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". Since some of these communities do not occupy a precise territorial area, being dispersed in various states, one of the criteria for locating these "new spaces" is that of the "threshold". For the last 25 years a number of relevant artistic and cultural works have been generated both in territories with a strong political and cultural identity, and in those territories in the "threshold" and heterotopy. The interdisciplinary purpose of this conference requires articulated phases: the first one consists in identifying these other spaces that surpass the territories organised as states, and the second one in identifying those cultural phenomena featuring this trend, in the areas of German, Russian, Polish, Rumanian and Czech languages. Related themes, motives, expressions, artistic works will be considered. An intercultural comparative method will be used, in order to comply with the nature of the research itself, since cultural products of different, though closely connected, languages and areas as well as different artistic typology (poetry, novels, tales, music, film, plays, photography, figurative art) will be analysed and studied.