Abstract
Since it is my contention in this volume that postcommunist Czech Shakespeare has begun to serve as a newly emerging site of resistance to neoliberal practices of the neo-imperial West, particularly the European Union (EU), it is crucial to outline such policies — and their material consequences on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) citizen subjects — at some length. It is only through the exploration of some of the most relevant examples of Western intervention in the postcommunist transitional process that we can begin to appreciate the dimensions of the emerging disbelief, sense of betrayal and subsequent mobilizing of cultural resistance to exploitive policies and cultural frameworks that enable them. I hope that my attention to the sociopolitical context here will provide an ample backdrop not only to my initial argument made in the Introduction, but also for the detailed consideration of particular incarnations of Shakespeare in the following chapters.
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Notes
Katherine Verdery echoed this observation in her analysis of the postcommunist transition, charting the ways in which both dissidence to communism and early postcommunist developments were defined by the rhetoric of returning to Europe (Katherine Verdery [1996] What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton University Press, 1996: 104). Numerous scholars have pointed to the links between neoliberalism and the rhetoric of democracy; see, for instance, the exemplary analyses by David Harvey in The Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), particularly Chapters 1–3
Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007)
Henry A. Giroux in The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004)
Lisa Duggan in The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), particularly Chapter 1.
Similar argument has been made by other scholars of the postcommunist transition: William Wallace ([2003] ‘Does the EU have an Ostpolitik?’, in Anatol Lieven and Dmitri Trenin (eds) Ambivalent Neighbors: The EU, NATO and the Price of Membership. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 51), Zaneta Ozolina ([2003] ‘The EU and the Baltic States’, in ibid.: 214), Christopher Bobinski (‘Polish Illusions and Reality’, in ibid.: 243), Vladimir Baranovsky (‘Russian Views on NATO and the EU’ in ibid.: 271) and Anatol Lieven (‘Conclusions: The Pangs of Disappointed Love? A Divided West and its Multiple Peripheries’, in ibid.: 304).
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© 2010 Marcela Kostihová
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Kostihová, M. (2010). ‘The End of History’ in Central and Eastern Europe. In: Shakespeare in Transition. Performan Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290426_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290426_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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