Echoes of Empire: Taming the Nature, Bodies, and Knowledge of Georgia's Black Sea Coast

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The echoes of imperial rule reverberate, manifesting in the material and epistemic transformations of territories under its grip. This panel examines how Russian imperialism, operating across tsarist and Soviet configurations, reshaped the landscapes, bodies, and knowledge systems of the South Caucasus's Black Sea Coast. While existing scholarship on the South Caucasus has predominantly centered on mountainous regions and Tbilisi as sites for analyzing imperial strategies, the scholarly attention to the transformation of lowlands remains limited. These littoral spaces underwent intensive interventions that altered their environment, social and cultural structures, and knowledge systems, leaving lasting imprints on contemporary configuration. Through an interdisciplinary lens incorporating historical and cultural studies, our papers explore how imperial legacies endure in these territories. Irine Beridze will examine how Black Sea coast became a laboratory for imperial and Soviet projects of exoticization. Through analysis of 1930s Georgian avant-garde cinema, she shows how ancient Colchis were reimagined, instilling new epistemologies of "Tropical Modernity." Tamar Qeburia examines the transformation of Georgia's lowlands from imperial periphery to a site of agricultural development, examining how rising demand for exotic goods prompted the reimagining of these wetlands as potential plantation zones, instigating shifts in land ownership regimes. Molly Walker's paper will discuss how malaria became entangled with imperial strategies of territorial control, establishing patterns of ethnic configuration that persisted through Soviet rule and beyond. Rowan Baker will show how imperial ecological interventions in Abkhazia transformed indigenous identity, as subtropical plantations became culturally significant while native sacred species vanished from both landscape and memory.

Sub Unit

• Geography, Environmental Studies

Chair

• Giorgi Tsintsadze, Brown U

Papers

• Aesthetics of Subtropics: Invention, Cultivation, Separation - Irine Beridze, Freie U Berlin (Germany)

• Between Empire and Nature: Land Ownership and Territorial Transformation of Georgia's Black Sea Coast - Tamar Qeburia, Ilia State U (Georgia) / IOS Regensburg (Germany)

• Malarial Durabilities: Tracing Echoes of Russian Imperialism in Abkhazia from the 1870s through the 1930s - Molly Walker, Harvard U

• New Trees to Call Sacred - Rowan Gabrielle Baker, Yale U

Discussant

• Oleksandr Polianichev, Södertörn U (Sweden)