Perpustakaan Digital ITB

WH AT WA S THE SOCI A LIST everyday experience? And where, physically, can we locate the exciting but elusive trope called “Central/Eastern Europe”? After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions of 1989–1991, Central/Eastern Europe became something of an exotic imaginary for North American scholars. Not quite modern West and not quite primitive East, the area and its inhabitants were still white, still Western, still European—but just strange enough to arouse the senses, to entice occasional nostalgia or touristic fascination, and to elude easy understanding. Ah, Proust’s Madeleine—why, we can almost taste it already—even if it is perhaps made with lard and not Normandie butter. During the twentieth century the diverse geographic region of Central/Eastern Europe—which I define as lying within the greater European arena—experienced related, yet significantly different, version(s) of modernity than its Western neighbors. For the West, these “other” modernities were largely characterized by the violent introduction of repressive governmental regimes in the mid-twentieth century. Since the early 1990s, scholarly attention has increasingly turned to this region, and especially to its “everyday,” in order to get at the workings of socialism and post-socialism. Early work on Central/ Eastern Europe after 1989 often focused on subjects that followed easy political expectations of the region, such as towering castles, heavily industrialized sites, and socialist-era monuments. The reasons for these early, occasionally less nuanced approaches are readily apparent: we need only look to the fifty-year isolation of Central/Eastern Europe and its categorization as “enemy” to understand the influence of Cold War politics on North American. research