EAST FRONTIERS

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, new cultural and political identities emerged mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, following years of obscurantism deriving from the policy of Real Communism. Newly created spaces, identities, and boundaries have dramatically changed the cartography of those regions. Despite the rise of new forms of nationalism as well as of open or underground conflicts, these spaces and identities do not take the solid form of impassable borders. Yet they turn out to be an archipelago of multiple and complex bonds in continuous change, persisting in complicated relationships that in some cases imply hostile demarcations between "Self" and "Stranger", in some others display forms of inclusions in acceptance of what is "other". [...]