Colloquium “In from the Cold: Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War”

Colloquium “In from the Cold: Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War”, Bucharest, June 17, 2016.

Organized by:

The Regional Francophone Centre for Advanced Research in Social Sciences (CEREFREA Villa Noël), Bucharest

In partnership with:

National Archives of Romania

Portuguese Embassy in Bucharest

Camões Institute for Cooperation and Language, Portugal

Call for Papers

In 1955, the Afro-Asian Conference held at Bandung, Indonesia, was a historical marker. Representatives of newly independent states came together to discuss the fate of African and Asian nations in face of the superpower’s political ambitions over the “Third World.” The “Bandung spirit” would epitomize the commitment to anti-colonialism and neutralism during the Cold War. In 1961, the Belgrade Summit crystallized this state of affairs as it advocated an eminently independent path for the “Third World”: the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This shift from neutralism to non-alignment co-existed with important historical events, such as the Sino-Soviet split and the Sino-Indian conflict. In the early 1960s, as the “Second world” of socialist countries was strongly divided and the decolonization process in Africa took off, new ideological and political fronts were opened in the global Cold War.  Africa became an important battleground on which a myriad of political projects were confronted and played out, from anti-colonialism and socialist solidarity to “third worldism”, non-alignment or Pan-africanism. In this context, cultural diplomacy became an important strategy for building cultural ties and fostering forms of political identification among different, sometimes estranged, actors.

Demography across the Iron Curtain: A French-East European Dialogue

A seminar by Corina Doboș

at New Europe College, Bucharest, March 9, 2016

My research explores the emergence of a scientific network that contributed to the transfer of demographic knowledge across Europe. I will focus on the academic exchanges between French and East-European demographers, pointing out the common concerns and solutions proposed. I will sketch the dialogue between population specialists responding to similar challenges and looking for possible common solutions, with a focus on the East European participation to the configuration of a continental demography beyond the Iron Curtain divide during the 1960s and 1970s.

Red Africa Exhibition

Red Africa. A season on the legacy of cultural relationships between Africa, the Soviet Union and related countries during the Cold War. 4 Feb — 3 Apr 2016

Hosted by Calvert 22

http://calvert22.org/red-africa/

Peripheries at Awe: Moscow as Metropolis of Communist Culture (1940s-1960s)

by Viviana Iacob, at The Paradigmatic City: Origins, Avatars, Frontiers, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar, 15-17 October, 2015.

Abstract

The presentation will focus on Romanian intellectuals who traveled to Moscow after the war to witness, internalize, and emulate the construction of a communist society and culture. I will focus mainly on the theatre community as I am going to examine those encounters that shaped the discourse of a superior socialist culture that was created at the Moscow center. These journeys were permeated by the imperative to replicate the Soviet exemplum at home in order to put Romanian culture on the right track to communism.