Author: Serguei Oushakine

Princeton Conjunction – 2016
An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

IMPERIAL REVERB:
Exploring the Postcolonies of Communism

May 13-15, 2016 • 120 Lewis Library
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

In a 2001 issue of the journal PMLA, David Chioni Moore asked: “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” Answers to this important question have come in many forms during the last fifteen years, and the tentative equation between the two has also been significantly extended: post-Soviet and postcolonial are routinely lumped together with postmodernist, and post-totalitarian; just as the “soviet” has with the “colonial.” Yet these “posts” did not sit comfortably together; their apparent family resemblance has not yet merged into a productive and convincing framework either for analyzing socialism as a form of colonial practice or for understanding post-soviet as post-colonial.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to review successes and failures of the dialogue between the postcolonial theory and postcommunist studies, which has been taking place in the former socialist countries. We invite scholars to approach the alleged postcolonial condition of postcommunist Europe and Eurasia not only as a break from the colonial past, but also as a method of retrospective reflection, and a form of an intellectual exchange.  To what extent can postcolonial studies of the communist experiment be seen as a product of intellectual transfer or conceptual mimicry? Do those studies merely graft the postcolonial argumentation and narration developed for the diverse cases of South Asia, Latin America, or South Africa onto the no less diverse traditions, experiences, and concerns of postcommuinist societies? Given the impact that Marxism in general and the work of Antonio Gramsci in particular had on the formation of postcolonial theory, how should we interpret the wholesale rejection of the leftist legacy by postcolonial scholarship in the region? Why do the anticolonial studies produced in, and of the region tend to privilege the history of the national elites, marginalizing even further the experience of the colonized and the suppressed?  What are the analytical and interpretive benefits and pitfalls of postcolonial anti-communism that has been emerging gradually after the collapse of communism? Will political conservatism, aesthetic traditionalism, and romantic nationalism remain the key contributions of this anti-communist postcoloniality?   

We encourage theoretically rigorous exchanges that scrutinize the history of intellectual exchanges between different sites of postcolonial thinking worldwide, and the approaches, methods, and concepts that emerge in the spaces of postsocialism. In particular, we are interested in examining those points of conceptual divergence and conceptual intersection between the postcolonial and postcommunist studies deriving from the different forms of inequality that industrial capitalism and state socialism produced. Did these two forms of socio-political and economic organization create comparable configurations of (post)coloniality, with similar structures of colonial subjection and anti-colonial resistance?  Or, were there distinctively socialist genealogies of subalternity that the processes of radical economic modernization in the USSR and the socialist bloc created? Which narratives and voices were strategically excluded during the formation of the allegedly classless society of socialist countries? Which narratives and voices have been strategically excluded now, as postsocialist states undergo rapid nationalization? Could we find the same dynamic of “domination without hegemony,” as Ranajit Guha discerned in the case of colonial India, or was the asymmetry of power between the “colonial” and “imperial” elites negotiated differently under/after socialism?

The program committee:

Serguei Oushakine, Chair (Princeton)
Tarik Cyril Amar (Columbia)
Edyta Bojanowska (Rutgers)
Michael Kunichika (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Ekaterina Pravilova (Princeton)

 

Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies
Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

ROMANTIC SUBVERSIONS OF SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT:
Questioning Socialism’s Reason

One year after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech,” Voprosy Literatury (Literary Issues), a new Soviet journal dedicated entirely to topics in literary theory, history, and criticism, published an essay that initiated a long-term intellectual discussion. In her article, Anna Elistratova, an expert on the English romantic novel, directly challenged the aesthetic doctrine of the post-Stalin period by asking, “When it comes to the artistic perception of the world, can we really say that realism is historically the only effective method we should rely on?” Was it not time to admit, the essay continued, that the legacy of romanticism, with its humanistic dreams and rebellious outbursts, could still offer an important source of inspiration for progressive socialist art?

This initial challenge to the hegemony of realist art was followed by a series of heated debates in 1963-1968 and 1971-1973. Drawing on European and Russian aesthetic traditions, participants of the debates highlighted such characteristics of romanticism as its propensity “to stare at the darkness in order to discern new directions” and its emphasis on the “absolute autonomy and uniqueness of the individual.” Within a few decades, the status of romanticism had radically changed. From “literature’s ballast,” romanticism evolved into a symptom of “social emancipation.” By the 1980s, dismissive descriptions of romanticism as “passive, conservative, and reactionary” had ceded to a vision of it as a “revolution in arts” that privileges dynamism, becoming, and spontaneity.

Today it is hard not to read these literary debates as an attempt to reframe the role of the humanities in the USSR in the wake of the Terror, World War II, and Stalinism. Ostensibly an esoteric philological enterprise, these late-Soviet discussions used romanticism as a historically available framework that could generate alternative versions of identity, spiritual values, social communities, and relations to the past.

Philological explorations of romantic tropes, of course, were only one expression of a broader interest in reclaiming romanticism. In the 1960s, newly publicized texts by Isaak Babel, Andrei Platonov, and Boris Pil’niak helped to reframe the Bolshevik Revolution, giving Communist Utopia one more chance.  The reappearance of revolutionary romanticism was paralleled by a host of other trends. Late Soviet cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare and the theatrical productions of Alexander Vampilov and Viktor Rozov highlighted the figure of the “problematic hero,” deeply attuned to psychological nuance and the complications of being in the world.  Interest in the occult and the mystical (facilitated by the publication of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita in 1966) provided yet another ground for destabilizing normative socialist-realist canons. A structurally similar escape from the rationality of Stalinist neoclassicism was manifest in various attempts to articulate a feeling of kinship with the natural world: from the vagabond aesthetics of ‘tourism in the wilds’ and the bardovskii chanson to the village prose movement, with its insistence on cultural rootedness and national belonging.

Throughout the Soviet Union, romantic nationalists offered alternatives to the unifying and universalizing notion of the “Soviet people” via reinterpretations of folkloric motifs (in Sergei Paradzhanov’s films), revitalization of the historical novel (through the novels of Vladimir Korotkevich), revisions of ancient history (in Lev Gumilev’s exploration of ethnogenesis), or reconceptualization of Marxism (in Yulian Bromley’s theory of ethnos).  The rhetorical force of romanticism had a profound impact on such key late-Soviet phenomena as the communard movement in education, major construction projects in Siberia (e.g. in Bratsk), or Soviet fascination with taming the atom and conquering the cosmos.

Instead of reducing these romantic interventions to the status of non-conformist versions of dominant Soviet aesthetics, our conference proposes to view sotsromantizm as an autonomous (and relatively coherent) form of historical imagination. This politico-poetical configuration brought together dispersive impulses, anarchic inclinations, psychological introspection, and metaphorical structuring in order to repudiate the basic Soviet conventions of normative rationality and mimetic sotsrealism.  In short, this conference will approach the romantic imagination in the late Soviet period as a form of critical engagement with “actually existing” socialism.

While many  recent studies of late socialism are structured around metaphors of absence and detachment, we want to shift attention to concepts, institutions, spaces, objects, and identities that enabled (rather than prevented) individual and collective involvement with socialism. Sotsromantizm offers a ground from which to challenge the emerging dogma that depicts late Soviet society as a space where pragmatic cynics coexisted with useful idiots of the regime. The romantic sensibility sought to discover new spaces for alternative forms of affective attachment and social experience; it also helped to curtail the self-defeating practices of disengagement and indifference.

The conference aims at analyzing the double nature ofsotsromantizm, understood both as a critique of the Soviet Enlightenment and as an alternative form of Soviet socialism.

Program committee:

Serguei Oushakine, Chair (Princeton University)
Marijeta Bozovic (Yale University)
Helena Goscilo (The Ohio State University)
Mark Lipovetsky (The University of Colorado at Boulder)
Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic ( The University of Manchester)

Princeton Conjunction – 2013: An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

PRINCETON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL STUDIES
PROGRAM IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN STUDIES

“ILLUSIONS KILLED BY LIFE”:
AFTERLIVES OF (SOVIET) CONSTRUCTIVISM
May 10-12, 2013
Princeton

Keynote Address by Richard Pare, the author of Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32.

In 1923, the influential Russian writer Maxim Gorky complained in one of his letters: “In Russia, formalists, futurists, and certain people called constructivists perform all kinds of deformity. It must be stopped.” Stopped it was not. In the early 1920s, Russian Constructivism emerged as a key emblem of Soviet modernity that responded to the call to “materially shape the flux” of social life, as Alexei Gan put it. It did this through a series of crucial theoretical, aesthetic, and technological interventions which broke with the artistic languages of the past and, simultaneously, offered new tools for organizing a new life.  Penetrating all spheres of the everyday – from housing, tableware and clothing to public space, mass performances and journalism – Constructivism fundamentally changed not only the vocabulary of expressive means but also the very understanding of the material environment and its social potentialities.

In the last two decades, this initial and most productive period of Constructivism has captured the interest of scholars again and become a privileged site of analytic and historical investment. The goal of this conference, however, is to shift scholarly attention to a less radical but no less complex stage in this movement’s history: the afterlife of Constructivism. In 1922, Boris Arvatov, a leading art critic of the time, described the Constructivist approach as “illusions killed by life,” seeing in the sober rationality of this movement a viable alternative to the illusionist and mimetic arts of the past.  It is precisely this ability of Constructivism to turn dead illusions into a source of inspiration that this conference plans to investigate.

The conference will explore the remains, revenants and legacies of Soviet Constructivism through the 1940-1970s – both in the USSR and beyond. We are interested in historically grounded and theoretically informed papers that map out the post-utopian and disenchanted period of “the Constructivist method.” No longer “a Communist expression of material constructions” (to use Gan’s formulation), these belated Constructivisms made themselves known mostly indirectly: for example, in the heated debates about the role and importance of aesthetics under socialism, in the functionalist idiom of mass housing, in the visual organization of museum space, or in the reception and development of constructivist concepts in architectural deconstruction.

Program Committee:
Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University), Chair;
Esther da Costa Meyer (Princeton University);
Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania);
Stephen Harris (University of Mary Washington);
Irina Sandomirskaja (Södertörns Högskola).

Princeton Conjunction – 2012. An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

OBJECTS OF AFFECTION:
TOWARDS A MATERIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

MAY 4-6, 2O12

219 AARON BURR HALL

In the first issue of the journal Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand, which appeared 90 years ago in Berlin, the avant-gardist El Lissitsky placed the object at the center of the artistic and social concerns of the day: “We have called our review Object because for us art means the creation of new ‘objects.’ … Every organized work—be it a house, a poem or a picture—is an object with a purpose; it is not meant to lead people away from life but to help them to organize it. … Abandon declarations and refutations as soon as possible, make objects!”

Ultimately, only three issues of Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand would be published, but the journal’s project to cultivate object as a primary tool of social organization clearly touched upon broader concerns of its time. At the end of the 1920s, Sergei Tret’iakov, a leading theorist of Russian production art, similarly insisted on abandoning the traditional fascination with individual trials and tribulations and to concentrate instead on the biography of the object that proceeds “through the system of people.” Only such a biography, Tret’iakov maintained, can teach us about “the social significance of an emotion by considering its effect on the object being made.”

Taking the Russian avant-garde’s concern with the material life of emotions as our starting point, the conference brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars working at the intersection between studies of affect and studies of material culture. In the last decade, these two crucial strands of social inquiry have shifted the focus of analytic attention away from the individual or collective subject towards emotional states and material substances. These interests in the affective and the tangible as such have helped to foreground processes, conditions, and phenomena that are relatively autonomous from the individuals or social groups that originally produced them. Thus interrogating traditional notions of subjective agency, various scholars have drawn our attention to “a conative nature” of things (Jane Bennet), to “affective intensities” (Brian Massumi), or to textural perception (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) – to name just a few of these interventions – in order to pose questions that fall outside of dominant frameworks for understanding the epistemology of power.

Despite their growing importance, however, these diverse methods and concepts for mapping the emotive biographies of things have not yet been in a direct dialogue with one another. By focusing on the material dimensions of affect and, conversely, the emotional components of object formation, this conference aims to bridge this gap.

Program Committee

Serguei Oushakine (Slavic Languages and Literatures; Anthropology, Princeton U)
Anna Katsnelson (Slavic Languages & Literatures, Princeton U)
David Leheny (East Asian Studies, Princeton U)
Anson Rabinbach (Department of History, Princeton U)
Gayle Salamon (Department of English, Princeton U)