Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics: Media and Performing Arts in Egypt, Central-Eastern Europe, and Russia [Hardback]

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Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics - Edited by Tetyana Dzyadevych

Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics: Media and Performing Arts in Egypt, Central-Eastern Europe, and Russia

Tetyana Dzyadevych (Ed.)

by Tetyana Dzyadevych (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Karen Elizabeth Bishop (Hans-Robert Roemer Fellow, Orient-Institut Beirut), Olha Voznyuk (Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences), Miljana Niković (HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany), Alexandra Bardan (University of Bucharest, Romania), Natalia Vasilendiuc (University of Bucharest, Romania), Sasha Razor (University of California Santa Barbara), Anna Sbitneva (University of Southern California), Yelena Severina (Harvard University), Yelena Zotova (Penn State University), James C. Pearce (City College Peterborough)

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“Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics: Media and Performing Arts in Egypt, Central-Eastern Europe, and Russia”, edited by Tetyana Dzyadevycz, is an innovative interdisciplinary collection of essays that probes the complexities of collective nostalgia. Dzyadevycz brings together a diverse group of scholars who open new avenues for analyzing the aesthetics of nostalgia across historical and contemporary socio-political contexts, with case studies ranging from Egypt to the post-Socialist bloc, including Romania, former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The volume contributors examine a wide array of media—film, music, digital photography, home videos, archival footage, circus arts, contemporary television series, and political campaign videos—to question the generation, channeling, and weaponization of nostalgia by media production agents. The book sheds light on the surprising and powerful ways in which the aesthetics of nostalgia shape contemporary political processes, offering insights into the global resurgence of populism and authoritarianism. It serves as a poignant reminder of how the manipulation of collective nostalgia through various media forms can influence contemporary political landscapes and shape the future.

Dr. Maria Khotimsky
Department of Global Languages
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Building on the wave of work on the culture and history of emotions and drawing on the seminal work of Svetlana Boym, this extraordinary book shows us the possibilities for the study of nostalgia. With a focus on post-communist anxieties, the project explores other areas as well - including an inciting perspective on Soviet nostalgia in Egypt. The texts collected by Tatyana Dzyadevych allow us to evaluate the construction of our present as a place of sadness and grief for a past that did never happen.

Prof. Dr. José María Faraldo Jarillo
Departamento Historia moderna e historia contemporánea
Facultad de Geografia e Historia
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

This volume shows that the cultural production of nostalgia is a major tool for structuring feelings of resentment and anxiety. The current volume is concerned with collective nostalgia as it has been elicited, channeled, and weaponized by media production agents. The book aims to analyze how the performing arts and media (music, cinema, TV, etc.) generate and shape the feeling of collective nostalgia. It shows how the cultural production of nostalgia reflects distinct social-political contexts and serves particular political purposes. The collective monograph prioritizes cases from the post-Soviet context. However, the authors do not argue that the collapse of the socialist bloc in general, and the USSR in particular, has established some unique nostalgic precedent. The book claims that mechanisms of producing nostalgia and marshaling it for political purposes are broadly similar in most (modern or postmodern) settings. It is not our intent to demonize Russia, nor do we want Russia to be our dominant frame of reference, even if, in most of our cases here, 'nolens volens' appeared first in Russia-centric post-Soviet discourse. The “Russian bloc” has been placed in the second part of the book in order to give primacy to non-Russian subjects.

List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Nostalgia and Political Symbolism: Post-Communist Performing Arts and Media Production
Tetyana Dzyadevych
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Chapter 1 Nostalgia and Politics: Soviet Circus in Arab Egypt
Elizabeth Bishop
Hans-Robert Roemer Fellow, Orient-Institut Beirut
Chapter 2 Visualizing Habsburg Nostalgia in Contemporary Ukrainian Film
Olha Voznyuk
Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Chapter 3 Audiovisual Yugonostalgias: Lost (Country) & Found (Footage)
Miljana Niković
HafenCity University Hamburg
Chapter 4 The Vibe of Sonic Nostalgia: An Archeology of Disco and Pop Music from Communist Romania
Alexandra Bardan and Natalia Vasilendiuc
University of Bucharest
Chapter 5 How Batska Became the Brand of Belarus: The Evolution of Alexander Lukashenka’s Image and Narratives of Nostalgia in Belarusian Popular Music, 1995-2021
Sasha Razor
University of California Santa Barbara
Chapter 6 Nostalgia for the Violent Times: Reincarnation of Danila Bagrov in Contemporary Russian Culture
Anna Sbitneva
University of Southern California
Chapter 7 Mourning the Monarchy: The Cinematic Tableaux Vivants in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002)
Yelena Severina
Harvard University
Chapter 8 From Parodies to Parades: How Post-Soviet TV Promoted Ur-Nostalgia
Yelena Zotova
Penn State University
Chapter 9 Performing Politics and the Past: Russia’s 2018 Presidential Election
James C. Pearce
City College Peterborough

List of Contributors
Index

Tetyana Dzyadevych is a researcher, commentator, and analyst of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian culture and literature. Currently, she works at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before, she was an assistant professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at Grinnell College (USA) and a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Tetyana Dzyadevych was born and raised in Kyiv (Ukraine). She received intellectual training and education in Europe and the USA. She holds a Ph.D. in literary theory from the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Lublin (Poland) and Slavic studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago (USA). Her area of interest is Russian and Ukrainian literature of 19th-21st c., politics and art; and visual and performing arts and pop culture. Her scholarship primarily focuses on works of the late Soviet period, perestroika, and post-Soviet period. Dr. Dzyadevych studies cultural production to explore and explain how art and literature shape and reflect their audiences' political identities.

collective nostalgia, anxiety, politics, film and TV production, sonic nostalgia, audio-visual nostalgia, tableu vivants