Publication date: 25 February 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800087811
Number of illustrations: 40
Anti-Atlas
Critical Area Studies from the East of the West
Tim Beasley-Murray (Editor), Wendy Bracewell (Editor), Michał Murawski (Editor)
Series: FRINGE
The invasion of Ukraine is the latest in a series of upheavals that have made eastern Europe a telling point from which to consider the place of area studies in the construction of knowledge about the world. The politics of academic knowledge about ‘areas’ now feels more urgent than ever.
Anti-Atlas plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It presents a collection of essays written by an eclectic mix of authors from Europe, both east and west, the UK and North America. These entries analyse a necessarily incomplete selection of topics, but they all engage with the question of how an approach to area can be ‘critical’ – and each entry demonstrates different aspects of criticality. The editors develop a manifesto for such criticality, calling attention to positions that are heterodox, area-informed or vernacular, ‘undisciplined’, and collaborative. Through a variety of genres, including the scholarly article, the travel guide, autobiographical reflections and data visualisations, Anti-Atlas provides readers with a diverse series of intellectual resources, asking them to think critically about the ways in which we construct the world by dividing it into pieces.
Praise for Anti-Atlas
‘Anti-Atlas is an imaginative, brave attempt to reframe area studies, simultaneously rebuilding “our images and cartographies of the world”. Assembling dozens of authors from broad swaths of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the East of the East, the volume is an essential antidote to knowledge produced in the service of empires, past or present.’
Aida A. Hozić, University of Florida
List of figures
List of contributors
Anti-Atlas: an introduction
Tim Beasley-Murray, Wendy Bracewell and Michał Murawski
Part I: Continents and terrains
1 Balkan balkanologies (and their shifting cartographies)
Diana Mishkova
2 (Global) choas
Joanna Kusiak
3 The children’s republic
Diana Georgescu
4 The countryside: a matter of ruling class
Alexandra Urdea
5 Digital Eastern Europe?
Maciej Maryl
6 Dreamland (and its queer map)
Čarna Brković
7 The early modern Republic of Letters
Wendy Bracewell
8 Vadim Tsymburskii’s Great Limitrophe
Dimitrii Sidorov
9 Greater Europe: a travel guide
Nóra Veszprémi
10 Low earth orbit: a speculative ethnographer’s guide
Victor Buchli
11 Flying a new flag: how Moscow hippies created a world without time and a land without borders
Juliane Fürst
12 Nation-states of mind: radical geopolitical imagination
Ksenya Gurshtein
13 Oraşul viitorului: beyond the siliconisation of postsocialist cluj
Erin McElroy
14 Planet ppparadise: decondensing the social in the condition of wild capitalism
Michał Murawski
15 Peripheristan
Francisco Martinez
16 The plus one dimension
Katalin Cseh-Varga
17 The Red Adriatic: the global East in Trieste
Chiara Bonfiglioli
18 The Second World: building (for) emancipatory futures
Daria Bocharnikova
19 Sharovarshchyna: sonic contestations of Ukrainian wildness
Maria Sonevytsky
20 Extracting the future: the socialist Anthropocene through artists’ eyes
Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes
21 The stalked zone: late capitalist logics and state socialist models
Jonathan Bach
22 Supercontinents and superdeep boreholes: area studies in three dimensions
Douglas Rogers
23 When Yugoslavia was the Wild West
Natalie Koch
24 Zwischeneuropa: mapmaking as image-making
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
Part II: Wandering critics
25 The accidental transnationalist: an autobiographical manifesto Choi Chatterjee
26 Crni Srbi and Ron Holsey
Catherine Baker
27 Arthur Griffith and Hubert Butler: the rhetoric and inspection of historical parallels between Ireland and Central Europe
Aidan O’Malley
28 Krystyna Gryczełowska maps a moving Poland
Eliza Rose
29 The engineer as indispensable critic
Jelena Prokopljević
30 Il’f and Petrov
Lisa Kirschenbaum
31 Komunistki: Polish communist women
Agnieszka Mrozik
32 Kosmopolitka: an orphaned subject between home and abroad Karolina Follis
33 The Kraeved(ka): a portrait of Soviet citizen scientist
Sofia Gavrilova
34 The ‘last heroes’ of perestroika (and their legacy in metamodernist Russia) Maria Engström
35 Mediator sanitar
Charlotte Kühlbrandt and Mihai Surdu
36 The migration broker
Philippa Hetherington
37 Olga Brookman’s everyday eyes: the Russian mail-order bride as ethnographer
Emily Curtin
38 Ovid in Tomis and the unreal space of literature
Tim Beasley-Murray
39 Polish architects in the world socialist system
Łukasz Stanek
40 Projectarians
Kuba Szreder
41 Raja: the not-quite critical subject of Sarajevo irony
Stef Jansen and Nebojša-Valha
42 Sherlock Holmes and his doppelganger: for an anti-atlas of world literature
Antonija Primorac
43 Cartographies of Soviet childhood
Nataliya Tchermalykh
44 TINA and Natasha: mapping exploitation after history’s end Jennifer Suchland
45 Yardsticks and shillelaghs: Croatian migrants to Ireland
Rory Archer
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800087811
Number of illustrations: 40
Publication date: 25 February 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800087811
EPUB ISBN: 9781800087828
Read Online ISBN: 9781800087811
Hardback ISBN: 9781800087798
Paperback ISBN: 9781800087804
Tim Beasley-Murray (Editor)
Tim Beasley-Murray is Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture at University College London.
Wendy Bracewell (Editor)
Wendy Bracewell is Emeritus Professor of Southeast European History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
Michał Murawski (Editor)
Michał Murawski is Associate Professor in Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
‘Anti-Atlas is an imaginative, brave attempt to reframe area studies, simultaneously rebuilding “our images and cartographies of the world”. Assembling dozens of authors from broad swaths of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the East of the East, the volume is an essential antidote to knowledge produced in the service of empires, past or present.’
Aida A. Hozić, University of Florida
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