Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline IV: Economic Downturn and Second World Cultural Production II

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Many, if not most, Marxist and Marxisant accounts of culture understand economic stagnation as a central structuring factor for cultural production since the 1970s. Scholars working in English and Comparative Literature departments, for example, have of late turned to different—even opposed—political economic arguments like Robert Brenner’s “long downturn,” Giovanni Arrighi’s “systemic cycles of accumulation,” or the Neue Marx-Lektüre to understand contemporary culture “after growth.” Though rarely put into conversation with the above, scholars as different as Simon Clarke, Boris Kagarlitsky, Darko Suvin, and Katherine Verdery have likewise linked the global economic crisis and slowdown to the collapse of state socialism in the former Second World. Even so, our region of study and its cultural production in relation to the fundamental restructuring of social life since the 1970s—and the uneven development that conditions it—remain under-studied. How does former second world cultural production represent or even try to intervene in economic decline and stagnation? How can we understand other paradigms such as postmodernism, neoliberalism, or globalization as functions of or responses to economic downturn? What can we make of divergent temporalities within late- and postsocialist culture vis-a-vis the West in light of these properly global dynamics? This interdisciplinary 2-panel sequence brings together historians alongside film, media and literary scholars to think through these questions.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Katie Frevert, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Coming Due: Debt, Stagnation, and the Crisis of Borrowed Time in Late-Socialist Yugoslavia - James MacEwan Robertson, UC Irvine

• Speed in the Era of Stagnation: Late Soviet Drug Literature - Ryan Hoaglund, U of Michigan

• Window to Tianducheng: The Portal Motif of 1990s Post-Soviet Cinema and 'World-Systems-Theory' - Nikita Allgire, U of Southern California

• Literary Cultures of 1970s and 1980s Odes(s)a - Olena Tsykynovska, U of Chicago

Discussant

• Yana Skorobogatov, Columbia U