Russia's Afrofuturism: T/Racing Utopia between the Moscow Avant-Garde and the Harlem Renaissance

Speakers): Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University

Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, first published in English translation in 1924 by Dutton of New York and subsequently hailed by George Orwell as the inspiration for 1984, has been canonized as the quintessential dystopian allegory of a totalitarian world order. Tracing the central yet little examined component of race in the novel, I argue that Zamyatin’s iconic work encodes an insurrectionist anthropologization of the future where the affirmation of selfhood becomes indistinguishable from the performance of Blackness. Such a reading, in turn, reveals an unknown pre-history of trans-continental cross-pollination between the Russian revolutionary avant-garde -- of which the author of We was a prominent member -- and the constellation of writers and activists who would subsequently constitute the Harlem Renaissance in the city where Zamyatin first found an audience.

ANINDITA BANERJEE, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, is a member of the Institute for European Studies, the South Asia Program, and the Visual Studies Program, and a fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell. Her research explores the interfaces between techno-scientific, cultural, and social imaginations across Russia, Eurasia, and the Indian subcontinent. She is particularly interested in science fictional literature and media, which play a crucial role in negotiating trans-local practices and global understandings of modernity. The subject is explored at length in her book, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), which won the first Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book award.