Cold War Europe: A Space of Communication (Culture & Conflict, 29)

The Cold War is often stereotypically depicted as a period of complete separation between Eastern and Western Europe, a time of little communication and exchange between what is often called the 'Eastern bloc' and the capitalist West . European integration, it is thought, was a Western project based on exclusively Western ideas. This edited volume aims to debunk this stereotype. It provides evidence for the numerous media and individuals that contributed to the circulation and exchange of ideas across the ideological divide of the Iron Curtain. The essays in this volume discuss the official an d unofficial channels of communication between the Eastern bloc and the West as well as the complex networks of transmission and reception that enabled the exchange of ideas between the two. The first part of the volume examines the communication infrastructure of the Cold War and the role of then available communication technologies. The second hones in on how different media channels, and the radio in particular, were used to form and transmit ideas between East and West, whereas the third and final part looks at how individual artists and literary authors made their voices heard across the Iron Curtain.; Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities. Editors:Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK; Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Editorial Board:Arjun Appadurai, New York University,Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg,Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich,Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara,Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam,Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University,Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen,Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College,Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra,Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna,Samuel Weber, Northwestern University,Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania,Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin,Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong