Reading the Archival Revolution

Regular price €31.99
A01=Cristina Vatulescu
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
archives
Author_Cristina Vatulescu
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=HBJD
Category=JPS
Category=NHD
COP=United States
declassified archives
Delivery_Pre-order
digital remediation
Eastern Europe
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Intermedia
Language_English
Michel Foucault
Mikhail Bakhtin
PA=Not yet available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
reading ethics
Russia
secret police
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9781503641020
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 12 Nov 2024
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives.

This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archival research. In so doing, it contributes to the urgent task of decolonizing the field of Eastern European and Russian studies at this critical moment in the region's history. Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault's traces in Polish secret police archives; tackles the files, reenactment film, and photo albums of a socialist bank heist; pits autofiction against disinformation in the secret police files of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller; and takes on the digital remediation of Soviet-era archives by analyzing contested translations of the Iron Curtain trope from its 1946 origins to the current war in Ukraine. The result is a bona fide reader's guide to Eastern Europe's ongoing archival revolution.

Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University and the author of Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police Archives in Soviet Times (Stanford, 2010).