“Socialist
Surrealism” and National Identity: Acts of Radical Imagination in Post-Soviet
Poland
In
the past four decades, the study of history, national memory in particular,
witnessed a radical paradigmatic shift. Abandoning the approach of individual
narrative analysis to explore the implications of collective memory as a
collaborative social construct, sociologists and historians like Paul Connerton
and Pierre Nora found that memory and identity transmission may operate
simultaneously and competitively with narrative history, allowing the
perseverance of a created collective memory to dominate and even usurp the
individual’s memory of actual experienced events. Recent discoveries in
cognitive neuroscience support this view of both individual and collective
memories as plastic, embodied experiences rather than static, stored
information; this perspective lends itself to new horizons in the study of
meaning-making in revolutionary street theatre and participatory mass
spectacle.
In
this paper, I argue that radical student groups such as the Alternative Orange
Movement in 1980s and 1990s post-Soviet Poland flourished because they recognized
the Soviets’ successful combination of visual iconicity and embodied experience
in their revolution-era propaganda and subsequently pursued similar tactics to
disrupt the intentionally fabricated Soviet sign systems. Rejecting rhetoric in
favor of “socialist surrealism,” their leaders sought to alter Polish national
identity by intervening at a physical rather than intellectual level. Alternative
Orange’s site-specific “happenings” were purported to be gleefully devoid of
meaning; they were acts of radical imagination that sought to reclaim the
streets of Wroclaw by creatively engaging sites of Soviet significance and
altering their cultural associations. In these acts of anti-meaning, the
movement successfully disempowered Soviet-era sign systems and opened a space
for the collective creation of a new national identity.
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SELECTED WORKS CITED
Cioffi,
Kathleen M. Alternative Theatre in
Poland, 1954-1989, Polish Theatre Archive. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1996.
Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, edited by
Jan Cohen-Cruz, 302. London: Routledge, 1998.
Connerton,
Paul. How Societies Remember, Themes
in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Conquergood,
Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR 46, no. 2 (2002): 145-56.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre.
New York: Routledge, 2005.
Green, Anna. “Individual Remembering and ‘Collective
Memory’: Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates.” Oral History 32, no. 2 (2004): 35-44.
Gronas, Mikhail. Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Literary Mnemonics,
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Halbwachs, Maurice, and Lewis A. Coser. On Collective Memory, The Heritage of
Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Kornas, Tadeusz, and Virginia Preston. Between Anthropology and Politics: Two
Strands of Polish Alternative Theatre. English ed. Warsaw: Zbigniew
Raszewski Theatre Institute : Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2008.
Leach, Robert. Revolutionary Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Mink, Louis O. “History and Fiction as
Modes of Comprehension.” New Literary
History 1, no. 3 (1970): 541-58.
Misztal, Bronislaw. “Between the State and
Solidarity: One Movement, Two Interpretations - The Orange Alternative Movement
in Poland.” The British Journal of
Sociology 43, no. 1 (1992): 55-78.
Nora, Pierre. “Between
Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire.” Representations,
no. 26 (1989): 7-24.
Peczak, Mirosław, and Anna
Krajewska-Wieczorek. “The Orange Ones, the Street, and the Background.” Performing Arts Journal 13, no. 2
(1991): 50-55.
Ray,
Larry. “Post-Communism: Postmodernity or Modernity Revisited?” The British Journal of Sociology 48, no.
4 (1997): 543-60.
Roach,
Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. The Social
Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.
Tyszka,
Juliusz. “The Orange Alternative: Street Happenings as Social Performance in
Poland under Martial Law.” New Theatre
Quarterly 14, no. 56 (Nov 1998): 311-33.
1 comment:
Sara,
When I started grad school, my interest was in pre-Soviet and Soviet theatrical aesthetics (the post Soviet was still in a state of emergence). My research goal was to sift the newly declassified KGB archives to recover what art looks like when it is a police (and not just policed) discourse. Well, that never happened (and hence the dubious relevance of this long personal anecdote), but reading your abstract has sent me back to a world that I still find incredibly rich. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that you are pursuing a project in this important field.
I have a few thoughts about the ways you might strengthen this well-developed project. Structurally, your abstract shifts from an introductory account of public memory in light of recent neuroscientific finds and the actions of Alternative Orange to reshape the collective recollection/imagining of politically overdetermined spaces. I would like to know more about the link between these two stories. It seems to me that you are using neuroscience to argue for the efficacity of AO’s strategies—science offers you a means of assessing the event. And yet, as you admitted in class, there is a gap between the written record you have access to—the manifestos of AO and the neuroscience of collective memory-making—and the historical events you refer to, which may not have unfolded in the ways intended by the artistic collective. You need to decide whether you are writing about the canniness of AO as theorizers of a theatre that blocks or disrupts the strong spatial imprint of Soviet ideology, or whether you are speaking about the revisionism effected on actual (embodied) minds. To do the latter would mean tracking down live subjects (or tracking down prior trackings down of live subjects—the data may already be amassed somewhere), but the result would be exciting. This inquiry need not be linked to AO, either; I wonder whether you could find accounts of the fading iconicity of a few chosen spaces. Your project suggests that one need not have witnessed AO's performances to have acquired a different sense of a Soviet landscape.
Finally, one hope I have for this project is that you can explain its pertinence not just to those scholars with an interest in Cold War or eastern European theatre, but to those interested in theatre’s power as a means of redrawing collective experience. I encourage you to frame this project (Article? Chapter? Book?) so that this wider audience knows that it is being addressed.
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