Siberian Spatial Poetics

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Siberia is a space of spaces, where multiple visions and experiences of the land collide and create ruptures. The works of Siberian Indigenous authors illustrate Siberia as a vibrant place — an image developed across centuries of learned stewardship of and kinship with their homeland. Competing with this vision is another image — one that is informed by the disruptions caused by settler colonialism. This violent process introduced into the spatial discourse on Siberia additional voices that often competed with each other in their attempts to define Siberia. Not least of these newly imagined spatial associations is one produced by the labor camps of the Russian Empire and the GULAGs in the Soviet Union. Through a multidisciplinary approach that probes linguistic, literary, and geographic spaces, this panel attempts to interrogate the competing plurality of modes and perspectives constructing Siberia. Through a critical and transhistorical examination of Siberia’s multiplicities panelists ask how a reconfiguration of our understanding of Siberia could offer insights to the history of colonialism in the region, as well as contribute to current anti/decolonial movements throughout Siberia.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Brett Donohoe, Amherst College

Papers

• Spatial Poetics of Nikolai Iadrintsev’s 'Russkaia obshchina v tiur’me i ssylke' - Ani Abrahamyan, Hamilton College

• Voices out of the Wilderness: The Politics and Poetics of Linguistic Landscapes in Yakutsk - Jenanne Ferguson, MacEwan U (Canada)

• Heterotopias of Indigenous Refusal: Spaces of Indigenous Siberian Survivance and Sovereignty - Brian Yang, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussant

• Katya Elizabeth Hokanson, U of Oregon