After the fall of the Berlin Wall, new cultural and political identities emerged in Central and East Europe. Other spaces, other identities, and other boundaries have been created: the cartography of those regions has greatly changed. These spaces do not take the stable form of impassable borders (although new nationalisms and new open or underground conflicts have emerged), but they have been configured as an archipelago of multiple and complex relations, that sometimes involve demarcations between "Self" and "Stranger", sometimes implies inclusions that accept the "other". And some of these communities do not have a precise territorial location, but are dispersed in various states. Both the areas with a strong political-cultural identity, and the areas characterized by "threshold" and heterotopy generated important artistic and cultural products in the last 25 years. The research project, which plans a multi-year development and has an interdisciplinary character, is articulated by phases: the first one consists in identifying, in a kind of 'cultural cartography' , these other spaces that go beyond the territories organized as states, and in identifying (at first, in the areas of German, Russian, Polish, Romanian and Czech languages) cultural phenomena that characterize this trend, as well as themes, motives, expressions, common elements of this artistic production. The research group in addition to a philological methodology, will use an intercultural comparative method, since the products do not only invest different (but closely connected) languages and areas, but they are also of different artistic typology. The research group aims to organize one or more international conferences on the subject, to present the results of the research in one or more books, to create a website to publish the partial results of the research, to organize a seminar (open to the PhD students and school teachers) to test the impact of the research results on teaching activity.
Some topics of the research project has been already studied but this studies concern individual linguistic-cultural areas and focus mainly the memory of the past or sectorial aspects of the post-1989 period. The new characteristic of this research project consists in producing a new chartography of the new cultural identities after 1989 in a general and comparative perspective, considering many linguistic and cultural areas (German, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Jewish) and the bordering minority areas in its reciprocal interference and in its intercultural communication. The second innovative characteristic of this project consists in building a stylographic data-base (computering a quantitative analyse) as background to produce a ¿lexicon of Otherness¿ i.e. a catalog of representations of Extraneous in each linguistic and cultural area. It will be very useful in pinpointing the form of relationship between Self and Other in Central and East Europa. The third innovative characteristic consists in producing a web site in which will be publish the chartography of new spaces and new cultural identities as well the results of the research. The fourth innovative characteristic consists in organizing a workshop (open to the PhD students and school teachers) to test the impact of the research results on teaching activity (especially in the middle school).
The existing bibliography on the topics of the research project is in fact sectorial. And even the publications of the participants either focus on particular linguistic and cultural areas or pinpoint the past i.e. the period before the Fall of Communism. It would be very innovative to combine these critical tools together to describe, map, and contextualise the literary forms of contemporary narratives (after 1989 and 2004) of transcultural writers ¿choosing¿ to stay on the threshold of not-native languages, to achieve a `third space¿ which can be able to liberate the traumatic personal and collective experiences of Central and East European memories in their longue durée (see Delaperrière-Lory-Marès 2005), starting from the beginning of the XX century to the present day.
The following short list aims to complete the state of art and to show the innovative character of this research project that will to connect all this sectorial perspective in a comparative study and build an innovative methodology as well a data-base and a web-site.
A. Assmann, Europe¿s Divided memory, in: U. Blacker, A. Etkind, J. Fedor (eds). Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, Springer 2013
M. Delaperrière, B. Lory, A. Marès, Europe médiane. Aux sources des identités nationales, Paris 2005
B. Waldenfels, Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, Frankfurt a. M. 2006
W. Müller-Funk, W., Theorien des Fremden, Tübingen 2016
M. Ponzi - Vittoria Borsò (ed.), Topografia dell¿estraneo, B. Mondadori, Milano 2006
W. Müller-Funk, W., The Architecture of Modern Culture: Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory New York 2002.
H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London-New York 1994
A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London 1996
R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, New York 1994
F. Laplantine, A. Nouss, Le Métissage, Paris, Flammarion, 1997
Baudrillard J., Système des objets, Paris, Gallimard, 1968
Clifford J., George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986
F. Italiano, Translation and Geography, New York 2016
F. Italiano, M. Rössner, (eds.): Translation. Narration, Media and the Staging of Differences, Bielefeld 2012.
B. Westphal, La Geocritique: Reel, fiction, espace, Paris, Minuit, 2007.
M. Ponzi, Identità multipla: Heimat e identità culturale nella Germania unita, Lithos, Roma 2013
N. Bekus, Struggle over Identity, Central European University, Press, Budapest-New York 2010
C. Hähnel-Mesnard ¿ K. Schubert (ed.), Störfall? Auschwitz und die ostdeutsche Literatur nach 1989, Frank & Timme, Berlin 2016
V. Vitti, (Trans-)Formationen jüdischer Lebenswelten nach 1989. Eine Ethnographie in zwei slowakischen Städten, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2015
M. Ponzi ¿ S. Borvitz (ed.), Schwellen. Aufsätze für eine neue Theorie des Raums, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf 2014
A. Nouss ¿ M. Ponzi, F. Vighi (ed.), Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces, Lexington Books, Lanham-Boulder- New York- Toronto-Plymouth, UK 2014
B. Grojs Utopija i obmen. Stil¿ Stalin. O novom. Stat¿i, Znak, Moskva 1993
S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, New York 2001
K. Zabawa: Rozpocz¿ta opowie¿¿. Polska literatura dzieci¿ca po 1989 roku wobec kultury wspó¿czesnej, Kraków 2013
J. Kloczowski, P. Plisiecki, H. Laszkiewicz, The Borders and National Space in East-Central Europe, Lublin 2000
Migration and Reshaping Identities in Romanian Travel Writings (1960-2010) (MARIS, http://ciscer.ro/proiecte/maris_index.php)