
“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.
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Rodchenko 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.
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Occasional Series | Thursday, November 1st, 2018 | 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
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Rachel Applebaum discusses the development and narrativization of Soviet-Czechoslovak relations through the 20th century.
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Jordan 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).
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Constantin Katsakioris assesses the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, both as an education institution and an experiment in international cultural policy.
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Historian 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.
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Occasional Series | Monday, May 1, 2017 | 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM EST
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Occasional Series | Friday, April 14, 2017 | 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM EST
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Colloquium | Thursday, April 6, 2017 | 3:00PM to 5:00PM EST
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How were Vertov’s films and writings revolutionary, and does their revolutionary character remain legible for us today?
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“The alt-right has found a natural ally in Russia’s current zeitgeist.”
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Colloquium Series | Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017 | 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST
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Occasional Series | Friday, February 17th, 2017 | 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST
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The Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) produced “multiple poetries,” some published within hours, some written “in the dark,” never to be published.
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Albeit brief, Albania was for a short while held up by China as a model for socialism.
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Colloquium | Friday, February 3, 2016 | 3:00PM to 5:00PM EST
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Neither national nor diasporic, never displaced but out of place nevertheless, Russian culture occupies distinctive and complex positions in Latvia.
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Is the Ukrainian government fighting with ghosts?
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Once you’re stigmatized, castigated, reviled for social identity, how do you crawl your way back up?
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