Call for Papers
BETWEEN HISTORY AND PAST:
SOVIET LEGACY AS
THE TRAUMATIC OBJECT OF CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN
CULTURE
Workshop
at the University of Sheffield (UK), 30-31 October 2010
The
workshop will address the relationship between
contemporary Russian
culture and Russia's Soviet past, the
relationship characterized by
profound ambiguity. Almost two
decades after the collapse of the
Soviet Union Russian society
and culture is increasingly dependent on its Soviet heritage,
which is upheld and rejected, often
simultaneously, in
practically all fields of symbolic production,
from state
ideology to architecture, from elitist literature to mass
culture. The aim of the workshop is to navigate the array of
discourses in
order to trace the ways in which Soviet past
functions not as a
self-contained object, however complex and
ambiguous, but rather as a space of projections, displacements
and symbolizations, as a symptom whose affective charge
betrays the urgency of its underlying
problematic.
The main impetus behind the workshop is to look at
the Soviet
past through the traumatic contradictions of the present.
Contemporary Russian culture is suspended between the unstable
historical
narrative of the new nation's emergence from the
ruins of the USSR
and the legacy of Soviet culture, whose
models, revolutionary or
Stalinist, no longer work. The
resultant impossibility of symbolic
structuration creates a
tangible traumatic void at the core of
contemporary Russian
culture which its subjects try to fill with
their
inconsistent, emotional, and ideologically charged
interventions. Whether praised or vilified, likened to the
present of contrasted
with it, the Soviet past is
influenced by Russia's current
predicament in no lesser degree
than it itself influences Russia's
present.
We invite papers from an open variety of disciplines
that will
be neither purely historical (i.e., tracing the actual
historical transformation of Soviet culture into contemporary
Russian one) nor
purely immanent (i.e., approaching the Soviet
past as a fantasmatic
image pertaining to the Russian present)
but rather address the gap
between historical genealogies and
immanent perceptions, the gap
conditioned by the traumatic
impossibility to merge narratives of
Russian history and the
fantasmatic visions of the Soviet past.
The workshop will be coordinated with Russian Aviation and Space:
Technology and Cultural Imagination workshop that will be held
at the
University of Leeds, UK, on 29 October 2010 (for more
details please
visit http://aviation.vladstrukov.com/).
Sheffield and Leeds are within a short train ride from each other.
Please, send your abstracts /300 words/ accompanied by a CV to
the workshop
organizers, Evgeny Dobrenko and Andrey
Shcherbenok, at [log in to unmask] by 1 June
2010.
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