Affective Historicism: Potentialities and Dead Ends

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable seeks to examine a mode of representing history that eschews naturalistic notions of historical accuracy and instead interpellates the spectators through affect.
We will investigate the works that represent history affectively rather than narratively, tracing how, in artistic representations of history, aesthetic experience itself becomes an affective experience that represents and eventually substitutes for historical knowledge or memory. This mode of affective historicism contains the possibilities of both critique and acquiescence. What are the capacities of affective historicism for undoing the emotional and narrative organization of affects? Can it reawaken us to the living dimensions of history outside of its preformed and consecrated constructions? And what are the limits of this mode when it comes to critiquing the dominant interpretations of Soviet and Russian history?

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Mark N. Lipovetsky, Columbia U

Roundtable Members

• Daria V. Ezerova, U of Cambridge (UK)

• Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Princeton U

• Irina Sandomirskaia, Södertörn U (Sweden)

• Emily Stetson Van Buskirk, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey