Rewriting Histories, and: Bodies and Representations (review)

Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe is a collection of essays thematically divided into two volumes, Rewriting Histories and Bodies and Representations. Its intention is to examine "the set of current questions raised by or regarding women authors in the [Central/Eastern European] region" (1:11) beyond the narrow confines of national literatures.

The socio-cultural space discussed here is enormous, reaching from Estonia, through Latvia, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland to the Czech Republic. A certain partiality for Romanian literature will hardly surprise in a text published by the University of Bucharest. I agree with the editors' opinion that "Eastern and Central European countries know little about each other's literatures" (1:7). As Milan Kundera rather harshly pointed out in his essay on Weltliteratur in The New Yorker ( January 8, 2007), this also tends to be true with respect to academics specializing in specific literatures. Considering this scope, it is especially praiseworthy that Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe remains true to the intention of meticulously contextualizing its various topics. No sweeping statements covering the whole Eastern/Central European space in one sentence will be found in this book. The one objectionable type of excessive generalization present is an altogether different animal, and I will mention it in due course.

Another feature that makes Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe quite a feat of comparative literature is the pattern in which multiple essays (in multiple cultural contexts) gravitate towards larger topics. These include, for example, the exilic condition (internal exile, external exile, exile and the creative process) or the subversion of various patriarchal master narratives (communist and nationalist propaganda, official histories, glorification of anti-communist dissent, the female body's commodification in the post-communist context, etc.). For instance, having perused volume one, even the staunchest anti-comparatist cannot but compare the ways in which several Croatian, Czech, Latvian, and Romanian women writers attempted to rewrite master narratives about the past. The collection's comparative nature is further strengthened by Iva Popovičová's essay on the non-literary media used by the Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra to undermine "the normative parameters and taboos associated with femininity and nudity in Polish culture" (2:161) and Lilla analysis of Binka Zhelyazkova's film The Tied Balloon. Several scholars point out contrasts and correspondences between works by a particular author before and after the fall of communist/socialist regimes in Eastern Europe (for instance, Marlowe Miller or Rodica Mihăilă).

The space devoted to pre-1989 works in a publication focused on times post-communist, nevertheless, seems occasionally overly large to this reviewer. A rather problematic inconsistency emerges with respect to a potentially highly interesting problematic: Exactly how useful is it to apply Western feminist (or postcolonial) theory to Eastern/Central Europe? The editors themselves draw our attention to this quandary in their introduction to volume one, when they claim that "[f ]eminist studies in the region in 1999/2000 displayed (and still display) a mimicry of Western attitudes. There is little, if any, feminist theory produced in the region or, if there is, the connection with the practical side of women's experience in Eastern Europe nowadays is often missing" (11). In its goal to take "one step towards a theorisation" in this area (11), Women's Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe falls short of the mark. The only scholar to seriously question the application of Western feminist theory here is Lilla . The collection's strength, without any doubt, lies in practical analysis rather than theory, even if Julia Kristeva, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler...