SEELECTS – seizoen 2021-2022

Petar Strunje (doctoral fellow, Università IUAV di Venezia/University of Zagreb)

Shortly after the 4^th Ottoman–Venetian War (1570–1573), the changing political and economic circumstances led the Venetian Republic to institute a specialized system of trade with the Ottoman Empire following bilateral negotiations. This was backed with a series of infrastructural investments such as road and port building and the construction of customs offices, lazarettos (quarantine facilities) and the fondachi – warehouses, trade houses (bourse) and housing facilities all in one. All Muslims arriving on Venetian territories were constrained to stay in a fondaco. While being places of financial and social control, these buildings were also equipped with religious spaces, sanitary facilities, furniture and internal organization according to the Turkish custom. We will take a look at these specific solutions in the Venetian building tradition, reconstructing the debate and the translation process that led to their formation while highlighting the actors who were responsible for mediation between the commissioners (the Venetian Republic) and the users (Muslim traders) in this Mediterranean game of exchange.

Brigitte Le Normand (Assistant Professor, Universiteit Maastricht)

Among Eastern Europe’s postwar socialist states, Yugoslavia was unique in allowing its citizens to seek work abroad in Western Europe’s liberal democracies. Brigitte Le Normand will present her book, which charts the evolution of the relationship between Yugoslavia and its labour migrants who left to work in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines how migrants were perceived by policy-makers and social scientists and how they were portrayed in popular culture, including radio, newspapers, and cinema.

Created to nurture ties with migrants and their children, state cultural, educational, and informational programs were a way of continuing to govern across international borders. These programs relied heavily on the promotion of the idea of homeland. Le Normand examines the many ways in which migrants responded to these efforts and how they perceived their own relationship to the homeland, based on their migration experiences. Citizens without Borders shows how, in their efforts to win over migrant workers, the different levels of government – federal, republic, and local – promoted sometimes widely divergent notions of belonging, grounded in different concepts of "home."

prof. Leonid Kulikov (Gent-Louvain-la-Neuve)

This talk will focus on a half-forgotten episode from the history of Soviet linguistics. In 1950, at the end of the discussion about Marxism in linguistics, Stalin made the puzzling claim that the Russian national language is based on the so-called ‘Kursko-Orlovskij’ dialect. Outlining the historical context of these years (the end of the dominance of Marr’s New Theory of Language, or “Japhetidology”), the lecture will try to uncover possible origins of this statement.

Georgi Kassianov (Lublin)

The paper provides a brief outline of the politics of 'decommunisation' undertaken by different mnemonic actors in Ukraine since the end of 1980s. 'Decommunisation' is the process of dismantling the legacies of the communist state establishments, culture, and psychology in the post-communist space. Special attention will be paid to the final 'decommunisation' effort in 2015 - 2021, after special 'decommunisation' laws were passed by the Ukrainian Parliament. The presentation will analyse interests and roles of political actors, societal responses and political outcomes of 'decommunisation'.