Communist Intimacy, New Academia Publishing (2014)
Title: Communist Intimacy
Author: Jasna Koteska
Publisher: New Academia Publishing LLC
Date of Publication: 10 March 2014
332 pages
ISBN-10: 0989916979
ISBN-13: 978-0-9899169-7-4
paperback
Format (B x L): 15, 2 x 22, 9 cm
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
Weight: 489 g
Link to the NAP page.
New Academia publishing web site.
An excerpt from the book is on this link.
About the book:
This book analyzes the nature of the police states in Eastern Europe (especially, of ex-Yugoslavia) during the communist era. The book opens as a personal memoir. The author's father, the famous Macedonian poet Jovan Koteski was a subject of massive police surveillance by the secret communist police of ex-Yugoslavia for 42 years out of 69 years of his life, in a well-documented case. His secret police file was maintained under the code name The Intimist (hence, the title of the book). The book continues as an academic enquiry into the mechanisms of the Eastern European police states in their relations towards the individual, the private and the public. The American poet Allen Ginsberg publicly revolted against the imprisonment of the author's father in 1986, when he was visiting Macedonia, which resulted in the release of the poet from prison in 1987.
About the author:
Jasna Koteska is a Professor of literature, gender studies and theoretical psychoanalysis at the University St. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia. She published over 200 articles, which have been translated into English, German, Hungarian, French, Slovenian, Serbian, Turkish, Albanian, Slovakian, Romanian, and Greek, and five books in Macedonian: Postmodern Literary Studies (2002), Macedonian Women’s Writings (2003), Sanitary Enigma (2006), Communist Intimacy (2008) and The Freud Reader. Early Psychoanalysis (2013).
Praise:
“Her personal story and her father's are emotionally compelling and her analysis of why Communist societies functioned as they did, in terms of surveillance and punishment, is quite original. She support her analysis with the works of others deftly (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Zizek, Judith Butler, Ivo Banac, Ben Fowkes, Katherine Verdery), and always in the service of her own thesis.”
- Herbert Eagle, Associate Professor of Slavic
Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan.
“Communist
Intimacy is a brilliant, provocative, and unique book. It is somewhere in
between an intellectual exploration of the topic and a memoir, where
Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Home-lands and Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days come to
mind, as exam-ples of a similar genre. It is about the police state which
can come in different forms, some communist, some capitalist, some monarchist,
but the book’s argument is universal, and contem-porary.”
-
Alla Ivanchikova, Assistant Professor of English, Hobart and William Smith
Colleges.
“Jasna
Koteska caused a true political storm among the Maced-onian public by talking
openly about the case of her father, the writer Jovan Koteski, the
reprisals he experienced in the period of the communist regime, and the
difficulties her family experi-enced during the long systematic persecution.”
- Nikola
Gelevski, Editor-in-chief of Templum publishing house and a writer.
[Update 27 August 2015]
The book Communist Intimacy (2014) made it on to the European Society of Authors' Finnegans's List of thirty books for 2015.
You can order it directly from New Academia Publishing: here, or from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Also available via beck-shop.de, E5.ru, bol.com, adlibris, and SAXO.com.
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