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Introduction: Mapping Postsocialist Cultural Studies Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Sibelan Forrester, and Elena Gapova ‘‘How leaky are the borders of man-made states!’’ Wis™awa Szymborska’s lyric ‘‘Psalm’’ raises many of the issues central to this collection, describing play and motion across borders in space, time, thought, and discipline. The poem’s appearance in English translation also embodies the zone that interests us: contact between the ubiquitous ‘‘West,’’ particularly North America and Western Europe, and the cultures, literatures, and individuals of Eastern Europe, or the ‘‘East,’’ in the years since the collapse of the socialist and communist systems that dominated the region for decades. Before we comment more extensively on its theoretical underpinnings and contents, we offer our reading of ‘‘Psalm’’ to open a post–Cold War1 meditation on the themes, terms, and personal insights that emerge from the essays gathered in this volume. Szymborska’s poem crossed the border from Polish into English after the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature made the poet’s hushing, resonant name pronounceable in the West for the first time. What does this poem tell us about the nature of boundaries and of discourses that would dare to cross them? What does it mean for a Polish woman to win the Nobel Prize, joining such esteemed Eastern male dissidents as Czes™aw Mi™osz and Joseph Brodsky, such gifted Western ‘‘outsiders’’ as Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney? The poet inhabits a precise location on the map of the New Europe, a nation and Introduction 2 tradition of considerable antiquity. What happens in the new post-1989, postcolonial , ‘‘global,’’ and hypothetically liberated transcultural space when a voice such as Szymborska’s echoes there? Szymborska was never an émigrée or celebrated in the West: born in 1923, she remained in Poland after the Second World War in a strange and unglamorous ‘‘internal exile’’ while the Cold War redrew the world map. Both the poet and most of her readers at home wrote and lived in the shadow of censorship, free to travel only inward; to them, the prize that signals a poet’s or a literature’s ‘‘arrival’’ on the world scene may suggest the arrival of new art judges, if not of a new artistic justice. No matter who guards the borders today or how their names have changed, this poet reminds readers outside Eastern Europe of a place filled with living bodies, desires, and troubles much like their own. Szymborska redefines the location of her country and calls from a subterranean landscape of excellent writing by Polish women, writing that was largely ignored in a world preoccupied with the macho struggle of superpowers.2 Just as Szymborska describes animals and plants that by their very nature cross the borders that humans pretend to guard, we emphasize the createdness of geography and maps of nations and cultures. Entangled in human states and human languages, we adopt and adapt the relative terms ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ in order to connote past and present divisions, a history useful in human terms.3 Geography is, after all, ‘‘a series of erasures and over-writings,’’ and ‘‘[t]he map functions as a mirror of the world, not because the representation of the earth has the status of a natural sign, but because it aims to invoke a simulacrum of an always inaccessible totality by means of an arrangement of symbols’’ (Rabasa 1995, 358).4 Animals, plants, and soil ignore these divisions. It is the human strife for hierarchy through analysis, discovery, and establishment of difference that engenders borders and their representation, arbitrary and man-made lines separating East and West, self and other. Borders reflect not only power and acquisition but also an emergence from solipsism into awareness of the other. Knowledge too is an empire, with more-or-less sacrosanct aesthetic and intellectual borders accepted by convention but permeable in their nature. Szymborska’s speaker wisely suggests what it means to ignore the map, to ‘‘decolonize one’s mind,’’ as bell hooks might put it. Unassuming in her speech but asserting a vision of fluidity across boundaries, she tacitly defies the borders she was expected to respect. From the margins of Europe, she ‘‘writes back’’ against divisions: the booted human’s opposition to the animal and vegetable, the thick red lines and iron curtains of Cold War Europe, and even the ‘‘proper’’ political subjects of a poet who ‘‘should’’ be treating the conditions of life under socialism, expressing the point of view of one or...

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