The Promises of Infrastructure II: Mediating Late Socialist Modernity

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Siberia has long been the object of intensive development projects and the target of hopes and dreams for rapid modernization. Focusing on Siberian infrastructural projects of the 1960s to early 1980s and their contemporary traces, these papers consider how late Soviet modernity was imagined, projected, and materialized not only through the projects themselves, but also through extensive commentary and coverage. They examine how grand “megaprojects” of the late socialist period such as BAM, the Bratsk aluminum plant and hydroelectric station, and television broadcasting were mediatized through photography, posters, slogans, poetry, and the press, with lasting effects in the post-Soviet period. We use these cases to explore questions of emotion and affect, affinity, nostalgia, infrastructural traces, and the sublime. In particular, the panel explores how the temporal and spatial orientations of late Soviet infrastructure projects resonate in the present. Authors integrate archival, visual, and ethnographic methods to illuminate how temporal equivalencies are constructed and maintained, through media and memory. This panel is one of two on the promises of infrastructure in Russia, with a focus on Siberia.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology/Cultural Studies

Chair

• Russell Scott Valentino, Indiana U Bloomington

Papers

• 'The Great Siberian Way': The Sublime of Infrastructure, Trailblazing, and the Future in Photographs of the Late 1960s–Early 1980s - Tatiana Saburova, Indiana U Bloomington

• Constructing and Re-Constructing the Baikal-Amur Mainline: Imaginaries and Ideologies of a (Post)-Socialist Megaproject - Olga Povoroznyuk, U of Vienna (Austria)

• Traces of Networked Unions Past: Locating One’s Once and Future Self through the Infrastructural Remains of Old Media - Kathryn Graber, Indiana U Bloomington

• Affects of (Im)Mobility in the Remembrance of the Soviet Sublime: Staying in a Siberian Village - Vasilina Orlova, U of Texas at Austin

Discussant

• Ben Eklof, Indiana U Bloomington