Negotiating the Colonial Gaze: Russian and Soviet Visual Culture in Domestic and International Contexts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

While significant publications have emerged on the visual culture of the Russian and Soviet empires, the question of the coloniality of visual culture continues to be riddled with gaps. The reason for this phenomenon is twofold. It is rooted in the continuous, cyclically recurring debates surrounding the (non-)colonial nature of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It is found in the persistent—and even currently demanded—scholarly, literary, and artistic clichés. The panelists will focus on the coloniality of visual imagery produced by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, analysing several interconnected cases from a comparative perspective. Beginning with the creation of photographic albums documenting the military conquest of Turkestan, which is marked by an overtly imperialist and militarist narrative, the panelists will move on to a more nuanced analysis of colonial-era postcards depicting Tashkent as a "European" capital of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship. The discussion will then turn to how colonial stereotypes were transferred from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union, revealing their remarkable persistence not only within the Soviet space itself (as exemplified by Siberia) but also in so-called Third World countries, particularly in Africa. The analysis will therefore encompass two aspects. It will explore the construction of a colonial canon in both its explicit and subtle forms within the Russian Empire. It will examine how this canon was reinterpreted, assimilated, and integrated into the official Soviet cultural framework to address both domestic and international audiences.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Maria Chernysheva, Independent Scholar

Papers

• Military Photography and the Russian Conquest of Turkestan in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century: Unwillingness or Inability to Depict Violence? - Svetlana Gorshenina, CNRS (France) / Sorbonne U (France)

• Early Tashkent Postcards: Strategies of Picturing - Maria Chernysheva, Independent Scholar

• From Travelogues to Soviet Cinema: The Colonial Gaze in Vladimir Arsen’ev’s Representations of the Far Eastern Peoples - Filippo Boscolo Gioachina, UC Berkeley

• Ambiguous Narratives: African Identity in Soviet Amateur Photography - Denis Skopin, Bard College Berlin (Germany)

Discussant

• Peter Rutland, Wesleyan U