Colloquium by Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh: Post-Colonial Russia as Conceptual Disorder

Speakers): Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh

Can any clarity be brought to current debates on Russia as a “post-colonial space”? My guess is no. In place of this, I am interested in an exchange of views about three assertions. First, Western academic postcolonial studies produced an account of empire with wide-ranging claims, but narrow relevance to the second world and its scholars. Second, the effort now to produce a “revisionist” postcolonial studies for Russia is a dubious project. Third, new thinking about contemporary Russian culture (as well as its legacy) might begin by leaving the old postcolonial fictions intact (as fictions) and looking beyond them to a different configuration that situates Russian culture in an environment of accelerated globalization. I would like to lay the groundwork for a discussion of these assertions, misguided though they might turn out to be. Time permitting, I would look at some contemporary Russian cinema texts that generate fictions different from the dominant postcolonial model.

 

NANCY CONDEE is Professor of Slavic and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Pitt Global Studies Center. Her research interests focus on contemporary (post-1964) Russian culture, with an emphasis on film, literature, and popular culture. Her publications include Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford 2009) and the following coedited volumes: The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, with Birgit Beumers (I. B. Tauris, 2011); Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor (Duke, 2008); Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20th Century Russia (Indiana University Press, 1995).