Browsing by Subject "East European studies"

This dissertation analyzes experimental art movements in Hungary and the former Yugoslavia from 1968 to 1989, examining the variety of ways that artists responded to the ideological and practical failures of communism. I also deliberate on how artists, living in the specter of Marxist ideology, negotiated socio-political and cultural systems dominated by the state; how they undermined the moral consciousness that state socialism imposed from above; and how they created alternative ways of being in an era that had promised the opening of society and art but that failed that pledge. I suggest that some artists increasingly questioned the state's hegemony in everyday relationships, language, and symbols, and attempted to neutralize self-censorship and gain sovereignty over their own bodies and minds through "decision as art." The dissertation approaches authoritarian domination within the context of the artists' aesthetic choices, especially the development of conceptual and performance art as a mode of opposition. Deliberating on the notion of decision as central to the conceptualization and execution of resistance to the state, I focus on the alternative ways in which Yugoslavian and Hungarian artists made art in variegated forms and modes of ethical commitment. I argue that such art must be understood as an active decision to live in and through art while enduring political circumstance.

This dissertation studies the political economy of city status and its historical role in promoting development. The status of a city was a set of political institutions that altered the governance of towns it was bestowed upon, making towns into cities and townsmen into citizens. The three essays of this dissertation explore why and how alternative city-level political institutions may result in different development outcomes, and how individuals may dynamically interact with and respond to political institutions. I highlight the role of the distribution of political power between the landed and the urban elites as key to understanding the consequences of city status. In this dissertation, I utilize a variety of methods such as archival research, game-theoretic modeling, historical and qualitative analysis, case studies, geographic information system mapping as well as econometric analysis.

In Chapter 2, I develop a formal model of city formation with political control by landed or urban elites. I show how technological limitations faced by the landed elites, a result of their dependence on the scarcely available land as a production input, constrain optimal allocation decisions for employing complementary production inputs, labor, and productive public goods. The model predicts that political control by landed elites will result in cities with a smaller equilibrium population size and with fewer public goods being provided.

In Chapter 3, I argue that institutions privileging urban at the expense of landed elites may generate better outcomes even in the absence of democracy and may actually outperform democracy if it leads to political control by landed elites. Using original town-level data, I draw on evidence from an 1869 city reform in Congress Poland which deprived three-quarters of the 452 cities of their city status, giving political rights to landed but not urban elites. I show that degraded cities experienced a 64 percentage points slower population growth over the next 40 years. City status was associated with greater public goods provision and more effective judiciary in remaining cities and contributed to a relative agrarianization of degraded cities. I discuss implications for our understanding of the role of inclusive institutions in promoting development.

Chapter 4 explores how individuals may contest unfavorable formal institutions, resulting in the development of norms that directly counter these institutions. The theoretical framework developed in this chapter serves to provide an explanation for how formal institutions may persist even long after their demise, and why the direction of this persistence does not need to replicate equilibria that formal institutions were meant to sustain. To investigate this empirically, I study the long-term effects of the 1869 city reform to show how formal city-level institutions that have been unfavorable to entrepreneurship have led to the development of strong pro-entrepreneurship norms that have persisted until the present and make the populations of towns with previously unfavorable institutions more entrepreneurial now.

This dissertation focuses on the fictional narratives of Eastern and Central European women authors writing in German and explores the ways in which historical and political trauma shapes their approach to narrative. By investigating the atrocities of the World War II era and beyond through a lens of trauma, I look at the ways in which their narrative writing is disrupted by traumatic memory, engendering a genre that calls into question official accounts of historical events. I argue that without the emergence and proliferation of these individual trauma narratives to contest, official, cemented accounts, there exists a threat of permanent inscription of official versions into public consciousness, effectively excluding the narratives of communities rendered fragile by war and/or displacement. The dissertation demonstrates how these trauma fictions i) reveal the burden of unresolved, transmitted trauma on the second generation as the pivotal generation between the repressive Stalinist era and the collapse of communism, ii) disrupt official accounts of events through the intrusion of individual traumatic memory that is by nature unmediated and uncensored, iii) offer alternative plural accounts of events by rejecting normal everyday language as a vehicle for narrative and instead experimenting with alternative modes of representation, articulating trauma through poetic language, through spaces, and through the body, and v) struggle against theory, while paradoxically often succumbing to the very same institutionalized language of trauma that they seek to contest. Trauma fiction therefore emerges as a distinct genre that forestalls the threat of erasure of alternative memories by constantly challenging and exposing the equivocal nature of official narratives, while also pointing to the challenges faced in attempting to give a voice to groups that have suffered trauma in an age where the term has become embedded and overused in our everyday language.

