Images of Transition in Post-Soviet Visual and Narrative Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

From the uncertainty of the 1990s to the (re-)emergence of seemingly novel identities the post-soviet space seems to be stuck in a state of permanent transition. The aim of the panel is to discuss discursive construction of transition in the post-Soviet space on the basis of narrative and visual culture.
How exactly were change, transformation and transition portrayed? How do established images function in different narrative and visual contexts and travel between them? What role does the idea of transition play in public and political discourse? And how can narrative and visual media carve out spaces of dwelling and re-locate its subjects in newly emerging spaces and cultural cartographies?
Since cultural production in the post-Soviet space has created a plethora of languages to make sense of inhabiting a world permanently in flux, contributors will address the guiding questions drawing on a wide range of visual and narrative media such as comics, theater, photography, film, television and literary texts created since 2000 in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine. The panel aims to carve out central images of transition. The concept of Image, examined by each panelist, serves as a bridge connecting the narrative and the visual.
While the individual papers examine images of transition in specific historical, media and linguistic contexts, the discussion opens up the possibility of exploring common ground, ruptures, patterns and exceptions in this post-Soviet discourse.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Anna Hodel, U of Basel (Switzerland)

Papers

• The Suspense of the Image and Its Reintroduction: Documentary and Democratic Trends in Ukrainian Theater of Revolution and War, 2014-Present - Anna Hodel, U of Basel (Switzerland)

• A New Map for Everything: Centering Azerbaijan in Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s 'The Persian' - Thomas Fritz Maier, U of Basel (Switzerland)

• 'Post-Soviet' Masculinity. Robin-Hood Romantics, Capitalist Values, Traumatic Violence. Images of Bandits and Businessmen in Early 2000s Russian Film and Television - Paul Armin Matthias Primbs, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)

• Postcolonial Identities in Central Asian Ecocritical Culture - Tamar Koplatadze, U of Oxford (UK)

Discussant

• Otto Floris Boele, Leiden U (Netherlands)