A tear and a smile: Translating Post-Soviet Memory in Cuba and Romania

Abstract
The talk explores what is remembered of the Soviet Union in Cuba and Romania after 1989 based on its representation in fiction. It aims to trace transformations and translations of the role, representation and attribution of the Soviet Union in reaction to the disappearance of its hegemonic power. Memory is understood here as a process of cultural translation: it is  a retrospective process starting from the present, a reinterpretation of history determined by the era’s social, political, and cultural circumstances, and a conflictual process of negotiation between elements of the old and the new contexts. Exemplary case studies show the impact of the Soviet Union on the construction of collective cultural memory. The comparative analysis aims to track the particularities of these representations and to identify the main strategies for dealing with the past.

About the Speaker

Dr Carola Heinrich studied Romance Philology, Italian Philology and Communication Science at LMU Munich and the University of Havana. She holds a PhD in Romance Philology from the University of Vienna. Her doctoral research project was associated with the Institute of Culture Studies and History of Theatre (IKT) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) in the research cluster Translation. In 2016, she held a fellowship with the OeAW Post-DocTrack-Pilotprogrammme. Dr Heinrich is currently working as university lecturer of the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research (OeAD) at the Institute for German Language and Literature of the Comenius University in Bratislava. 
Image: © IKT/Stefan Csáky