Soviet Materialities: Socialist Things, Environments, and Affects

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable explores the place of materiality in the Soviet world. It goes beyond the traditional focus on material culture and the everyday (byt), engaging with human-object relations, ecologies, and histories of affect in novel ways. Based on an in-progress multi-author book project titled Soviet Materialities, the roundtable will draw on theoretical approaches from New Materialism to investigate how Soviet people related to, interacted with, and conceptualized material objects and environments. Although partially inspired by the so-called “material turn” in Western humanities fields, which began in the 1980s with Object-Oriented Ontology and developed into the New Materialism of the twenty-first century, this project does not merely import approaches from Western scholarship and apply them to Soviet examples. It takes Soviet knowledge production seriously and investigates ways of thinking about, feeling, and relating to the material world that emerged from the historical context of Soviet socialism, many of which pre-empted the concerns of New Materialism by decades or pose valuable challenges to newer theories. Diverse case studies include how the “exploding” gelatine press connected anarchist movements with avant-garde artists in revolutionary Tbilisi; extractive mining and revived lapidary techniques put to work on a monumental stone map of the USSR in the Stalin era; mobility and the materiality of land on the Kazakh steppes during the construction of the TurkSib railway; the “heritagization” of mosque buildings and Sufi mausoleum-shrines in 1960s Uzbekistan; and the recycling and layering of material remnants of the Soviet past in the work of late-Soviet artist Irina Nakhova.

Sub Unit

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

Chair

• Christianna Bonin, American U of Sharjah (UAE)

Roundtable Speakers

• Mollie Arbuthnot, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

• Christianna Bonin, American U of Sharjah (UAE)

• Gabriella Aurora Ferrari, Princeton U

• Kamila Kocialkowska, U of Warwick (UK)

• Anel Rakhimzhanova, New York U