Postsocialist Literatures in the United States

This special issue calls attention to an emergent body of cultural productions by US immigrants from nations in the former Eastern Bloc, including Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine. Predominantly written in English, these cultural productions explore the legacies of state socialism and Cold War paradigms for the United States, represent diasporic immigrant practices by writers from Eastern Bloc nations, and emphasize US participation in NATO’s involvement in Yugoslavia as a form of US humanitarian interventionism. The special issue places the new creative work in dialogue with the evolving scholarly focus on transnationality of US multiethnic cultural productions and studies of US imperialism. The special issue is the first to use the term postsocialist as a collective descriptor to theorize commonalities in the work of US-based immigrant authors from the former Eastern Bloc and its intersections with other contemporary US immigrant and transnational cultural productions.