Post -Cold War encounters with Eastern Europe: Sites in return and trajectories of desire

This interdisciplinary project is an inquiry into how post-Communist sites enter America post Cold War and how post Cold War America and American identity are imagined in relation to “Eastern Europe.” I pursue these questions by focussing on the 1996 NBC coverage of the Olympic Games, travelguides to “Eastern Europe,” and narratives of return to “Eastern Europe.” My project is more generally informed by Slavoj Zizek\u27s readings of the spectral encounters between East and West, Maria Todorova\u27s theorization of Balkanism, and McKenzie Wark\u27s account of telesthesia. My analysis demonstrates that the fiction of a territory of “Eastern Europe” is reproduced and solidified across discursive lines and that it has persistent Cold War and Balkanist inflexions. Eastern Europe appears as an abjected and pathological space that participates in the production of an abstracted and normative America. The first chapter of my dissertation focuses on the way in which America and Eastern Europe are televisually produced. The following chapters focus on the ways in which televisual Eastern Europe is encountered in the U.S. and on the journeys of travel and return to Eastern Europe. My readings demonstrate that the encounters with Eastern Europe are precipitated by the televisual and that Eastern Europe has televisual inflexions. I suggest that a recurring fascination with Eastern Europe as history happening reflects on the production and experiencing of a post Cold War America as an ahistorical, abstract place from which to view/access history happening to others. I show how Eastern European sites of abjection become traversed by trajectories of desire and how this desire is rechanneled or curbed. Finally, I analyze the discursive production of the returnee as an Eastern European/American subject. My reading of Eva Hoffman\u27s Exit Into History and Petru Popescu\u27s Return demonstrates that telesthesia complicates the relationship of the immigrants to their past and their present. My analysis shows that identification with the abjected and desired Eastern Europe happens through a curbing of desire and a turning of the returnee against himself