРЕЧИЯ НА ТУРСКАТА МОДЕРНИЗАЦИЯ

Author(s): Kalina Peeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2018

This article is dedicated to the modernization in the Republic of Turkey that took place from its establishment in 1923 until the end of the 20th century. It analyzes Mustafa Kemal’s approach to modernization, which has imposed a radical separation with traditional Islamic values and Ottoman tradition. Despite the quick enactment of a European legislation and the restructuring of the country to a European model, the change in Turkish people’s identity has not been without difficulty. Alongside the introduction of a multiparty political system, the traditional Islamic values have made their way into the political scene, and shortly thereafter the Turkish army begins to intervene directly in political life as a guardian of the secular nature of the state, but at the same time undermines its democratic foundations. The movement toward a liberal political life during T. Özal’s administration has irreversibly shifted the direction of Kemalist Turkey’s development. The necessity of the merging of Islamic cultural identity with European values has sparked a public debate, marked by an uneven advancement, testing the country’s worldly stature.

The Theme of Rape in Ida Fink’s Aryan Papers and Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class

Author(s): Aránzazu Calderón Puerta / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

The article analyses the ways in which Central European postwar societies produce gen¬dered representations of Holocaust stories. Calderón Puerta shows how sexual violence functions in culture, highlighting the different ways in which it can be represented in literary texts: it can be understood as a symbol of relationships between antagonistic communities of men (what Roland Barthes refers to as mythologization), but it can also be seen to symbolize the continuum of violence in patriarchy (violence against specific women, structural violence and symbolic violence). Calderón Puerta argues that the different ways of understanding the representation of rape are related to the difference between masculine and feminine points of view.

Shame or Pride? Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Novels for Girls in the Polish People’s Republic and Today

Author(s): Eliza Szybowicz / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Manly Fascism

Author(s): Sławomir Buryła / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Buryła discusses how fascism relates to the concept of masculinity in popular and stereotypical representations of fascism and of the Nazi torturer. He also analyses the ways in which the executioner is erotized in film and literature. Finally, he explores the sources and dimensions of the Nazis’ fascination with masculinity – a fascination that led to the male’s dominant position in Hitler’s ideology.

An Ethnography of the Production of Translation: Literatures from the (Semi) Periphery on the German Publishing Market

Author(s): Paweł Zajas / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

This article discusses the processes of bringing translations of literatures from nations on the (semi)periphery to the German publishing market. Using Dutch and Polish literatures as case studies, and drawing empirical data from the archives of the publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, covering the period from the early 1960s until 1993. Zajas examines what aspects of the German publishing landscape have propelled Dutch literature to a relatively prominent position in the second half of the twentieth century, while literary translations from Polish came to only about half the number and were thus relegated to the periphery. Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) allows Zajas to broaden the theoretical scope of the scholarship on the social and organizational conditions of translation.

Who Needs the Book? Copyright in the Late Print Epoch

Author(s): Alicja Pałęcka,Maciej Jakubowiak / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

The authors analyse the relationships that came into being within the literary field in Poland after 1989, with reference to the question of copyright as well as the process of print remediation. Their analysis is based on pronouncements by actors with in the field – pronouncements that have been collected during a sociological investigation across Poland. The point of departure is a recognition of the divergent ways in which writers and publishers articulate their own interests. Both groups express a strong attachment to the book as an object (an attachment related to conservative distribution models), and yet they disagree on the question of copyright protection. This article contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the two groups’ different interests can be articulated with the help of identical figures.

Digital Literature. Current State of Research in Poland

Author(s): Urszula Pawlicka / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

The aim of the article is to present the current state of research on electronic literature in Poland. By way of introduction, the author presents various phenomena in literature at the turn of the 21st century, which originated from the intersection of literature and new technologies, especially Internet. In subsequent parts, the author presents major terminological and methodological problems: the difference between “literature on Internet” and electronic literature, digital literature and liberature, contexts for the description of hypertext and the definition of cyberpoetry. The author attempts at sketching the research fields and pointing at issues hitherto left behind by the theoreticians of electronic literature.

Digital and Print Hybrids

Author(s): Jarosław Kopeć,Izabela Koryś,Dominika Michalak / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

In 2014 the National Library of Poland commissioned a survey to create a typology of Internet users. Building on that typology, the authors of the present article examine what role literature sourced and read online plays within reading practices. Their focus on the social adaptation of modern technology, on issues related to reading literary texts online, on diagnosing how the Internet facilitates access to literature, and on situating digital practices in the context of analogue ones.

Negative Testimonials. Photographic Representation of Holocaust Memory

Author(s): Adam Mazur / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

An Affective Art History

Author(s): Luiza Nader / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Trajectories of “Western Borderlands” Memory After 1989

Author(s): Kinga Siewior / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

This article concerns the literature of “minor homelands” representing the territories that were included within Poland’s post-1945 borders. Preoccupied with a search of Otherness and with the concept of a multicultural borderland, this literature rose to popularity in the 1990s. Writers associated with it drew on the poetics elaborated in the context of Poland’s so-called borderland literature [literature kresowa] to rediscover traces of German culture that had been erased during the People’s Republic. By drawing on the poetics of retrospective utopia, however, this literature marginalizes the fundamental problem of forced migration. Siewior describes the strategies of masking that ‘migratory gap,’ i.e. the aestheticizing transfers of older (borderland) traditions, the return to the grandparents’ experience, or the reconstruction of the perspective of the Other. These narrative strategies suggest that this literature is unwittingly entangled in dominant discourses of identity and memory – discourses rooted in nostalgic postwar borderland literature.

EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL POLICIES IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA AND THE MINORITIES

Author(s): Aneta Mihaylova / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

The collapse of communism in Romania in 1989 has left its imprint also on the minority policies. The article tries to outline the factors that influenced the minority policies of the Romanian governments and their development over the past quarter of a century, while laying a major focus on education and the use of the mother tongue. The Romanian legislation in these fields in the post-communist period gives good grounds to conclude that there has been a considerable progress towards the extension of minority rights. A major role for that has played the need to harmonize the Romanian legislation with the European rules and directives. A significant factor for the change was also the active policy of the UDMR, which firmly defended the rights of the Hungarian minority. At the same time, it should be noted that while making numerous concessions, the Romanian government had made it clear that these concessions could only be made within certain limits.

THE ALBANIANS IN THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA (1991 – 2001)

Author(s): Mariyana STAMOVA / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

For more than two centuries the Albanian factor in Macedonia has been an objective and dynamically changing reality. It has manifested itself as an ethnic, demographic, socio-economic factor during the Ottoman rule and in Unitarian Yugoslavia; as an ethnic minority, political and constitutional crisis – at the time of SFR Yugoslavia; ten years after the establishment of independent Republic of Macedonia, since the beginning of 2001, the Albanian factor has turned into a major problem for the existence and sovereignty of the country.

TUDJMAN AND CROATIA’S DISTANCING FROM EUROPE

Author(s): Irina Ognyanova-Krivoshieva / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

On 1 July 2013 Croatia became part of the European Union, but that happened nine years after Slovenia. The Croatian nationalism, flourishing in the 1990s was hostile to the very idea of united Europe. In 1991 – 1992 when a great part of the Croatian territory was under Serbian control, the Western countries supported and recognized the new state. But this positive image quickly changed after its participation in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and especially after the military operation “Storm” in 1995, when around 300,000 Serbs were forced to leave the country. As a result, European politicians did not invite Croatia in 1997 to start negotiations for accession to the EU. In late 1990s the country was in complete international isolation. Tudjman was against every initiative for regional or European cooperation. Building its own independent state Croats were very suspicious to all mega-national projects and initiatives.

RESISTANCE THROUGH SOUVLA AND KREMALA – PERFORMATIVE ACTS AND ACTIONS IN A PROTEST IN CYPRUS 2013

Author(s): Mike Hajimichael / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

This article explores an actual and online street protest which unfolded over a series of weeks in the Spring of 2013 when Cyprus experienced an economic crisis following the ‘bailout’-‘haircut of March 2013. In an effort to contextualize and explore the performative aspects of these events the author links this to art and protest as an expression of alternativeness and an avant-garde spirit embodying resonances of 1960’s and 1970’s art and protest as performative happenings. It is argued, unlike other similar contemporary contexts of economic crisis in the EU, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain, protests in Cyprus may not have been so massively populated but the spirit of performative art was expressed in innovative ways, as documented and shared through social media as an alternative platform of expression, which ultimately fills a void that exists in the contemporary Cypriot political landscape.

BEYOND BLOOD AND HONEY: RE-IMAGINING THE BALKANS THROUGH TRAVELLING EXHIBITIONS

Author(s): Maria-Alina Asavei / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

From 2002 to 2015 a considerable number of large-scale, geopolitical bannered exhibitions have been dedicated to the ‘the Balkans.’ This article aims to analyze and compare two types of regional, large scale exhibitions from/on the Balkans: contemporary art exhibitions and interpretative (dedicated to historical and ethnographic themes) exhibitions. The pervasiveness of the stereotypical visual representations of ‘the Balkans’ – called by the Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev the ‘Balkan blue’ – as a region of everlasting conflicts and binary oppositions coincides with the birth of contemporary Balkan art. By attempting to overcome the stereotypical images of the Balkans (‘the Balkan ethos’) still prevalent in our days, the travelling exhibition ‘Imagining the Balkans: Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century’ – opened in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at the National Museum of Slovenia, in April 2013 and then displayed in other national museums of history from the Balkan region – endeavors to place national histories in a perspective where they interact.

Александър Костов. Транспорт и комуникации на Балканите (1800–1914). Поредица „Регионални изследвания“. София, Университетско издателство „Св. Климент Охридски“, 2017. 312 с.

Author(s): Evgeni Kostov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2018

Book Review

The Common Law and the Canon of Lekë Dukagjini

Author(s): Berat Aqifi,Ardian Emini,Xhemshit Shala / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This paper contains a summary, chronology and analysis of a specific process that Albania has in general, as it is the specificity of blood feud, which is one of the typical and very current problems of the Albanian people. The implication of the second parties and the third parties on these developments in reconciliation of the lynx and the effect of the Canon of Lekë Dukagjini and other socio cultural implications for overcoming the inter human conflicts that find support at customary law, at the same time it is considered as an act to settle down the disputes, a legal and institutional component for the replacement of the courts. Special emphasis is placed on the Canon that Albanian law is an Albanian institution, institutional history, but also a “formulated idea”. It is the mind and spirit of the Albanians, conceived for centuries in the oral tradition, preserved, protected with fanaticism and transmitted as a message, to be understood, disaggregated and absorbed in the way it was formulated and transmitted, without being changed in form and content. The Canons are the product of an ancestral society, when Canon law was the only right to regulate life. Life becomes fierce not only in the sense of confronting nature, but also of people with each other, which is characterized by a constant competition, which one alone can not withstand. One of the challenges that Albanian society and state faces in this decade is the phenomenon of blood feud and revenge, a habit inherited from the ancient past, incompatible with the principles of civilized society and the rule of law.

Колко струва войната, а колко – мирът?

Author(s): Albena Simova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

Любомир Огнянов (съставител). Политическа история на съвременна България. Сборник документи. Т. III (1953–1956). София, Държавна агенция „Архиви“, 2018

Author(s): Vladimir Migev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2018

Book Review