Day 2 – Two-day workshop starts new conversations on Russia`s Races


David Rainbow. Image by Ilaria Parognii

On February 27, 2015 the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted the second part of its two-day workshop Russia’s Races: Meanings and Practices of Race in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, convened by David Rainbow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, and co-sponsored by NYU Department of History, Global Research Initiatives (NYU Provost), the Harriman Institute, and the Humanities Initiative (NYU).

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“Those crazy Americans, of course Pushkin’s not black!”


Last Friday, a group of scholars gathered in the wonderful space of NYU’s newly established Africa house to discuss connections of various forms between Russian and Africa.
We were a notably eclectic collective, including a Nigerian professor who studied in the USSR, the daughter of a Russian woman and an Angolan man who was born in Soviet Uzbekistan, an American historian of Russia married to an Africanist, a young scholar working on a book manuscript about the Soviet Afro-Asian writers’ organisation, a historian of African interested in global expression of blackness, a documentary film maker, and a early-stage graduate student perhaps feeling her way to a Russian-African topic.

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What counts as corruption?


It would be difficult to argue that the Russian political system is squeaky clean. However, the ways in which the media defines corruption are skewed to classify what may be elements of long embedded cultural practices within Russian political cultural as injustices that necessarily need adjusting.

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