The book Images of the Other in Ethnic Caricatures of Central and Eastern Europe contains 16 articles and over 100 graphics namely ethnic caricatures. It presents work of scientists from Central and Eastern Europe focusing in their texts on data also from that region. Contributors of the volume represent various scientific disciplines and thus various approaches. In the book one can find theoretical articles as well as particular interpretations of visual data. Images of the Other in Ethnic Caricatures is the first such detailed study on nineteenth- and early twentieth- century ethnic caricatures from Central and Eastern Europe. However the aim of editors of the volume was not to introduce to the readers all-encompassing analysis of those pictures, but rather to make an attempt of deconstructing stereotypes existing behind pictures and depicted in those graphics. The general aim of the volume is to start a discussion on ethnic caricatures, their perceiving and their function and not to give final solutions for studying it

The 2015 issue of the Journal of Belarusian Studies is almost entirely about history. It focuses on the Belarusian-Polish-Lithuanian borderland and the period stretching from the uprising of 1863 to the inter-war period of the 20th century when the territory of today's Belarus was split between the Soviet Union and Poland. Two longer articles are followed by several essays which resulted from a conference held by the Anglo-Belarusian Society and other London-based organisations at University College London in March 2014.

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe’s east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers’ reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets. Studying the eastern European ‘iconosphere’ leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies.

This book is an exploration of the potential of the ethnosymbolic approach to nation and identity to act as an instrumental tool for research into the mechanisms of identity-building. Using insights and data from Bulgarian history and culture, it views the construction of Bulgarian national identity as a modern process intimately affected by circumstances which prevailed in nineteenth-century Bulgarian society, and also as a process which, for its structural and psychological prerequisites, drew upon and reworked various specific features and peculiarities of an available but always malleable and never fixed Bulgarian ethnic and cultural tradition. The development of Bulgarian national identity drew, in combination or mutual interaction, upon two main sources: namely, a process of articulating, systematising and rationalising ideas of group commonality and ethnic distinctiveness; and the mobilising and politicising effect of modern economic and political forces upon that intersubjective process. The overall means of national identity construction, in all its complexity, was achieved as a symbiosis between the historical continuity of a collective ethnic inheritance and the modern dynamics of its political activation and mobilisation. The book combines, diachronically, the ideas and logic of social evolution with a synchronic approach that draws upon the so-called “instrumentalist” view of ethnic phenomena. It explores the cultural landscape of available ethnic notions and terms that were utilised as expressions of Bulgarian ethnic identity, but which also, in that process, reshaped all this in response to the changing conditions of Bulgarian society in the nineteenth century. As such, the book offers an in-depth investigation of how ideas of national identity were formed and changed within a modernist framework. Furthermore, it shows how ethnosymbolism, used as a tool and instrumentarium for national identity construction, can reveal the main patterns that contribute to what is defined as a discursive construction of identity dynamics.

This volume compares different regional perspectives on the national and democracy-building aims of individual states. It confronts discourses about national states to regional perspectives on the past as well as the current political and social landscape. Why are we observing calls for national identity right now? What are the roots of this development? How can a Central European identity be shaped when national perspectives are prevalent? The book’s first part analyses social and political processes that shaped nation-states in the Central European region and shows divergent trends of individual states when it comes to defining a regional approach of the Visegrád Group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary = V4). The second part focuses on key personalities of the 20th century history of individual V4 countries in the light of their perception in the neighbouring states and how they shaped national states as well as identities after the end of World War II. Similar aims and approaches implemented by individual countries often led to anything but raising regional understanding. The book’s third part reflects upon activities of various initiatives aiming to approach this challenge from the perspective of civil society, and Central Europe’s young generation. The collection brings together leading historians of Central Europe from the V4 countries. It also offers external perspectives on historical developments in Central Europe from the perspective of the 21st century and on political cooperation as well as its roots. Lastly, it includes practitioners of Central European cooperation from both academia and civil society, and their reflection on their countries’ political cooperation after 1989.

Catastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society. Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.

The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of the European audiences in the 19th and 20th century was concentrated in the metropolises in the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, traveling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European humans took place also in territories located to the east of the Oder river and Austria. The contributors to this edited volume present practices of ethnographic shows in Russia, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Austria and discuss the reactions of local audiences. The essays offer critical arguments to rethink narratives of cultural encounters in the context of ethnic shows. By demonstrating the many ways in which the western models and customs were reshaped, developed, and contested in Central and Eastern European contexts, the authors argue that the dominant way of characterizing these performances as “human zoos” is too narrow. The contributors had to tackle the difficult task of finding traces other than faint copies of official press releases by the tour organizers. The original source material was drawn from local archives, museums, and newspapers of the discussed period. A unique feature of the volume is the rich amount of images that complement every single case study of ethnic shows.