Victims, Complicity, and Games in Gulag and Prison Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The papers on this panel focus on the margins of Soviet/Russian prisons and camp systems and the ethical and aesthetic questions that emerge in these complex, gray spaces. In analyzing a de-convoyed prisoner’s correspondence and positionality, prose and poetry engaging with complicity within contemporary carceral logics outside the prison zone, and video games that instrumentalize and attempt to make the Gulag “fun,” they analyze prison culture from its outermost layers and emphasizes how those boundaries have blurred at different moments in its history.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Polly Jones, U of Oxford (UK)

Papers

• In the Margins of the Zone: Complicity in Contemporary Russian Writing - Jose Vergara, Bryn Mawr College

• Can the Gulag Be Fun?: Video Games Remediate Soviet Camp Literature - Spencer Small, U of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Polly Jones, U of Oxford (UK)