Workshop at the University of Sheffield (UK), 30-31 October 2010
Call for Papers
BETWEEN HISTORY AND PAST:
SOVIET LEGACY AS THE TRAUMATIC OBJECT OF CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN CULTURE
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 still very much 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.
|