Urban Cultures in (Post) Colonial Central Europe

Agata Anna Lisiak completed her PhD in 2009 in communication and media studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Most recently, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship in urban studies at the National Sun Yat-sen University where her research extended to Asian port cities. Lisiak has published her scholarship in English and Polish in journals and collected volumes in a variety of fields including urban studies, literary studies, and communication and media studies. She resides in Berlin.

Marshall Berman, City University of New York "A great deal of modern culture has evolved through writers', painters', photographers', and film-makers' reflections on the ambiguities of life in the modern metropolis. Some of the greatest of this material has emanated from the cities of Central Europe. This kept happening even in the midst of the Cold War and it is still happening in our (post)colonial and neoglobal age. Agata Anna Lisiak shows in her book "Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe" how the postcolonial idea, developed recently to study Central and East European culture, can help us see the transformations of cities in the region. Lisiak argues that Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague are incubated cultures whose deepest forces were shadowy and ironic: Lisiak has a novelist's sensitivity to show in her book the processes at work in a manner rare in academic writing. It is fascinating to see her trace the evolution and convergence of these cities into an ideal type of (post)colonial metropolis." Reviewed by Alexander Vari, Marywood University, Scranton, PA "Focusing on the post-1989 urban representation of Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest and their identity-shaping processes over the past two decades, Agata Anna Lisiak's book is not just a welcome addition to the field of comparative cultural studies but a book with a strong and innovative theoretical agenda. ... Lisiak's book is a theoretically path-breaking work and the first book-length study to innovatively address urban representation issues in four capital cities that are very rarely connected to each other." This book is a very valuable addition to the literature on the transformation of Central European cities: its originality resides in its comparative dimension and in its advocacy of a postcolonial framework of analysis to study a geographical area to which it has been seldom applied to date. Given the background of the author (in comparative literature, cultural studies, media and communication), it is perhaps no surprise that the theoretical concepts and arguments derived from cultural and postcolonial studies appear to be much more strongly and convincingly developed than notions borrowed from (the wide field of) urban studies. ... Nonetheless, the book is a worthy addition to recent scholarly works that seek to bridge the gap between, and reconcile, the perspectives offered by humanities, cultural studies and social sciences in urban studies. Claire Colomb, University College London Lisiak, Agata Anna. "Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe." Comparative Cultural Studies Series. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2010. Pp. 232, illus. Reviewed by Alexander Vari, Marywood University, Scranton, PA Focusing on the post-1989 urban representation of Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest and their identity-shaping processes over the past two decades, Agata Anna Lisiak's book is not just a welcome addition to the field of comparative cultural studies but a book with a strong and innovative theoretical agenda. Lisiak's main argument is that the history of urban space in the above-mentioned Central European capital cities is best interpreted if read through the lenses of postcolonial theory and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek's concept of "in-between peripherality." Critical of the post-socialist and post-communist labels that have been used to describe developments in the region since 1989, Lisiak instead proposes the concept of the (post)colonial. According to her, after the end of the colonial period which was marked by Sovietization and their belonging to the Eastern Bloc, during the last two decades the four Central European capitals analyzed in the book have experienced the spread of globalization and westernization, which has been equivalent to their entering a new period of coloniality. Therefore, these cities are both post-colonial and colonial, an overlap which Lisiak proposes to call "(post)colonial." As she argues: "the (post)colonial city is a city whose politics, culture, society, and economy have been shaped by two centers of power: the former colonizer, whose influence remains visible predominantly in architecture, infrastructure, social relations, and mentalities, and the current colonizer, whose impact extends over virtually all spheres of urban life." In addition, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest are doubly "in-between peripheral" places since they are geographically located between the West and the East and te This detailed examination of historic central European capitals--Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest--uses visual and creative culture to explore the impact of imposed foreign regimes in the past century, with particular attention to the transition from Soviet domination. The work provides windows on central European theory--geographic models by Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and cultural studies from Siegfried Schmidt and Itamar Even-Zohar--that may be novel to US urbanists. Lisiak reviews a historical framework of layers of "colonization" (Austrian/German/Nazi, Soviet, Western, and globalization) that have shaped these cities, although one might wish for engagement with questions raised within wider colonial studies (e.g., by Frantz Fanon). Chapters are encyclopedic, scrutinizing heraldry, urban logos, Web sites, and printed tourist materials for all four cities in one chapter, followed by chapters on new architecture and renovation (sadly, with no illustrations) and post-1989 literature and films. The detailed chronologies and comparisons among all cities make for a jerky read, especially in the history chapter. The insistent data, while important for researchers, may make it difficult for readers to extract wider conclusions from myriad examples or to understand what differences among these cities teach one. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.G. W. McDonoghBryn Mawr College