Bad Materiality

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable brings together scholars from history, museum studies, and literary studies to consider instances of material culture that have been deemed “bad” on moral, aesthetic, religious and class grounds. Contributors will focus on a range of stigmatized objects and phenomena from the Imperial period and earlier: depictions of pagan idols and demons in Muscovite manuscripts; early-nineteenth-century Old Believers’ perceptions of state-related objects (e.g., passports, stamps, money); a local museum’s “bad” curatorial display of picture postcards in the late Imperial period; debates surrounding fabrichnaia igrushka (which by the end of the nineteenth century was deemed “bad” in contrast to “good” kustar toys); and Gorky’s representation of the “bad materiality” associated with meshchanstvo (i.e., roughly, the petty bourgeoisie). In thinking about how material objects have been devalued and revalued in different historical contexts, we hope to address not only these histories but also the theoretical questions raised by studying materiality itself.

Sub Unit

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

Chair

• Valerie Ann Kivelson, U of Michigan

Roundtable Speakers

• Liliya Dashevski, Yale U

• Marisa Karyl Franz, New York U

• Valerie Ann Kivelson, U of Michigan

• Anne L Lounsbery, New York U

• Fedor Maksimishin, U of Michigan