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A conference about bodies, identities and spaces in post-Soviet territories
Slought is pleased to announce Contested Bodies, a conference about bodies, identities and spaces in post-Soviet territories, from March 15-16, 2018. Organized with the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the program will feature two presentations by scholars Kevin Platt and Serguei Oushakine.
What does it mean to be a 'post-Soviet person' today? The Soviet Union was created and held together on the premise that the power of class consciousness could create a community that transcends the limitations of ethnicity and language. The events of 1991 shattered this illusion. As the USSR dissolved, newly created states and people across the post-Soviet space were left with the task of figuring out who they were and to what country, body politic, language, and culture they belonged. In the early post-Soviet years, this process was manifested in social violence in the form of armed conflicts in Georgia and Moldova, the expulsion of Russian nationals from Central Asian states, and criminal infighting over the privatization of former Soviet industrial complexes. As time passed, however, it began to seem that the people and states of the region were embarking on an era of peaceful co-existence, built on shared recognition of their common history and present situation in the world. The absence of visas encouraged travel within the region, while organizations like the Customs Union stimulated trade and economic cooperation. Post-Soviet political elites seemed at times to work with one another much better than they did with their European or American colleagues.
Yet armed conflicts-between Russia and Georgia in 2008, and Russia and Ukraine in 2014-have radically unsettled hopes for further peaceful development of the region. Today, the post-Soviet social space is unstable and contested. This contestation extends to people, nations, cultures, languages, architectural heritages, memories, arts, lands, industries, infrastructures, international relations, social hierarchies, and political systems. It demands a renewed critical examination of the history and reality of the post-Soviet world. What happened to people's lives after the dissolution of the USSR? How did its sudden collapse affect the cultural sphere, language, and artistic production? How is the Soviet past remembered at the official, popular, and individual levels? What does it mean that many still name this region with reference to a political formation that no longer exists? How might this denomination still be useful, or is this a problematic naming which we need to reinterpret or reorient? Our conference will consider these and other questions.
March 15, 2018
5:30-7pm
This talk by Kevin Platt will look at racism and social exclusion in post-soviet Latvia. The abbreviation "ne.gr." on the passport of many non-citizens in Latvia, short for "non-citizen" in Russian, is also a pun on "negr" ("black person"). Extracting from this detail, Platt will compare the diminutive legal status applied to Latvia's ethnic Russians with regimes of discrimination towards dark-skinned people of African origin. In so doing, he will examine how legacies of empire, Russian and Soviet, continue to shape political realities in Latvia, and how the post-Socialist world may be understood as a post-colonial one.
March 16, 2018
5:30-7pm
This talk by Serguei Oushakine will use photographic projects of the Minsk School of Photography to explore how Belarusian photographers re-appropriated visual conventions of the Soviet official portraiture to produce a postcolonial archive of ready-made images. Blurring the distinction between appearance and substance, they presented subjectivity as a vocabulary of poses and costumes which could deliver their semantic effect even when the identity of the performer could never be established. This vicarious photography, the talk suggests, affords presence without identification. Its play with stereotypes offers a way of recycling visual formulas of the Soviet period, while, simultaneously, providing an expressive possibility for demarcating the authorial distancing from the contexts and contents that these formulas index.
Kevin M. F. Platt is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Platt works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian cultures. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (2011) and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (2006).
Serguei Oushakine has conducted fieldwork in the Siberian part of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine is Director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Princeton.