In this book, Comparative Literature and Media Studies, scholar Jessie Labov revisits the idea of central Europe for a number of good reasons and from novel theoretical and methodological perspectives. Central Europe was a foundational and aspirational utopia of east European intellectuals in the late 1970s and 80s, elaborated and advocated by writers well known in the west, such as Czesław Miłosz, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, György Konrád, and Adam Michnik. It has primarily been seen as a political project to redefine the region marked by Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia as deserving of their designation as culturally European and properly belonging to “the West,” and many have critiqued it for what we might call its Orientalist attitude toward the Soviet Union, including Russian culture, and the Balkans. Labov finds this perception superficial. A careful reading of the key periodicals on the pages of which the idea was revived and debated, analyses of symposia, letters, and interviews, and a novel Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis offer empirical evidence for the key argument of the book, that central Europe was not a well-bounded, objectively existing region, but rather a space of transnational cultural exchange that brought into productive dialogue writers, journalists, philosophers, and artists from many more countries than previously thought, and with a much greater effect on political praxis.
Of course, the central European idea had philosophical substance as well, but this too went beyond what it was commonly associated with, namely liberal humanism. Labov primarily focuses on the shared belief in the public role of intellectuals, a role that had been abandoned in the west; the transcendence of the nation as a key container of culture and arts; and as a corollary of these two ideas, the Adornian negative identity of the eastern/central European writer. Two allegories embody this subjectivity in the history of Cross Currents, the journal that was a key venue for discourses on central Europe, published by the Michigan Center for East European Studies from 1982. One allegory is the figure of the Jew; the other is Yugoslavia. To understand this figure of the public intellectual, Labov emphasizes that while it is based on the universalism of liberal humanism, and while committed to reason, especially in the writings of Kundera, this is not a clear-cut Enlightenment project, though she detects a novel trace of the Encyclopedists. The legacy is not of philosophy, but rather of genre: the essay. Following Adorno, Labov describes the form of the essay, the most common genre in Cross Currents and many of the other journals analyzed, and the form of the Encylop édie entries, as one in which the author has the freedom to go beyond the strict boundaries of the topic, to eschew deductive and inductive logic, and which “demands a distance, and not a conflation, of the subject writing the essay and the object under investigation” (47). The implication is that authors writing about central Europe do not necessarily embrace it as their own identity, nor are they without ambivalence towards the political project it entails. This is most evident in the work of Danilo Kiš, who explicitly calls attention to the danger of defining a homogenous geopolitical and cultural phenomenon. Viewed through this aesthetic lens, Labov presents the idea of central Europe as much less totalizing, static, and well-bounded than previously interpreted.
Yugoslav identity as a synecdoche for central Europe is another key intervention of the book. Against scholars who faulted the central European idea for its silence on and abandonment of the Balkans, and perhaps even for the subsequent wars in Yugoslavia, Labov demonstrates not only that Yugoslav authors were included on the pages of Cross Currents, but also that Yugoslavia was treated as a really-existing utopia in which the nation had already been transcended and which still boasted the heterogeneity that had been lost in other east European countries. Countering Maria Todorova's claim that central Europeans are writing against southeastern Europe, Labov argues that “Central Europeans are writing despite the very real problems posed by Southeastern Europe, by the possibility of ethnic divide, and by the relativity of different historical accounts of the region” (107). As further proof of this attitude to Yugoslavia, in Chapter 4 Labov describes central European intellectuals’ reaction to rising nationalism in Yugoslavia as horror at the “Betrayal of the Intellectuals,” a term from Julien Benda; that is, the misuse of the power of intellectuals, by politicians such as Franjo Tudman and Dobrica Ćosić, in the service of nationalist power and war. Here the author gives a much-needed corrective to mainstream descriptions of this treasonous process, by arguing that it was not that Yugoslav dissidents turned into nationalists, but that various western actors misrecognized and anointed nationalist intellectuals as dissidents. She however does not so much blame particular organizations or individuals as explain the conditions that made this misrecognition possible: “the same configuration of cross-border communication and movement of texts can work in the opposite direction [from the Central Europe idea, contesting national and imperial geographies], to reify the national and channel diasporic exceptionalism in the service of “dissent” from authority” (159). She conceptualizes this process as an instance of transmediality, texts changing their meaning when crossing borders across forms, though not necessarily independent of the actor's intent, who is able to adjust a technology to meet his or her goals. This practice is what Labov calls “work-around.” Such work-arounds facilitate the borrowing of forms and practice by cultural qua political resistance in countries normally seen as outside central Europe, as in the examples of the color revolutions of 2004–6, and even in the recent internet-based mobilizations, described in Chapter 4.
The intervening third chapter on émigré and diasporic literary journals in Poland and Hungary (including Transylvania, since 1920 part of Romania) demonstrates different models for defining and redefining a culture from outside the nation-state border or outside the national capital. One key finding, in the case of the journal Kultura, supported by digital mapping (GIS) evidence, is the dialogic and relational nature of these fields of cultural production, which suggests that rather than treating individual journals as self-contained islands, we need to analyze the field that made divergent and conflicting aesthetic projects possible and intelligible.
Transatlantic Central Europe is a thought-provoking volume that employs theoretical and methodological innovations to a seemingly passé idea, and thereby not only improves on the intellectual historical record, but also demonstrates its enduring relevance for cultural politics in the present. The book is clearly written, and is thus accessible even to those with no prior exposure to the literary figures discussed.
