The editors invite submissions of articles on Jewish material culture that examine historical discourses, everyday practices, and literary texts that construct materiality through metaphor, approximation or alienation. The concepts of absence and presence provide a theoretical framework for understanding how Jewish materialities are narrated, reflected upon, and remembered, both in the socialist past and in post-socialist societies today. The entangled simultaneity between the presence and absence of Jewish materialities can be seen as a common feature, but it operates in different ways and to different degrees in each culture.
By analysing the tension between presence and absence, this cluster aims to demonstrate how the opposing ends of common dichotomies, such as Jewish/non-Jewish, existence/non-existence, and visibility/invisibility, are deeply intertwined and, when approached as such, have the capacity to reveal the ambiguous and multi-layered experiences of Eastern European Jewry in Central and Eastern Europe. The transition between presence and absence is particularly evident in the study of material culture. The issue will cover a diverse range of materials, from literature and art commemorating the Shoah to everyday practices representing Jewish life, thereby offering innovative approaches to studying Jewish material culture in different cultural contexts.
We welcome proposals for the upcoming issue of "Czytanie Literatury" that explore new theoretical and methodological questions relating to material culture and address the following areas of interest:
- Between absence and presence: Theoretical approaches to material culture in Central and Eastern Europe
- The interplay of presence and absence in Jewish objects and everyday practices
- Jewish Material Culture from Central and Eastern Europe in a global age: Processes of translation, adaptation, and cultural transmission
- Jewish Objects in literature, art and other media formats of Central and Eastern Europe: Poetics, forms, memory-making and ideological perspectives in representations of human–object relations
- The album as a medium: Practices of album-making as a means of narrating and remembering catastrophic pasts in Central and Eastern European cultures
- Objects of memory and post-memory: Remembering the catastrophic past through the material culture
- "There Are No More […] Jewish Towns…": Entangled narratives of nostalgia and mourning in European literatures and cultures
- The "Dinggedicht" and its afterlife: Post-memory poetry and object-centred lyric traditions
We are waiting for article submissions with a short abstract until 31 January 2026, for finished texts (in English or in Polish) – until 5 April 2026.
All submissions should be sent to both of the following addresses:
You can find more information on the website of the annual.
