How might renewed attention to the cultural production of the former Second World help us move past one of the defining impasses of literary studies after globalization: namely, the antinomy between an overarching, “one and unequal” world system and the radical particularity associated with “multiple” or “alternative” modernities? Recent scholarly efforts in East European and Eurasian literary and cultural studies -- drawing on insights from postcolonial studies, World Systems theory and the theory of uneven and combined development -- have significantly reframed the region’s relationship to modernity. Implicit but yet to fully emerge from these promising developments is a model of comparison that can work across the multiple temporal and spatial scales that make up Second World literatures and cultures, and that can speak at once to the particularities of national traditions, genres, and individual works and to their broader stakes for humanistic inquiry. 

Much like the “Three Worlds” model of international relations, the formerly state socialist cultures in question were rendered largely invisible within the wider humanities after the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, East Europe and Eurasia --the immediate geographic peripheries to Europe’s imperial core -- once represented a rival form of development that, for all its contradictions, played a key role within the worldwide non-capitalist and anti-colonial imaginary.

Issuing from some of Europe and Asia’s earliest decolonizing nations, the literatures of the former Second World were comparative from the jump, produced by and within supranational formations founded upon a vast cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. The various articulations of socialist modernity to which the Second World was home, along with their rapid resignification as archaic remnants after 1989, invite us to rethink contemporary comparative frameworks plotted geographically along a Global North/Global South imaginary. It is not simply that this “global East” slots uneasily into a North/South framework. Even as the spatial is inseparable from any consideration of Second World literatures, the temporalities of belatedness, acceleration, and non-synchronicity proper to them complicate extant models of literary history and contemporary criticism. They also demand a reading practice attuned to both uneven socio-historical development and the exigencies of aesthetic form. Addressing these questions requires a comparative and interdisciplinary approach that moves beyond not only the familiar pitfalls of rigidly “national” frameworks, but also the subtler essentialism that can be encouraged by the “regionalism” of area studies. Rather than searching for uniquely East European or Eurasian modern/ist phenomena, we seek to identify how global modernity, as such, manifested itself in what we now call the former Second World.