COMPARATIVE POLITICS - Discussion Themes & Bibliography

1st Week (5 Oct.):
Introduction. Outline and Prerequisites of the Course. 
Cultural Studies and their intertextual ties to other disciplines.

2nd Week (12 Oct.)
The Power of Discourse – Language in/as action, language and representation. Discourse Study in Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language
- J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962, 1-11;
- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,  Metaphors We Live By, London: University of Chicago Press, 2003 (1980), 8-22.

3rd Week (19 Oct.)
SOFT APPROACHES I. The Discursive Turn in the study of societies and cultures. Language and power in the formation of cultural identity.
    Bibliography (two of the following): 
- Ruth Wodak, “Introduction: Discourse Studies – Important Concepts and Terms”, R. Wodak and M. Krzyzanovski (eds.), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences, Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 1-20;
- Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse”, R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Boston & London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1981, 48-78.

4th Week (26 Oct.)
SOFT APPROACHES II. The Discursive Turn in the study of societies and cultures. Cultural identity and the discursive constitution of societies.
     Bibliography (two of the following): 
- Anthony Giddens, Modernity & Self-identity: Self and Society in the late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 23-34;  
- Wendt, Alexander. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2003 (1999), 171-178;
- Bogdan Ştefănescu, Postcommunism / Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity, EUB 2013, 82-98.

5th Week (2 Nov.)
Coloniality, colonialisms, colonies; Colonialism versus imperialism, colonialism and modernity.
     Bibliography (one of the following – a or b): 
a) - Bogdan Ştefănescu, Postcommunism / Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity, EUB 2013, 47-65, 112-117.
or
b) - Osterhammel, Jürgen. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers and Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1997 (1995), 1-22.
- ‘Modernism’ and ‘modernity’ entries in Ashcroft, B. et alia, Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies. London & New York, Routledge, 1999 (1998), 143-7.

6th Week (9 Nov.)
Contrasting postcommunism and postcolonialism: generic and typological similarities vs. historical and ideological differences.
     Bibliography (two of the following):
- David Chioni Moore, „Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Towards a Global Postcolonial Critique”, Violeta Kelertas (ed.) Baltic Postcolonialism, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi,  2006, 11-44.
- S. Chari and K. Verdery, „Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51.1 (2009), 6–34.
- Henry F. Carey and Rafal Raciborski, “Postcolonialism: A Valid Paradigm for the Former Sovietized States and Yugoslavia?”, East European Politics and Societies 18 (2004), 191-235.

7th Week (16 Nov.)
The coloniality of (post)dependent cultures: Cultural trauma as unifying concept for Western and Soviet coloniality
Bibliography (two of the following): 
a) - Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Aghaie, “Introduction: Mourning and Memory”, Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East vol. 25, no.1 (2005), 16-29;
- Piotr Sztompka, “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcommunist Societies”, J. Alexander et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, University of California Press, 2004, 149-189.
or
b) - Robert Eaglestone, “’You Would Not Add to My Suffering If You Knew What I Have Seen”: Holocaust Testimony And Contemporary African Trauma Literature’, Studies in the Novel vol. 40, 1&2 (2008), 72-85.
- Kiossev, Alexander, “Notes on Self-colonising Cultures”, Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe. Eds. B. Pejic. & D. Elliott. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999, 114-8.

8th Week (23 Nov.)
Main Concepts of Postcolonial Cultural Studies and their potential applicability in Postcommunist Cultural Studies.
    Bibliography:
- Entries for agency, authenticity, cartography, center/margin, comprador, creolization, counter-discourse, cultural diversity/difference, dependency theory, essentialism, Eurocentrism, exotic(ism), hybridity, liminality, negritude, Orientalism, subaltern, world system theory in Ashcroft, B. et alia, Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies, London & New York: Routledge, 1999 (1998).

9th Week (7 Dec.)
The West and the rest. Self and exotic other in the creation of European identity.
    Bibliography (two of the following):
- Edward W. Said, “Introduction,” Orientalism, new and rev. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1994 (1983), 1-28.
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, „Can the Subaltern Speak?”, C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London: Macmillan, 1988.
- Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 66-84.

10th Week (14 Dec.)
Main Concepts of Postcommunist Cultural Studies and their potential applicability in Postcolonial Cultural Studies.
    Bibliography (two of the following):
a) - Entries for Balkanism, postcommunism, communization/decommunization, transition, wooden language in Monica Bottez et al. Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms, EUB 2011.
- Bogdan Ștefănescu, „Viză respinsă. Anevoioasele călătorii teoretice dintre lumea postcolonială şi cea postcomunistă”, Dus-întors. Rute ale teoriei literare în modernitate, ed. de Oana Fotache, Magda Răduță, Adrian Tudurachi, Humanitas, 2016.
or
b) - Monika Albrecht (ed.). “Introduction” to Postcolonialism Cross-Examined: Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present. London, New York: Routledge., 2019, pp. 1-47.
- Dumitru Tucan, “The Adaptability of Theory: Postcolonialism Vs. Postcommunism in Romanian Literary Studies”, in Dacoromania litteraria vol.II / 2015, pp. 101-116.

11th Week (4 Jan.)
The Other(ing of) Europe.
     Bibliography:
- Milica Bakic-Hayden, „Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia”,  Slavic Review, 54. 4 (1995), pp. 917-931.
and one of the following
- Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 1-16.
or
- Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3-20.

12th Week (11 Jan.)
The Connection between the Second and Third World in a Colonial Context.
    Bibliography (one of the following – a or b):
a) - Benyamin Neuberger, “The African Concept of Balkanisation”, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1976), 523-529.
- Ádám Mayer, „Afrikanizacija: Eastern European Epistemologies and African Labour”,  Intersections. EEJSP 2.1 (2016), 54-73.
or
b) - Eboe Hutchful, “Eastern Europe: Consequences for Africa”, Review of African Political Economy, No. 50, Africa in a New World Order (Mar.,1991), 51-59.
- Monica Popescu, “Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating eastern European experiences for an African audience”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 48, No. 2 (2012), 176–187.

13th Week (?)
Modernization Traumatized Identities: the loss of self and authenticity.
    Bibliography:
- Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001, 1-23.
- Bogdan Ștefănescu, “Filling in the Historical Blanks: A Tropology of the Void in Postcommunist and Postcolonial Reconstructions of Identity”, D, Pucherova and R. Gafrik (eds.) Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, Brill/Rodopi, 2015, 107-120.