Oranizers: Arja Rosenholm (arja.rosenholm@tuni.fi) and Marja Sorvari (marja.sorvari@uef.fi) and Viola Capkova (viocap@utu.fi)
The session takes as its starting point the transformations of the 1990s in the Soviet Union to examine how individual women reflect on and recall their own and their families’ past lives in the Soviet/Russian home country after having moved out and now living in the new country of residence. The session intertwines migration, memory, and gender studies to analyse the literary presentations created by the travelling women as mirrors for their identity reflections. The very focus will be on texts written by women who share the history of (e)migration and the past in the Russian/Soviet society, if only as part of their family history, as is the case with the generations of post-memory. We invite papers with literary material consisting of fictional genres, such as novels, short stories and graphic novels, autofictional essays and memories written and published in the 1990s up until today. The session points out that women’s literary voices and the memory as a form and tool to work through both individual traumas and collective tragedies are not sufficiently studied within the modern Russian and post-Soviet migration history. Not only that the past becomes part of the present in ways women speak about the history but in their literary works women also respond to the question about who has the right to reflect upon national traumas and speak of the history; citizen living in or those who for different reasons have emigrated from the home country.