Translating Race in Eurasia

Slought is pleased to announce "Translating Race in Eurasia," a one-day conference and film program on Saturday, September 24, 2016 from 9:30am—5:30pm that brings together artists and scholars working at the forefront of the study of race as it has been articulated by the cultures of Eurasia, including Sarah Lewis and Abderrahmane Sissako.

The territories of the Russian and Soviet empires are often presented by Western media and academics as racially homogenous spaces, or as territories characterized by other categories of identification, such as nationality or ethnicity. However, race has a profound history in Eurasia; racialized identities were produced both by Russian imperial conquest and in the responses of Russian and Soviet imperial culture to the racial categories that emerged from the history of empire across the globe. "Translating Race in Eurasia" will address the constructions of race that have appeared across the region, and the process of translation from global categories and theories of race.

The first portion of the conference will take place from 9:30-1:15pm at 402 Claudia Cohen Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, and is comprised of two panels featuring invited scholars working at the intersection of area studies and critical race theory across a wide range of media, including literature, visual art, and performance. Topics to be discussed include the unique racial categories produced by Russian and Soviet imperialism; the effects of Soviet intervention in the Global South during the Cold War and their consequences for global struggles against white supremacy; the experiences of African-Americans in the Soviet Union; the history of whiteness in Eurasia; and the intersection of sexuality and gender with constructions of race in the region, and more.

The second part of the conference will take place from 2-5:30pm at Slought and will feature a keynote address by Sarah Lewis, who is an Assistant Professor of Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent projects explores the Caucasus mountain range in Russia and how the emerging technology of photography was used to develop myths of Caucasian racial identity (and by extension racial purity) in the nineteenth century. Her keynote address is titled "From Frederick Douglass to Leo Tolstoy: Race and the Thought Pictures of the Caucasus."

Following Lewis' address, a film program featuring two two films by Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako will be screened. Both films, "Oktyabr" (1993) and "Rostov-Luanda" (1998) explore the relationship between the Soviet Union and Africa, as told through the experiences of foreign exchange students. "Oktyabr" is a near-silent black-and-white film that tells the story of Idressa, an African student living in Moscow, and Irina, his Russian girlfriend, chronicling the challenges they face forming a relationship across racial and national lines in the last years of the Soviet Union. "Rostov-Luanda" (1998) is, on the surface, a documentary travelogue that follows Sissako as he searches for a friend he met at film school in the Soviet Union; however, the film is at its heart an exploration of war-torn Angola. In Luanda, Angola's capital, Sissako finds a civilization pulled apart by years of Cold War proxy conflict between Communist forces (which supported the national government) and the Western-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Both "Oktyabr" and "Rostov-Luanda" serve as exemplars of the growing pessimism felt by the global proletariat about the promises of Communism and its imbrication with racialized and neo-colonial conflicts at scales ranging from personal life to the geopolitical.