Limina: Marginality, Memory, and Counter-Narratives in the Post-Socialist Space
Maggio 15 ore 12:00 – 14:30
Limina: Marginality, Memory, and Counter-Narratives in the Post-Socialist Space
Friday, 15 May 2026 University of Siena
Room 07 – Palazzina Donne (Pionta Campus in Arezzo)
Programme:
- 12.00-12.15 Introduction Xu Zheng, Ornella De Nigris and Alessandra Carbone
- 12.15-12.45 Ģirts Vikmanis, Limina: The film Soviet Milk (Latvia/Belgium, 2023) as a dual narrative of different historical eras (1945–1989)
- 12.45-13.15 Desirèe Marianini, Representing Reality and Individual Memory: The Turn of Chinese Documentary in the 1990s
- 13.15-13.45 Guest Lecture and Screening with filmmaker Gu Tao
- 13.45-14.30 Round table and discussion
The Limina seminar explores marginality not only as a geographic or social condition but as an epistemic and linguistic position from which to observe and challenge the hegemonic narratives of socialist and post-socialist 20th-century history. Through a dialogue between Soviet Latvia and reform-era China, the seminar focuses on threshold spaces (limina) where identity, memory, and language intersect. In these contexts, marginality is not only the periphery of power but also a site for producing alternative discourses, often in tension with official languages and rhetoric.
The film Mātes piens (Soviet Milk), based on the novel by Nora Ikstena, portrays the trauma of Soviet rule through a narrative where body and language overlap: silence, censorship, and the internalization of ideological discourse create a communicative fracture between generations. Linguistic marginality—between Latvian and Russian, between private and public speech—thus becomes an integral part of the colonial experience.
Similarly, Chinese documentary filmmaking of the 1990s redefined the relationship between image and language: the use of xianchang (“what happens in front of the camera”) reduces discursive mediation and foregrounds vernacular language, dialects, silences, and hesitation. In the work of Gu Tao, language is not only a medium of communication but also an index of belonging and marginality: the voices of ethnic minorities, often excluded from standard Mandarin, carry alternative memories and worldviews.
Across both contexts, tensions emerge between: official language and lived language; institutional narration and individual storytelling; visibility and silence. Marginality thus also takes the form of a linguistic condition: to speak “from the margins” often means using minority, hybrid, or non-standard languages—or resisting the dominant language through silence, ambiguity, or fragmentation.
The seminar invites reflection on key questions:
- How do linguistic and cultural policies in socialist and post-socialist contexts shape cultural production?
- What is the relationship between language, identity, and power in marginal areas?
- How can cinema preserve non-hegemonic forms of language without assimilating them into dominant narratives?
Situated at the intersection of Slavic and Sinology studies, Limina proposes a comparative perspective in which marginality emerges as a critical site of resistance—political, cultural, and linguistic—capable of challenging boundaries between center and periphery, voice and silence, history and memory.
The seminar will be held in English
Organized within the framework of the degree programme in Languages for Intercultural and Business Communication and the MA program Languages for Business and Development, with the support of the Confucius Classroom of Arezzo.
