Cross-Borders and Crossroads—Sharing Cultural Memory and Identity Negotiation in South-Eastern European Narratives

Dear Colleagues,

In the South-Eastern European cultural space, the fall of the communist regimes (1989/ 1991) brought forth problematic, even conflicting, identity negotiations emerging from the history of the previous decades. Such debates on redefining a cultural profile placed at the crossroads of “cultural memory” (Assmann) are at the fore of contemporary hybrid narratives of post-traumatic “retrieval” displayed by different types of identity-focused discourses. These texts share a cultural “fragmented” memory facing multiple cross-border challenges. The “narratives of the Past“, contaminated now by the dislocation/re-location drive of crossing geographical and cultural borders, mirror the South-Eastern authors’ tendency of echoing a double-bind approach, fictionalizing history (meta-history) and historicizing fiction (“the effect of the real“), on which the temptation of identity reconfirmation at the crossroads of cultures overlaps. Thus, the identity-focused literary narratives of the South-Eastern European “margin“ employ fluid strategies of re-legitimization calling for “the soft memory“ (Etkind) now facing Europe under a multicultural lens, opening its mnemonic discourses of post-traumatic “periphery“ to cross-border dialogue and identity renegotiations.

      Rooted in the main research areas developed at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Central and South-Eastern European Cultural

Studies (CISCLE) from “Dunărea de Jos”, University of Galati, Romania (CISCLE is founded in partnership with the “G. Călinescu”

Institute of Literary History and Theory—The Romanian Academy), this Special Issue of Humanities aims to advance scholarly discussions on the current dynamics of the literary field, focusing on necessary redefinitions and reconfigurations. We invite contributors to engage in critical explorations of the following thematic areas:

Ø  The dynamics of contemporary literary and film studies—theoretical and practical (re)approaches to South-Eastern European narratives;

Ø  Cultural and social memory/memory games reflected in South-Eastern European literature;

Ø  Translation as an (inter)cultural mediation;

Ø  Traumatic memory and literary strategies of dislocation and re-location;

Ø  Memory maps, identity-focused literary cartography, and conflicting cultural memories in South-Eastern European literature;

Ø  Displacement, location, and re-location perspectives under a multicultural lens;

Ø  Hybrid identity and “désidentification“ (Muñoz) as a multicultural praxis in South-Eastern peripheral narratives.

For planned papers, please send a 100-word abstract to nicoleta.ifrim@ugal.ro by 7 June 2025. The full article deadline is 30 November 2025

Prof. Dr. Nicoleta Ifrim
Prof. Dr. Simona Antofi
Dr. Iuliana Petronela Barna
Dr. Oana Celia Gheorghiu
Guest Editors

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• “cultural memory”
• post-traumatic “retrieval”
• cultural borders
• South-Eastern European narratives