| My work posits post/communist Eastern Europe as a neo/colonial terrain to show how contemporary discursive underpinnings of global capitalism and liberal democracy have been shaped by a combined Orientalist demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures. Thus far, scholarship has focused primarily on Orientalist imaginings of the Balkans (in the wake of the 1990s' wars in former Yugoslavia); when it did tackle Eastern Europe, it looked mostly at Western historical, sociological and literary texts about the region, offered an overview of related discourses and incorporated insights from postcolonial theory cautiously at best. I update existing scholarship by analyzing how old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-articulated in narratives that define a "European" or "civilizational" ideal as an essentially liberal-democratic project against the discursive palimpsest of "totalitarian," "barbarian," and "Oriental" communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to justify transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in post-communism; it increasingly provincializes Eastern Europe by suppressing its communist histories and legacies, placing it in an economically and politically subordinate position with respect to the EU and US and continuing its dependence on the West as a point of reference for an articulation of identity.;I shift the focus from Western narratives to texts written by Eastern European, anti-communist dissidents and exiles, or by authors who ethnically and linguistically straddle the borders between "civilization" and the "Wild East" as they present post/communism to (largely) Western audiences. As with texts emerging in traditional post/colonial situations, exile or incessant border-crossing frequently signifies fragmentation and disjunction in terms of national, cultural, or linguistic identification. I examine the discursive conditions that prompt Nabokov, Milosz, Kundera and others to present themselves as native, "Eastern European" experts and emancipate themselves---and their homelands---as "civilized," "Enlightened," or "Westernized." Importantly, the authors' articulations of such seemingly oppositional identities create discursive openings for recognizing and analyzing the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. These are valuable for deconstructing the basic concept of "Eastern Europe," and exposing Eastern Europeans' preoccupation with their reflections in the Western mirror and the concomitant tradition of self-Orientalization. |
