To Write and to Roam: Ambiguous Liberations and the Travelogue

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Travelogues written by Russians or set within the Russian and Soviet realms fixate on narratives of liberation and captivity, beginning with accounts of merchants and serfs escaping from captors in Asia and the Middle East. This panel focuses on the central importance of liberation as a thematic and poetic structure within works from the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Our papers aim to undermine and nuance the rhetoric of liberation, by interrogating who is the liberator, who is being liberated, and how might the act of liberation be pretext for or predicated upon imperial expansion. Our panel adopts a broad thematic, chronological, and cultural scope, to consider how liberation and its actors evolve across time. We consider varied forms of enslavement and liberation in our papers, while also attending to how modern political structures like borders could function as a disciplinary structure as well as doors to freedom. Transgressing borders could thus be an act of self-liberation or re-capture. Liberation thus emerges as both a durable and flexible trope in travel narratives. On the one hand, liberation was a useful means to justify the imperial project (both Tsarist and Soviet) and its civilizing mission. On the other hand, personal narratives of liberation undermine Russia’s image as an emancipatory force and expose how leaving a politically circumscribed space was a means to find new freedoms.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Katya Elizabeth Hokanson, U of Oregon

Papers

• 'They Will Long Remain as Free as the Wild Steeds of the Plains': Depictions of Kirghiz and Nomadic 'Freedom' in 19th Century Travel Writing - Hana Connelly Stankova, Yale U

• The Caucasus and Transcaspia under Russian rule: Orientalism and the Production of Knowledge, 1870-1890 - Roman Osharov, U of Oxford (UK)

• 'Everything Must Be Relearnt Again': Ella Maillart’s Investigations of Emancipation in Soviet Central Asia - Alexandra Dennett, Harvard U

• Freedom and Fantasy: Russian Travelers at the Borders of India - John Webley, Yale U

Discussant

• Ani Abrahamyan, Hamilton College