Remembering the Soviet: Un(Mixing) Trauma and Nostalgia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Using various cultural material and sources - literary, visual, political - this panel will approach the logic of remembering, forgetting and reinterpreting the “Soviet” - or what can be identified with the “Soviet” - in the recent decades. These processes resonate with both traumatic and nostalgic memories, sometime contradictory and sometimes mixed up, or undergoing various new turns from liberating parody to ideological re-actualization of Soviet patterns.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Stephen Michael Norris, Miami U of Ohio

Papers

• 'Non-Place' of the Soviet Past: Between Trauma and Deliverance - Anastasia de La Fortelle, U of Lausanne (Switzerland)

• Very Old Songs about the Most Important: Parody → Nostalgia → Affirmation → Parody (from D.A. Prigov to Gosha Rubchinskiy) - Ilya Kalinin, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)

• Post-Soviet Reception and Canonization of Soviet Conceptualism - Tomas Glanc, U of Zurich (Switzerland)

• Resonating the Soviet Past in Armenian Cultural Memory - Alexander Agadjanian, Yerevan State U (Armenia)

Discussant

• Victoria Smolkin, Wesleyan U