Join the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, the Russian program and the Department of History for a talk by Rossen Djagalov from New York University. Djagalov will discuss the connection between racism and dissent movement in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet space. There will be an opportunity for questions following the talk.
Join via Zoom or attend in-person in the Community Foundation Theater in the Gund Gallery.
Rossen Djagalov is an assistant professor of Russian at New York University. His interests lie in socialist culture globally and, more specifically, in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad.
In the late Soviet Union, translations of African and Asian literature could be seen in many bookstores, Indian films were among the most popular, and the USSR underwrote (and participated in, through its Central Asian and Caucasian republics) a whole Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958-1990) and a biennial Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968-1988). Little is left today of these once-vibrant cultural engagements, except for library books that few now read, area studies academic institutes that are a pale shadow of their Soviet-era selves, fading memories of a world much wider before its post-1990 Westernization/ provincialization. Beyond ruins, however, we have to think of the intellectual legacies of these engagements: from contemporary liberal intelligentsia racism in Russia, which emerged as a reaction to Soviet engagements with non-Western cultures, to postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American academy, which took off precisely at the moment when Third-Worldist and Soviet-aligned anti-colonial initiatives were fading away.
This event is supported by the GLCA Internationalization Innovation Grant.