Overview

The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings―the personal files―as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

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Cristina Vatulescu received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Harvard in 2005 and came to NYU after a year as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford UP, 2010), a study of the relationships between cultural and policing practices in twentieth century Eastern Europe, won the 2011 Heldt Prize and the 2011 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. She is also the co-editor of The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), and a Perspectives on Europe special issue on Secrecy (2014). Her articles have appeared in diacritics, Comparative Literature, Poetics Today, Law and Literature, Film and Literature Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Rail. Cristina is currently working on a project entitled Archival Revolutions: Medium, Embodiment, Silences.

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