Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of academic and essayistic writing. It casts a glance at the heterogeneous relics of socialism and their transformation in very different parts of the world. From the description of (post-)socialist interiors, façades, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, and objects towards the imaginary spaces of literature, the contributors describe the concreteness and intimacy of some of the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the »second world« today.
Thomas Lahusen is a professor at the Department of History and Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. After studying in Switzerland and Poland, he earned his Doctorat ès lettres at the University of Lausanne. Besides writing academic texts about Russia, Kyrgyzstan and China, he directed a number of documentary films. Schamma Schahadat is a professor of Slavic literatures and cultures at the University of Tübingen. She is working on Russian and Polish literature and film from a cultural studies perspective.
