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Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the individuals, groups, and institutions that comprise Moscow's contemporary restaurant industry, this dissertation explores the production and consumption of Moscow's postsocialist culinary culture and landscape. Approaching cuisine as both a social product and a cultural process, I examine the agents and avenues of the local globalization of culinary culture. In my analysis, these "agents" include restaurateurs, chefs, cooks, professional associations, and educators and educational institutions, among others. I attend to the various meanings, practices, and contexts of their work, as well as to the political, aesthetic, and performative dimensions of cooking, cuisine and restaurants. I also examine how Russian consumers engage with and make sense of Moscow's emerging culinary culture and restaurant scene. I see these producers of cuisine and restaurants as authors of the capital's postsocialist consumer landscape and intermediaries between the local and the global. Articulating global culinary culture into local contexts, these cultural producers redeploy contemporary and historical culinary practices, aesthetics, and forms as representations of culture on both local and global stages. I call these practices culinary strategies and argue that they are vehicles through which new social actors struggle over the meanings and values at stake in the marketization of Russian society. Cuisine and restaurants are thus contested sites for the construction of Moscow as a world-class city and the production, dissemination, and negotiation of community, nation, identity, and class. I suggest that cuisine and restaurants play important roles in processes of globalization, serving as sites for reproduction and contestation of global hegemonies of form. Drawing on and expanding work in the anthropologies of food, visual communication, postsocialism, and globalization, my project suggests how ethnography and micro-analysis of the visual, sensual, performative, and structural dimensions of cultural production can open critical understandings of the complex and shifting interactions between local, national, and global contexts. / Anthropology

Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman has been renowned in the West as a dissident author of Life and Fate, which multiple sources, including The New York Times have called "arguably the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century." Grossman, however, was not a dissident, but an official state writer attempting to publish for a Soviet audience. Grossman's work was criticized by Soviets as being "too Jewish", while Jewish scholars have called it "not Jewish enough." And, despite his modern critical acclaim, little scholarship on Grossman exists. In my thesis, I explore these paradoxes. I argue that Grossman attempts to reinterpret traditional state ideas of Sovietness into a more inclusive, democratic version by creating heroes from traditionally marginalized groups. To do this, he reinterprets and inverts traditional tropes of the Socialist Realist genre. Genric limitations on his worldview, however, prevent this vision from being completely realized in the course of his work. I trace Grossman's work from his early short fiction to his Khruschev era novels and show how this trope develops during his career as a Soviet writer and citizen.

<p>This dissertation analyzes experimental art movements in Hungary and the former Yugoslavia from 1968 to 1989, examining the variety of ways that artists responded to the ideological and practical failures of communism. I also deliberate on how artists, living in the specter of Marxist ideology, negotiated socio-political and cultural systems dominated by the state; how they undermined the moral consciousness that state socialism imposed from above; and how they created alternative ways of being in an era that had promised the opening of society and art but that failed that pledge. I suggest that some artists increasingly questioned the state's hegemony in everyday relationships, language, and symbols, and attempted to neutralize self-censorship and gain sovereignty over their own bodies and minds through "decision as art." The dissertation approaches authoritarian domination within the context of the artists' aesthetic choices, especially the development of conceptual and performance art as a mode of opposition. Deliberating on the notion of decision as central to the conceptualization and execution of resistance to the state, I focus on the alternative ways in which Yugoslavian and Hungarian artists made art in variegated forms and modes of ethical commitment. I argue that such art must be understood as an active decision to live in and through art while enduring political circumstance.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation focuses on the fictional narratives of Eastern and Central European women authors writing in German and explores the ways in which historical and political trauma shapes their approach to narrative. By investigating the atrocities of the World War II era and beyond through a lens of trauma, I look at the ways in which their narrative writing is disrupted by traumatic memory, engendering a genre that calls into question official accounts of historical events. I argue that without the emergence and proliferation of these individual trauma narratives to contest, official, cemented accounts, there exists a threat of permanent inscription of official versions into public consciousness, effectively excluding the narratives of communities rendered fragile by war and/or displacement. The dissertation demonstrates how these trauma fictions i) reveal the burden of unresolved, transmitted trauma on the second generation as the pivotal generation between the repressive Stalinist era and the collapse of communism, ii) disrupt official accounts of events through the intrusion of individual traumatic memory that is by nature unmediated and uncensored, iii) offer alternative plural accounts of events by rejecting normal everyday language as a vehicle for narrative and instead experimenting with alternative modes of representation, articulating trauma through poetic language, through spaces, and through the body, and v) struggle against theory, while paradoxically often succumbing to the very same institutionalized language of trauma that they seek to contest. Trauma fiction therefore emerges as a distinct genre that forestalls the threat of erasure of alternative memories by constantly challenging and exposing the equivocal nature of official narratives, while also pointing to the challenges faced in attempting to give a voice to groups that have suffered trauma in an age where the term has become embedded and overused in our everyday language.</p> / Dissertation