Introduction: Postsocialist Literatures in the United States

Abstract:This article places an emergent body of cultural productions by US immigrants from former Eastern Bloc nations in dialogue with scholarship on US immigrant and transnational writing. We argue that the collective work by authors of (post-)Soviet and Central/Eastern European background constitutes a new object of inquiry and theory, which we call postsocialist literatures in the United States. The new representations—fiction, poetry, and theater—connect the United States to key events in the former Eastern Bloc. They emphasize the importance of state socialism and its decline for the consolidation of postsocialist diasporas in the United States and for the constitution and maintenance of US Cold War imaginaries, which continue to inform US policy making to this day. The new cultural productions show how experiences of (post)socialism have helped shape new transnational connections and cultural practices, and some link the Cold War and military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as portray cross-ethnic linkages between immigrants of different national backgrounds. As it creates new transnational imaginaries, this work reconfigures US representations of the former Eastern Bloc, while also contributing to theories of US immigrant writing that bridge American, Slavic, and immigration studies.