Forms of Protest I: New approaches to the Pugachev rebellion

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable brings together an international group of literary specialists and historians whose recent research focuses on the Pugachev uprising. While the study of other popular resistance movements of the period (e.g., the Tupac Amaru rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and the war for Mexican independence) have become enriched by new and bold approaches, scholarship on Pugachev’s rebellion has yet to shake off the paradigm of the “senseless and merciless” revolt of the imperial period. In an effort to revise this reigning interpretation, and to critically reassess the framework of the “all-Russian class war” and “frontier jacquerie,” our roundtable will showcase scholarship employing post-colonial theory, semiotics, the new history of borders and borderlands, and, in line with the conference’s general theme, the history of memory. Above all, the roundtable seeks to emphasize the agency and motivations of subaltern participants in the revolt: Bashkirs and inovertsy peoples, Old Believers, and Cossacks. Three participants (Toyokawa, Ospovat, and Leckey) have recently finished or are close to finishing new books on the subject, and the fourth (Kalinin) has published several theoretical articles on the Pugachev revolt from the perspective of post-colonial theory. Our roundtable will also be featured in a broader series of conference events, “Forms of Protest.”

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Erika L. Monahan, U of New Mexico

Roundtable Speakers

• Ilya Kalinin, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)

• Colum Leckey, Piedmont Virginia Community College

• Kirill Ospovat, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Koichi Toyokawa, Meiji U (Japan)