Lecture

As part of our Year of Memory and Politics Series, the ESC is pleased to welcome Peter J. Verovšek as a Jean MonnetCenter of Excellence speaker. Thirty years after 1989 - and15 years since the first postcommunist states joined the EU - European memory is still divided by the faultlines of the Cold War. Whereas the West’s historical imaginary is based on the traumas of Nazism associated with 1945, Central Europe’s is dominated by the legacy of communism signified by 1989. These differing understandings of the past have resulted in divergent conceptions of democracy.

Across the Western world, the air is filled with talk of immigration. The changes brought by immigration have triggered a renewed fervor for isolationism able to shutter political traditions and party systems. So often absent from these conversations on migration are however the actual stories and experiences of the migrants themselves. In fact, migration does not simply transport people. It also changes them deeply.

In my presentation, I link contemporary expressions of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, and I claim that the zombie-ridden landscapes of The Walking Dead lead back to Boccaccio’s masterpiece, to its structure, and to its main themes. Dennis R. Perry defines the apocalypse as the breaking up of the predictable universe: the world as we know it starts collapsing, and so does the scale of values everyone relies on. Apocalypse is therefore but a massive change of costumes, of parameters, of language.