Northeast Modern Language Association Convention 2013
Call for Papers for the panel on
In Search of the Former East in the Former West

Chair: Corina L. Apostol, Ph.D student, Art History Department, Rutgers
University

In the past two decades, artists from Eastern Europe and Russia have
been discovered and rediscovered in the West many times over. To this
date, there have been over 25 major group exhibitions mounted on the
topic of art from these regions before 1989, while many more books,
articles, reviews have been published and significant conferences
organized. Moreover, artists from these regions have entered in the
collections of major museums in the West. From Berlin to Chicago, from
Paris to New York, there seems to be a boundless interest on the part
of scholars working in the Western cannon of art history to present
eastern art production before the fall of the Iron Curtain - and thus
come to terms with their former Other. By now, this series of grand,
ambitious projects amounts to more than just a way for the West to
satisfy the need for covering this so-called "uncharted territory" or
the desire for the new in contemporary art. The diversity in strategies
on how to approach these regions attests to a lingering anxiety on both
sides on how to re-define the former East. These enunciations are
important both from a geo-political perspective, manifested through
art, and a historical one - which parts of Cold War history still need
to be re-considered and re-written? This panel invites a thoughtful
dialogue on the re-presentations of Eastern European and Russian art
through curatorial and scholarly investigations mounted outside the
realities in which it is grounded. According to which criteria, or
whose criteria are these (art)histories constructed and to what ends?
And what implications do these gestures have for the West to
rearticulate itself as the "former West"?

Please send inquiries or 250-500 word abstracts (preferably in MS Word
or PDF) to Corina L. Apostol, capostoleden.rutgers.edu

About NeMLA: http://nemla.org/convention/2013/