Multimodal Palimpsests: Ideology, (Non-)memory, Affect and the Senses in Cultural Landscapes Construction in Eastern and Central Europe

Abstract

This article introduces a collection of essays about the construction of a cultural landscape in Eastern and Central Europe. This part of the world has been subjected to violent changes over the past hundred years that have also left their marks on the landscape, especially in the wake of the Second World War and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It is suggested that the cultural dimension of these changes will be approached as a multimodal palimpsest, where old layers have partially been erased and overwritten by new layers of landscape text, with the old text still being more or less readable to the researcher. In addition, it is emphasized that this process of rewriting is still ongoing, in attempts to inscribe landscapes within ethnocentric frameworks.