Introduction: entangled cultures in the Baltic region

ABSTRACT

The following special issue offers the first attempt to look at the history and culture of the Baltic region using the concept of entangled histories and cultures. The study of entanglements is part of the transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences and has been greatly influenced by postcolonial studies, but it has its own set of topics, problems and questions that it aims to study. Rather than a methodology, the entangled approach is a perspective that looks at its research objects from a new angle and from multiple new levels of analysis. Nonetheless, it has found considerable methodological reflection in different disciplines such as history writing, literary and cultural studies, and memory studies. This introduction goes briefly over some of the disciplinary contexts where the study of entanglements has emerged and their methodological discussions. It also offers some reflections on the nodes of problems related to the interconnectedness of different cultures in the Baltic region that might be successfully approached with the concept of entangled cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Baltic states
• Baltic cultures
• entangled histories
• entangled cultures
• entangled memories
• methodological nationalism
• literary history
• cultural history

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council Grant Entangled Literatures: Discursive History of Literary Culture in Estonia [IUT28-1].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All translations from Estonian are by this article’s author.

2. Ulrich Beck defines methodological nationalism in the social sciences as an approach that,

equates society with nation-state societies, and sees states and their governments as the cornerstones of a social sciences analysis. It assumes that humanity is naturally divided into a limited number of nations, which on the inside, organize themselves as nation-states, and on the outside, set boundaries to distinguish themselves from other nation-states (Beck 2007, 287).

3. Conrad and Randeria (2002, 17) use the German term geteilte Geschichte, which has the double meaning of both ‘shared’ and ‘divided’ history.

4. Sapiro (2011, 232) reminds us that methodological nationalism comes naturally to the study of history and culture, as these disciplines have throughout the past two centuries been the vehicles of national identity.

5. Eva-Clarita Pettai and Vello Pettai argue in relation to the Baltic politics of memory that “there remains a strong sense in the Baltic states of being able to treat the entire Soviet era and regime as an externally inflicted tragedy. There is, paradoxically, a greater feeling of distance from the Soviet experience in the Baltics than perhaps elsewhere in Central Europe toward the communist period, because there is a greater possibility of externalizing the phenomenon” (Pettai and Pettai 2015, 58).

6. Sturken (1997, 3) defines cultural memory as ‘memory that is shared outside of the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning.’ For a similar approach see Feindt et al. (2014).

7. For a recent study of the transnational entangled memories of the Holocaust, see Henderson and Lange (2017).

8. For postcolonial and other approaches to the Soviet Baltics that have problematized the discourse of resistance see Annus (2012, 2018), Kalnačs (2016), Davoliūtė (2016Davoliūtė, V. 2016Davoliūtė, V. 2016, 2013), Kurg (2014), and Peiker (2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Eesti Teadusagentuur (IUT28-1 Entangled Literatures: Discursive History of Literary Culture in Estonia)

Notes on contributors

Eneken Laanes

Eneken Laanes is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at Tallinn University and Project Leader of the Estonian Research Council grant ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena.’ She is the author of Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in the Post-Soviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian, Tallinn: UTKK, 2009) and co-editor of Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (Helsinki: SKS, 2015). Laanes has published extensively on cultural memory and trauma theory, transnational memory, post-socialist memory cultures in eastern Europe, historical novel, autobiography and self-writing, transnational and multilingual literature, critical theory, and cultural analysis. Laanes has been the Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University and Kone Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium.