[ Spaces of Identity ]

Spacesofidentity has a new home! The multidisciplinary web-journal dedicated to issues of tradition, cultural boundaries and identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe is now housed at York University’s Canadian Centre for German and European Studies. Check out our latest issue here or, alternatively, there.

To mark the move, this issue of spaces looks at the 'oldness' of the 'new' Europe and how the centrality of Europe has been reimagined and relocated on both sides of the former Iron Curtain and on both sides of the Atlantic.

It opens with a contribution that explores the question of what it might mean for a place to be, or to claim to be, the center of Europe. In Stoking the Heart of (a Certain) Europe: Crafting Hybrid Identities in the Ukraine-EU Borderlands, Adrian Ivakhiv first navigates the complex portrayal of the Slovak-Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands in Stanislaw Mucha’s documentary Die Mitte (The Center), which brims with many such 'centers', most of which happen to be textbook cases of near-total marginality. He then compares Mucha’s lighthearted Euro-borderland discourse with that of the avant-garde theatrical collective Gardzienice and Immersions, an exhibit marking Ukraine’s officially designated 'Year of Poland'.

Two sets of articles follow. Scott Spector shows up the limits of Homi Bhabha's concept of cultural hybridity by exploring the contexts of Prague, Bohemian, Moravian, Galician and Bukovinan German-speaking Jewish writers, while Andrew Gow similarly explodes assumptions about the ethnic and racial homogeneity of Central Europeans in North America.

An analysis of current images of Austria’s cultural identity by Cornelia Szabó-Knotik is then counterpoised with Karen Virag’s account of visits to Budapest’s Statue Park and House of Terror.

As always, readers’ reactions and comments are always welcme: the editors.