"A reconstruction of Cold War-era cultural networks between the Second and Third Worlds that offers a compelling genealogy of contemporary postcolonial studies. Would there have been a Third World ...without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism addresses this historical blind spot by recounting the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema: the Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958-1991) and the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968-1988). The inclusion of writers and filmmakers from the Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia and extensive Soviet support aligned these organizations with Soviet internationalism. While these cultural alliances between the Second and the Third World never achieved their stated aim--the literary and cinematic independence of the literatures and cinemas of these societies from the West--they did forge what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o called "the links that bind us," along which now-canonical postcolonial authors, texts, and films could circulate across the non-Western world until the end of the Cold War. In the process of this historical reconstruction, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism inverts the traditional relationship between Soviet and postcolonial studies: rather than studying the (post-) Soviet experience through the lens of postcolonial theory, it documents the multiple ways in which that theory and its attendant literary and cinematic production have been shaped by the Soviet experience."--
There are many and different types of racism in contemporary Russia: institutional racism, far-right racism, everyday (bytovoi) racism, and a fourth kind to which this essay will be devoted, the ...racism of the liberal intelligentsia. Russian liberal media's reaction to the BLM protests of 2020 has offered abundant material for the study of its social base, main tropes, and underlying logic. This article attempts to historicize it, locating its origins in the anti-Soviet pro-western dissidence of the stagnation era and illustrating its workings through some statements made by Joseph Brodsky and his milieu. Furthermore, the article identifies the intersection of two main ideas from which this racism emerges. In the first place, this is Cold-War rejection of real or perceived Soviet alliances with newly decolonized countries of Africa and Asia or with African Americans during the Civil Rights era. In the second place, this is dissident civilizational hierarchies that placed the west at the top and saw the east or the south as a backward space best avoided.
Over the last decade, a hitherto forgotten literary magazine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (1968-1991), has become an object of ever-greater scholarly attention. Indeed, whether seen as an ...instantiation of the Third World project in literature, a pre-history of postcolonial studies, or a distinct vision for world literature, Lotus offers a fresh perspective on many old questions. Before the magazine could be launched, however, many practical questions had to be resolved. Where would the resources for such a publication be found? How could it become a representative journal? In which country should such an international magazine be located and how would it operate in practice? Finally, who would edit or otherwise contribute to it? At least, these are the questions that Faiz Ahmad Faiz considered in his October 1963 proposal to the Soviet Union of Writers. In the process of answering them, he also offers the most fascinating of snapshots of Arab literary, intellectual, and political life ca. 1963. We translate it below along with two other documents that accompanied it in the archival file: the formal proposal the Soviet Writers Union leadership sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where, basing themselves on Faiz's letter, they requested permission and funding to establish and run the magazine, and finally, a brief biography of Faiz written by his Russian translator. Beyond illuminating the specifics of Lotus's history, the publication of these documents should illustrate the immense utility of the Soviet archive for postcolonial or Global South scholarship. There are thousands of such documents there, waiting for their hour.
Restorative Posters Kim, Monica; Djagalov, Rossen
Radical history review,
5/2020, Letnik:
2020, Številka:
137
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Restorative Posters: Representing Justice Visually is an initiative by Project NIA, a Chicago-based organization founded and directed by Mariame Kaba. The project features a series of downloadable ...posters mostly created by Chicago-based artists and focuses on the potential of art to generate questions and foster dialogue on restorative and transformative justice.
This is the first volume to consistently examine Soviet engagement with world literature from multiple institutional and disciplinary perspectives: intellectual history, literary history and theory, ...comparative literature, translation studies, diaspora studies. Its emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet attention to world literature; as such, the present volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on world literature beyond the field of Slavic and East European Studies and foregrounds the need to think of world literature pluralistically, in a manner that is not restricted by the agendas of Anglophone academe.
I draw on Benedict Anderson's study of the role the 19th-century novel played in constructing a national community, but apply it to a political community coterminous with the globe and its main ...genre: the proletarian novel, characterized by its representational interest in proletarian lives and formed in "the alliances between writers and the socialist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century." Mediating that relationship of genre and politics are two other terms: political imaginaries and international literary institutions. Thus, after a brief account of the proletarian novel's triumphant march through the Soviet Republic of Letters--my term for the Moscow-centered international literary field from the late 1920s to the late 1950s--this essay explores the literary figures and narrative patterns through which that novel imagined the contemporary left.
This essay seeks to reconstruct the history of the first Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia and Africa (1968). It offers an account of the festival as a highly heterogeneous and productive site for ...better understanding the complex relationship between the Soviet bloc and the Third World in the crucial moment between the victory of post-colonial independence movement and the end of the Cold War.
Социалистический реализм получил широкое освещение в истории как русской, так и восточноевропейской литературы. Тем не менее, институциональной парадигмой соцреализма сложно объяснить существование ...левых текстов вне рамок государственного социализма. Настоящая статья посвящена мировому пролетарскому роману первой половины XX века и предлагает новый аппарат для рассмотрения таких текстов, во-первых, очерчивая границы Советской республики литературы (литературной подсистемы, соседствовавшей с политическими левыми и отличной от Мировой республики литературы Паскаль Казановы), внутри которой эти тексты циркулировали, а вовторых, объясняя широкое использование религиозных нарративов и системы образов, посредством которых в таком романе были представлены революционные сообщества левых читателей.
Restorative Posters Kim, Monica; Djagalov, Rossen
Radical history review,
05/2020, Letnik:
2020, Številka:
137
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
Restorative Posters: Representing Justice Visually is an initiative by Project NIA, a Chicago-based organization founded and directed by Mariame Kaba. The project features a series of ...downloadable posters mostly created by Chicago-based artists and focuses on the potential of art to generate questions and foster dialogue on restorative and transformative justice.
The last two years have been a rough time for our discipline. As usual for pandemics, it hit the most vulnerable particularly hard. For those on the job market in Slavic literatures in 2020–21, there ...was not a single tenure-line job advertised in the AATSEEL job list, as of April 2021. The equivalent number of such positions in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) in history and other disciplines is not much higher. Current PhD students are graduating into this non-existent market, but nobody has abolished their basic needs: food, housing, health insurance. Even in the best-case scenario, when institutions resume hiring, current jobseekers will face a heavily clogged market for years. Even more cruel are the cuts and layoffs that have already hit and will continue to threaten our field. In May 2021, Ohio University terminated its Russian program and the full-time faculty who for many years sustained it. The University of Vermont has similarly announced the closure of its Russian major. Layoffs have taken place elsewhere, though much less visibly. Thanks to Steven Segal and Rebecca Mitchell’s work, Slavists may have heard about Canisius College’s revocation of its Russian historian’s tenure as part of its cost-cutting measures, but the much more common realities of nonrenewable lectureships and adjunct faculty positions have rendered many of our colleagues who have lost their jobs during the pandemic invisible in their precarity.
