Whose Gaze?: Capitulations, Compromises, and Reconstructions of Non-Hegemonic Identities in Soviet and Post-Soviet Spaces

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel brings together four papers that treat works that concern places ranging from Ukraine to North Korea. In that span, we track the formulations of, and the responses to, sly impositions of narratives from spectatorial seats of power. Often these impositions remind us of the powerlessness of those artistically rendered. Yuri Shevchuk examines the strategy of “cinematic depopulation,” in which the presence of Ukrainians in Ukraine is effaced in order to assimilate the genericized idea of Ukraine into the broader, universalizing conception of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. Youngkwang Shin contends with a quieter violence, in which heroic filmmaking of revolutionary provenance purports to expose the political oppression hidden by the North Korean government, but regardless succumbs to the familiar scopophilic pleasure that all but reifies the division between the entertained viewer and the stranded victim of political violence. Simultaneously, the panel examines how certain artists from the Soviet periphery meet the objectifying gaze of others and seizes the reins of self-perception. In Sophie Lockey’s reading, Anatoliy Kim’s stories reject both Orientalization and generic internationalization and insist upon his personal, humanist sense of Soviet normativity. For Adam Willson, Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov deploys various genres throughout literary history to construct an irreducibly complex sense of identity in conversation with the past. Together these works constitute a panorama of responses to hegemonic interpretation as wide-ranging as their geographical origins, united in their desire for liberation, away from the gaze of others towards one’s own sense of self and world.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Sophie Lee, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Nothing New Under the Sun: Under the Sun, Vertov, and Cinematic Ethics - Youngkwang Shin, Harvard U

• Curious Forms: Observational Ethics in Anatoliy Kim’s Sakhalin Korean Sketches - Sophie Lee, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Justin McCabe Weir, Harvard U