Soviet Everyday Culture: An Oxymoron?

Mikhail Mishin, a Soviet satirist, wrote that Russians recognize themselves in the famous fairy-tale character Ivan the Fool. He bides his time napping on the heated furnace and gets up only to undertake major heroic feats. Ivan the Fool might be a great hero, but he has no idea how to survive his everyday life. Everyday life, captured in the Russian word byt, is a more dangerous enemy to him than the multi-headed fire-spitting dragon. The everyday is Russia \u27s cultural monster. The nation might worship its heroes and their fabled ability to withstand hell or high water, but it also celebrates their impracticality and helplessness in the face of everyday life

Between Pixels And Play: The Role of the Photograph in Videogame Nostalgias

The histories of videogames are so often contained with nostalgia for the screen, for the arcade, console, computer or game box design, and for the experience of playing itself. Various amateur photographs now archived on Flickr allow us to remember beyond the stereotypical, albeit iconic, imagery of Pac-Man and Space Invaders. The essence of play becomes captured in the photograph as a “collective memory” and “reflective nostalgia” for the places, times and actions inherent in the histories of the early 1970s and 1980s videogame era. It is through debating the so-often implied “reconstructed nostalgias” offered by videogame companies to consumers in their remakes of classic game titles that this paper explores “reflective nostalgia” of videogames by examining the role of photographs taken during the act of playing these games. In doing so it reframes 1980s videogame nostalgias beyond the “mediated space” of the screen, and moves instead towards the “play space” as another way of keeping these histories alive

The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul

This essay looks back upon Orhan Pamuk’s non-fiction book, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), and unpacks its multi-layered representation of the city as landscape. It is here that Pamuk pursues most overtly “the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city” which won him the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Weaving personal memoir and historical essay into a unique narrative tapestry, Pamuk’s book explores a series of tensions that define the city’s image and identity; insider/outsider and East/West polarities, in particular, are tirelessly deconstructed. The essay examines Pamuk’s poetics and politics of memory in relation to works by other authors, notably Walter Benjamin. In conclusion, the new edition of Istanbul (2015) is discussed against the background of the social and spatial changes that have beset Turkey’s cultural capital in the interim

Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place

Téa Obreht’s Transnational Disremembering within the Mythical Realism of The Tiger’s Wife

This paper discusses Téa Obreht's 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife within the context of transmigrations and post-national conceptions of both the real and mythical translocality. Through analysis of Obreht’s discourse of disremembering, which is in Aleksandar Hemon’s definition a recognition of one’s own experience under the new narrative, the paper will explore the transnational dimensions of the Slavic-American identity of The Tiger’s Wife. The aim of this paper is to focus on the new understanding of transnational relationality as well as on a reconception of reality that disremembers Obreht’s or, on a larger scale, human experience within the mythical realism of The Tiger’s Wife.Keywords: transnationalism, the Slavic-American identity, disremembering, Aleksandar Hemon, Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife, mythical realismTo disremember, according to Aleksandar Hemon, a celebrated Bosnian-American writer with an immigrant experience, is to recognize one’s own experience under the new narrative. He points out that it especially refers to the “people who have come through a form of actual, physical slaughter, and to the extent the construction of narrative is memory, then the narrative, for them, has to involve a quantity of amnesia. More amnesia that is involved in most narrative” (Interview by Richard Wirick). Disremembering blends non-fiction and fiction, genocide documentation and utopian imagery, and implies an alternative interpretation of reality. Hemon’s 2008 novel The Lazarus Project is a transnational project of disremembering. In The Lazarus Project, Hemon intertwines a double narrative of the multilayered parallel universes of the past and the present by following the narrator Vladimir Brik, a post-war Bosnian who lives in the United States, as he questions his life. Brik traces the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant who is a survivor of the Kishinev pogrom in what is now Moldova, and an alleged anarchist. At the same time, Brik questions both the inner and outer aspects of his reality. In the first-person narrative, he explains that he needs to re-imagine what he could not retrieve, and to see what he could not imagine. For this reason, he disremembers his own experience within the story of Lazarus that also implies resurrection and a new birth story. This paper will analyze Téa Obreht’s evocative 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife from the point of view of a Hemonesque narrative concept of disremembering and, within the discourse, an Obrehtesque interaction of myth and truth

Remembering the City: Changing Conceptions of Community in Urban China

Adopting complimentary integrative research methodologies, this article examines changing conceptions of community amongst urban residents within the city of Suzhou, Jiangsu province, China. Whilst the impact of urban transformation from a macro-perspective, deploying large scale quantitative measures to capture resident perceptions within China’s mega-cities, has been addressed, there is something of a scholarly lacuna that adopts a micro-perspective to explore the nation-state’s smaller developing cities. Thus, through local residents’ past memories, ‘everyday’ experiences of (former) urban communities, and reflections on a particular way of life, we focus upon the subjective/affective meanings and memories attached to processes of urban change. We place emphasis on the manner in which residents make sense of socio-spatial transformations in relation to the (re)making of community, local social interaction, and a sense of belonging. Discussion centres on the affective and embodied notions of a particular way of life in (older) communities; sensory performances that were deemed difficult to replicate within modern development zones and the broader field of contemporary Chinese society