The Wrinkled Borders of Freedom: Russian Migration to the Americas across the 20th Century

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Liberation in the Russian imagination remains heavily interwoven with experiences of westward migration in the 20th century. These communities found freedom in crossing not only physical borders, but also ones structured by citizenship, world systems, and artistic expression. However, in each of these transversals the idea of liberation that carried them across the border gets wrinkled during the journey. This panel explores these wrinkles as sinuous, uneven, material “holds” in order to identify perhaps subtle, yet critical developments in Russian conceptions of liberation across the 20th century. Our discussion begins on Ellis Island, in the years from 1914 up through the 1920s, when new forms of citizenship and language complicated the imagination of liberty among members of the first major wave of Russian migrants to America. We will continue with investigation of the case of São Paulo, where a group of over 2,000 Russians from Harbin find themselves at the rough ideological terrain at the interstice of three world systems. Finally, we turn back to New York, exploring the 1970s, where newly arrived Russian-speaking migrants crossed into a new artistic milieu that led to new, composite ideas of liberation registered in their creative practice. This approach, which cuts across class, geographic, and temporal lines, provides the foundations for a study of border wrinkles that we hope allows for future interlocking, collaborative analyses of migration histories.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Daria Smirnova, Duke U

Papers

• The Never-Ending Border: Russian Migrants in Search of the American Dream - Galina Zhuravleva, U of Chicago

• Valery Pereleshin: Asserting Queer Time in Three Brazilian Sonnets - Asher Anthony Maria, U of Pennsylvania

• The Protest of a 'Superfluous Man': Vagrich Bakhchanyan and His Artistic Strategies - Elizaveta Senatorova, Columbia U

Discussant

• Roman Utkin, Wesleyan U