Keynote speakers:

Eleonory Gilburd (University of Chicago)
James Mark (University of Exeter)

After years of isolation and division during the late Stalinist period, the so-called ‘Thaw’ in the cultural politics of socialist Eastern Europe in the second half of the 1950s enabled a broadening of horizons. This also entailed the physical opening up of borders. Not only were foreign journalists, cultural delegations, festival visitors, and travel groups allowed to visit the world behind the Iron Curtain, but, vice versa, a host of reporters, writers, and artists set out to travel to capitalist foreign countries—especially to countries engaged in the struggle for independence from their colonisers. Travel literature became one of the most popular genres of the 1960s and 70s. These texts paved the way for the emergence of a new global consciousness, distinguished from and influenced at the same time by the ‘imperial gaze’ of the capitalist West. ‘Writing the world’ meant striving to find a socialist understanding of a ‘Red Globe’ and constructing a new, post-Stalinist subjectivity.