Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material / Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik -- Introduction: Which Postcolonial Europe? / Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik -- Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing / Madina Tlostanova -- Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options: The Baltic Experience / Benedikts Kalnačs -- Joined at the Hip? About Post-Communism in a (Revised) Postcolonial Mode / Cristina Sandru -- Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication / Emilia Kledzik -- Filling in the Historical Blanks: A Tropology of the Void in Postcommunist and Postcolonial Reconstructions of Identity / Bogdan Ştefănescu -- Confessions from the Dead: Reading Ismail Kadare’s Spiritus as a ‘Post-Communist Gothic’ Novel / Adriana Raducanu -- Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-)Communist Literature / Dobrota Pucherová -- ‘Let My People Go’: Postcolonial Trauma in Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets / Natalie Paoli -- Voicing the Subaltern by Narrating the Communist Past through the Focalization of a Child in Gábor Németh’s ‘Are You a Jew?’ and Endre Kukorelly’s ‘The Fairy Valley’ / Edit Zsadányi -- Geopoetics of the Female Body in Postcolonial Ukrainian and Polish Fiction / Irene Sywenky -- Building Empire through Self-Colonization: Literary Canons and Budapest as Sovietized Metropolis / Tamás Scheibner -- The City of K. (Königsberg/Kaliningrad) as a Cultural Phenomenon: Cultural Memory, the Myth and Identity of the City / Xénia Gaál -- The Organic (Re)Turn ― Ecology of Place in Postcolonial and Central/Eastern European Novel of Post-Displacement / Dorota Kołodziejczyk -- Representations of India in Slovak Travel Writing during the Communist Regime (1948–1989) / Róbert Gáfrik -- Socialist Anti-Orientalism: Perceptions of China in Czechoslovak Travelogues from the 1950s / Martin Slobodník -- A Socialist Orientalism? Polish Travel Writing on India in the 1960s / Agnieszka Sadecka -- Ukrainian Culture after Communism: Between Post-Colonial Liberation and Neo-Colonial Subjugation / Mykola Riabchuk -- Trapped by the Western Gaze: Contemporary European Imagology and Its Implications for East and South-East European Agency ― a Case Study / Dariusz Skórczewski -- Central European Palimpsests: Postcolonial Discourse in Works by Andrzej Stasiuk and Yurii Andrukhovych / Jagoda Wierzejska -- Contributors / Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik.

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This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a more extensive and nuanced geohistorical comparativism. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of transformative political, economic and cultural experiences such as changes in perception of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, objectifying gaze, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism. Together the studies map the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art, the latter highlighted through accompanying illustrations.