Cycles, Continuity, and Change in the Post-Soviet World
April 15-16, 2011, Yale University, New Haven, CT
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 appears as a boundary between two distinct periods in geopolitics, history, and culture. More than that, it emerges as an irrevocable break, separating the era of a bipolar global balance of power from the widely perceived universal triumph of liberal democracy and the 'end of history.' Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the disintegration of the only supposed alternative to a spreading globalized culture, we wish to explore the ways in which the complex movement of history interferes with clean temporal delimitations. What has changed in the last two decades and what has not? What is repeating itself and what is emerging anew? How do the histories of media, technologies, and the proliferation of global cultural networks accentuate or militate against the periodization of history according to the life-c ycles of superpowers? What of the desire of human beings to overcome chronological time by giving themselves over to utopianism or nostalgia? Motivated by these questions, we initiate this conversation, hoping in the process to learn how literary, cinematic, and other types of cultural production have responded to the changes and developments in the physical, cultural, and conceptual terrain of the former Soviet Union.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
· Utopianism after socialism;
· Nostalgia for the Soviet past;
· Cultural memory and cultural amnesia;
· Representations of war: Great Patriotic War, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia/Ossetia;
· Censorship and self-censorship in television and mass media: legacies and new developments;
· Reconfiguration of center-periphery relations in contemporary Russia (Moscow vs. regions; Russia vs. Former Soviet republics; Russia vs. Western/Central/Eastern Europe);
· Cultural mobility: writers and artists from the periphery as leading cultural figures;
· New waves of emigration/immigration, Russian diasporas abroad and Caucasian/Central Asian migrants in Russia;
· New cultural relations among Slavic peoples;
· Rewriting history: nationalism, mythology, and historiography in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe;
· Internet and new media as a form of cultural production;
· Genealogy of contemporary Russian film;
· Post-Soviet historical films;
· Soviet and post-Soviet responses to Hollywood cinema;
· The Soviet school of translation: tradition lost?
Presentations may not exceed 20 minutes.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Данный адрес e-mail защищен от спам-ботов, Вам необходимо включить Javascript для его просмотра. by January 15, 2010. Please include paper title, name, institution, department, email & phone. Open to graduate students only.
