“Is the post- in postcolonial the post- in post-Soviet?” asked David C. Moore in 2001, prompting a reexamination of the dynamics between the Russian metropole and its Eurasian peripheries. But to deploy the postcolonial optic here is to presuppose the passing of an era of global ideological and cultural entanglements, primarily unfolding between the Second and the Third Worlds before the end of the Cold War. In his book talk on March 6th, 2020, Professor Rossen Djagalov revisited the history of Soviet Union’s cultural engagements with the literature, films, and cultures from a region now known as the Global South. His new monograph, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and Third World (McGill-Queens, 2020), reconstructs the Soviet Third-Worldist literary formation as that which bridges between the interwar-era internationalism and the present-day (post-Soviet) postcolonial studies. Rossen Djagalov is an Assistant Professor of Russian Slavic Studies at New York University, who focuses on socialist culture globally and, more specifically, on the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. The talk was introduced by Yannis Kotsonis, Professor of History & Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University.
Continue reading...“Socialist Orientalism: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s and Varvara Stepanova’s Ten Years of Uzbekistan”, a talk with Nariman Skakov
Aron OuzilevskiRodchenko and Stepanova’s album “Ten Years of Uzbekistan” was commissioned and produced in 1933, with the intent of producing a luxurious folio to commemorate the tenth-year anniversary of the Uzbek Socialist Soviet Republic. At the time, the Central Asian republic was considered “an exemplary space” for manifesting the Socialist goal.
Continue reading...Film Editing as Women’s Work: Esfir Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage
Aron OuzilevskiBuilding and Mythologizing the Soviet Friendship Project
Daria ProkhorovaRachel Applebaum discusses the development and narrativization of Soviet-Czechoslovak relations through the 20th century.
Continue reading...Joshua Tucker introduces new book on how communism’s legacy shapes present attitudes
Nigar HacizadeJordan Center Director Joshua Tucker delivered the NESEEES keynote address on his new book, “Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes” (co-authored with Grigore Pop-Eleches).
Continue reading...Constantin Katsakioris on The Lumumba University and the promise of a Soviet-Third World alliance
Nigar HacizadeConstantin Katsakioris assesses the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, both as an education institution and an experiment in international cultural policy.
Maria Galmarini-Kabala on “defective children” and the state that treated them
Nigar HacizadeHistorian Maria Galmarini-Kabala puts her lens on a 1920s children’s sanatorium in search of “norms, discourses and historiographical frames” of the period’s pedagogy.
Continue reading...Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange
Natasha BluthImages against Words: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945
Natasha BluthThe Violence that Makes Children “Psychically Sick”: Wars, Medical Diagnoses and Everyday Life in a Soviet Psychiatric Institution
Natasha BluthJohn McKay surveys the revolutionary character of Dziga Vertov’s cinema
Nigar HacizadeHow were Vertov’s films and writings revolutionary, and does their revolutionary character remain legible for us today?
Continue reading...Journalists discuss the role of race in US-Russia relations
Nigar HacizadeTo the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: A History of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Heather JansonNarrating the Soviet Metropolis: Visual Culture, Underground Architectural Space, and the Moscow Metro
Heather JansonPolina Barskova surveys poetries from the Siege of Leningrad
Nigar HacizadeThe Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) produced “multiple poetries,” some published within hours, some written “in the dark,” never to be published.
Continue reading...Elidor Mëhilli explores Albanian filmmaking across the 1960s Sino-Soviet split
Natasha BluthAlbeit brief, Albania was for a short while held up by China as a model for socialism.
Continue reading...Socialism in Motion: How Georgians and Russians Acted Albania’s Ottoman Past and Albanian Films Brought War to Mao’s China
Natasha BluthKevin Platt explores the meaning of Russian “Near Abroad” in the case of Latvia
Nigar HacizadeNeither national nor diasporic, never displaced but out of place nevertheless, Russian culture occupies distinctive and complex positions in Latvia.
Artists and scholars discuss “Falling Lenins,” revolution, identity
Nigar HacizadeSamuel Casper studies letters to Mikoyan to understand rehabilitation after the Great Terror
Natasha BluthOnce you’re stigmatized, castigated, reviled for social identity, how do you crawl your way back up?
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