Left Perspectives on Discipline II: Cold War Legacies and the Poverty of Cultural History: History Writing in the Twenty-First Century

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The roundtable proposes to interrogate the complex ways Cold War narratives and cultural history analytics continue to inform the ways scholars of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe formulate their research agendas and analytical frameworks. In the center of the roundtable are methodological and theoretical approaches and problematics that over the past thirty years have been either marginalized or fallen outside of mainstream analysis of Soviet and Eastern European encounters with socialism. The focus of Alexander Herbert’s paper is environmental history and its two—cultural constructionist and political economy—modes of inquiry. Moving beyond cultural readings of late Soviet environmental history, he utilizes the material lens of political economy to rethink Soviet processes of environmental policy and decision making. Anna Krylova brings into view the fields of modern Russian and Eastern European gender history and examines how feminist scholars committed to innovative gender analysis happened to integrate it into what she calls Cold War moralizing narratives that continue to prejudge socialism’s emancipatory promise as a failed feminist project. Oscar Sanchez-Sibony zeroes in on the price recent histories of the socialist block have paid when they have eschewed any historical content pertaining to political economy. Bryan Gigantino interrogates the history and present-day conceptual currency of the “Soviet empire” studies and proposes new avenues of analysis that, among many things, rethink the Soviet nation-building project from the grounds of developmentalist schools of historical analysis. Rossen Djagalov will chair the roundtable.

Sub Unit

• Professional Development, Non-language Pedagogy, State-of-Field

Chair

• Rossen Lilianov Djagalov, New York U

Roundtable Members

• Alexander Thomas Herbert, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

• Anna Yu. Krylova, Duke U

• Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, U of Hong Kong (China)