Empire & Nation-Building East Central Eu

This lecture course investigates nation-building as a process of decolonization of Europe’s land empires (Ottoman, German, Russian, and Habsburg) from 18th century to present. It was a turbulent historical process: decolonization of European East’s ‘small peoples’ paved the way to anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements outside Europe only to be crushed, in the mid-twentieth-century, by imperial politics of Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union. We will study different ways in which culture – local languages, vernacular heritage, religion, and material culture – became politically weaponized to achieve goals of national self-determination and social revolution. Throughout the 19th and 20th century nation-building in the European East produced particular forms of non-Western modernity that found expression in built environments, visual arts, letters, music, public activism, and domestic sphere. We will study how resistance and enforced accommodation to Empire turned into spaces of cultural production, mass movements, economic upheaval, state-building, and last but not least, physical violence. Finally, we will investigate how ordinary Eastern Europeans experienced and gave meaning to the processes of nation-building. The course is intended for students interested in cultural, intellectual, social and gender history, histories of nationalism and communism, as well as local and transnational histories of Eastern European ‘peoples’ (Jewish, Muslim, Christian Slavic; German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Southern Slavic/Yugo-Slav, Greek, and Roma).