University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Oct 2019)
The “Passing Clouds” of Nationalism in Anthea Nicholson and Kapka Kassabova: Cross-Border Recollection of Political Trauma
Abstract
Nationalism re-emerges from contemporary cultural debates under a panoply of controversial perspectives. In some of them like, for instance, the contemporary fields of border studies and the study of migrant cultures and writing, it fairly often takes the shape of an effort to strengthen hierarchies, hold differences together into ideologically ‘sterile’, supposedly homogeneous units, and to delimit overflowing identities. What binds a great many such contemporary reassessments is the urge to retrace or excavate past experience of nationalism, especially in cases when its purportedly beneficial properties of sheltering nations are brought to such ends as dictatorship, autocratic and authoritarian rule. The present article ruminates on those violent forms through the medium of two literary works authored by contemporary writers in its attempt to analyse the traumatic, but also prolific potential of re-membering past oppression. The study is concerned with their responses to an excessively violent political form of selfproclaimed nationalism which are worth considering because of their borderline status. Both Anthea Nicholson and Kapka Kassabova fall into the category of migrant writers. Of Georgian and Bulgarian descent, both writing in English, each one of them retraces a remembered and oppressive past experience in an effort that aims to reconstruct the contemporaneity of their countries of origin. Alongside specific contextual details, the investigation meditates on the common features of their fictional responses to a shared past. A meaningful outcome of their retracings is the critical distance that forms between remembered experience and the contemporary state of their birth lands which illuminates in a creative way the problematic achievement and development of state sovereignty.
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