Angel, Avenger or Trickster? The ‘Second-World Man’ as the Other and the Self

Abstract

Nancy Condee recently pointed to the strange absence of the Second World — the former Soviet bloc countries and cultures — from contem­porary postcolonial discourse.¹ Even the expression ‘Second World’ seemed to expire with the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, a culturally distinct Second World did not disappear with the end of communism, although it obviously changed, becoming inscribed in the global context, yet continuing to produce new, now postcolonial, identities, conflicts and attitudes. Yet this question about the modelling of the ‘Second World’ Other seems irrelevant in the time of the ‘War on Terror’ aimed mostly at the ‘Third World’. Nobody seems to be interested if the models of perception and (self) representation of Eastern Europeans in the post-Wall global context are anything other than an agglomeration of Cold War stereotypes, combined with rumours about the Russian mafia and anecdotes about the extravagances of post-Soviet new capitalists.