Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics I: Geopolitical and Class Agendas among Post-Stalin-Era Multinational Soviet Writers and National Intelligentsias

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The emancipatory agenda of communist globalization “with a human face” was at the core of the post-Stalin Soviet project of multinational literature and culture. As an alternative to the Western model(s) of global culture, this vision—supported by writers, artists, scholars, and other representatives of national intelligentsias—successfully fostered an alliance between the "Second" and "Third" Worlds. Within this framework, the cultures of the Soviet republics emerged as key actors in transnational cultural exchange during the Cold War. However, as early as the 1960s, this binary structure was increasingly questioned and complicated by multidirectional collaborations across different geopolitical blocs. These interactions blurred ideological boundaries in some contexts while sharpening them in others in peripheral regions of the USSR such as Central Asia, the Caucasus, or the Far North.
Against this backdrop, the role of national intelligentsias and literati in the geopolitical shifts and ethnic conflicts of the perestroika period and the 1990s becomes more comprehensible. Often driven by emerging intelligentsia class project, they played a decisive role in shaping various trajectories of post-Soviet decolonial struggle, ressentiment and cosmopolitanism—ranging from nationalist movements to the emergence of today’s competing global constellations, such as the ideologies of Pan-Turkism, Pan-Asianism, and Pan-Arctic worldviews.
The participants in this panel will explore these transformations through case studies of different (post-)Soviet regions.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Ararat Sekeryan, Columbia U

Papers

• Writers and the National Movements in the Soviet Western Republics, 1985-1991 - Erin Hutchinson, U of Colorado at Boulder

• Soviet Literatures, Perestroika, and Global Imagination - Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)

• On the Road to Class Power: Writers and the Nations in the Late Soviet Era - Rossen Lilianov Djagalov, New York U

• 'If My Roar for the Oppressed Were Heard by the Whole Planet': Displacement, Mass Action, and Solidarity in Late Soviet Crimean Tatar Literature - Marsel Khamitov, U of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Zukhra Kasimova, Bucknell U