Memory and Empire: Post-Soviet TV Entertainment

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

TV entertainment programs have always played an essential role in the post-Soviet daily routine, offering an easily accessible and consistent form of leisure. The diversity in genres (comedy, game, reality, and talk shows) and formats (the blend of what Stephen Hutchings and Natalia Rulyova call “externalized ‘Sovietness’ and internalized ‘westerness’” [2009: 24]) ensures the continuity of their mass appeal and existence, spanning from the 1990s to current times. Despite its ostensibly straightforward nature, contemporary TV entertainment can also be seen as a site of competing narratives that expose the internal dialectics of post-Soviet nationhood.
This roundtable will explore post-Soviet TV entertainment through discourses of memory and empire that are sometimes intertwined and at other times mutually exclusive. The participants will discuss how TV programs, on one hand, can serve as vehicles for state ideology aimed at imposing unified views on history and the present, while, on the other hand, they can also function as outlets for personal narratives and private strategies of remembering. What are the politics and counter-politics of post-Soviet TV entertainment? How do its Soviet and Western origins influence the representations of nationhood? Does it overcome or revive the imperial legacy? By addressing these questions through an open-ended exchange of ideas rather than isolated presentations, the roundtable participants will focus on such cases as KVN, Ural Pelmeni, Field of Miracles (Pole chudes), Battle of the Psychics (Bitva ekstrasensov), and Evening with Vladimir Soloviev.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Christine Elaine Evans, U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Roundtable Speakers

• Yulia Kim, Swarthmore College

• Arina Kosareva, U of Oslo / PRIO (Norway)

• Alexander V. Prokhorov, College of William & Mary

• Alexey Shvyrkov, Columbia U