Forging Frontiers: Identity, Representation, and Alienation in Imperial Russia's Borderlands

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The proposed panel examines various aspects of identity and representation of subjects in the Russian imperial borderlands throughout the long 19th century. By focusing on the experiences of brutal annexation, oppression, and colonization of territories such as the Kingdom of Poland, the Caucasus, and Eastern Siberia, the panel uncovers the diverse perspectives of agents who moved across these different milieus, including exiles, migrants, officials, and wives accompanying their husbands in banishment. The panel explores how these itinerant subjects in the empire’s East, West, and South employed and (re)invented legal, political, scientific, and literary categories to make sense of their situatedness within the surrounding environment and to resist or engage with the imperial project of forging and assimilating frontier territories. Additionally, the panel delves into the construction of “subjecthood” in Western and Southern borderlands and the exoticization and Orientalization of the imaginary Orient.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Nadja Berkovich, U of Arkansas

Papers

• Self-Representations of Polish Subjects in the Courts of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, 1813-1818 - Kostas Zivas, Yale U

• Writing the Circassian: Adil-Girey Ch’ashe on the Loss and Reclamation of Identity - Lily Tarba, U of Toronto (Canada)

• The Image of the Caucasus in the Memoirs of Polish Exiles in the 19th Century - Joanna Maria Kula, U of Wrocław (Poland)

• The 'Soft' Power of Colonization: The Role of Political Exiles' Wives in the Orientalization of Siberia in Late Imperial Russia - Anna Smelova, Georgetown U

Discussant

• Heather Leigh Bailey, U of Illinois at Springfield