Based on fieldwork in Bursa and archival research, this dissertation investigates the historical interplay between professional soccer, nationalism, and globalization in Turkey. The dissertation makes the case that the globalized commercialized competition in professional soccer as well as attempts and failures to regulate the explosive economic and cultural dynamics of professional soccer have made significant contributions to the remaking of Turkish nation-building over the decades throughout the 20th century and until the present day. Starting with a historical analysis of the interwar origins of commercial soccer in post-imperial Istanbul and its fraught relation to militarist nation-building, the dissertation then moves to the formation of a national sport bureaucracy and subsequent development of a national professional league after the 1960s. An ethnography of a city team Bursaspor, which constitutes the second half of the dissertation, demonstrates that what I call the joint-stock politics of city’s soccer team is a cultural performance for the city to tell itself stories about its industrial modernity and the globalizing transformations the city undergoes.

The dissertation examines the work contemporary artists, curators, and scholars who have, in the last two decades, addressed urgent political and economic questions by revisiting the legacies of the Yugoslav twentieth century: multinationalism, socialist self-management, non-alignment, and war. I conceptualize the work of contemporary artists as that of Yugoslavia’s “surviving generation,” and use it as a starting point for a reconstruction of what I argue is a decolonial twentieth-century Yugoslav aesthetics that has persisted into the present despite numerous and violent historical ruptures. I also seek analogies between this aesthetics and a number of theoretical frameworks, in particular those of Edmund Husserl, Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler, whose work similarly arose out of constellations of crisis, death, and survival. The worldwide strengthening of conservative and nationalist movements following the crisis of capitalism in 2008 reveals the violent break-up of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a precursor to global developments, rather than an exception, and my dissertation argues for a global import of the Yugoslav experience. From the anti-imperialist assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the communist-led resistance during WW2, the anti-Stalinist socialist state and its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement, to the war-ridden, post-communist transition, the Yugoslav century is not only co-extensive with the dreams and disasters of the “short twentieth century” (1914-1991), but can be seen as this century’s metonymy, or even, synecdoche. The engagement of contemporary artists, scholars and curators with the aesthetic and political legacies of the Yugoslav century, the dissertation argues, opens up the possibility to read Yugoslavia both as a proper name, designating a particular history, and as a universally valid signifier for a number of unresolved and persisting questions of the past: the quest for social equality, ongoing forms of colonialism and decolonization, the return(s) of nationalism, and the crises of capitalism and democracy.

How can community-level observations in ethnically divided post-conflict zones explain local behavior towards the memory and denial of a genocide? Nearly 30 years after the end of the war and genocide of the targeted group of focus in this study (Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks), certain municipalities across Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia), particularly in the Bosnian state entity of Republika Srpska, remain divided in favor of ethnic Bosnian Serbs and create a hostile social and political environment for Bosniaks. In this thesis, I seek to understand the social factors that explain the extremes of denial and memory of the Bosnian War’s concurrent genocide. I will focus on the case of the municipality of Prijedor in north-west Bosnia, where post-war behavior towards the war and genocide reflects the extreme changes and violence endured by the civilians of the municipality during the active conflict. I conclude that municipalities like Prijedor with long multicultural histories are more vulnerable to the conditions that destroy nations during genocides and ethnic-based conflict, and in the post-genocide era, memory and denial coexist and fight for a platform in the same social spaces.

This dissertation argues that the emergence of the idea of Eastern Europe in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment West could be attributed not only to geopolitical causes but also to the way that the region was figured religiously. Considered against the backdrop of the rise of global racial order, the idea of Eastern Europe is shown to have its origins in Western theological imaginaries which were transmuted into gendered raciality. Through an analysis of the travelogues by Western travelers to the Russian Empire and its European peripheries, this project traces the rise of Euro-Orientalism, which gets inflected as “Asiatic” in Russia, and “Jewish” in the rest of Eastern Europe. Seen through this Euro-Orientalist lens, Russia is figured as the intra-European antithesis to the West, and the remainder of Eastern Europe, as liminal territories.