Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics III: Transnational Flows and the Falsifiable "Center" and "Periphery"

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

A notion of hybridity depends on the existence of a Self and an Other – one pole attempting to exert influence, and the other responding, negotiating, and reclaiming a modicum of agency in the face of perceived threatening cultural hegemony. As Said proclaims in Culture and Imperialism, this negotiation confirms a belief in a kind of "[usually Western] super-subject, whose historicizing and disciplinary rigor either takes away or, in the post-colonial period, restores history to peoples and cultures 'without' history." Recent efforts in post-colonial studies have often focused on this "restoration." But to what extent does situating the act of recalling history as a "restoration" reconfirm the status of one entity as super-subject, and the other as an Other? How can we prevent the restoration of a national subject as a continuously perceived super-subject by our very act of attempting the "restoration" of disenfranchised subjects? This panel attempts to renegotiate previously established bifurcations by examining the way "center" and "periphery" were challenged by their own cross-pollination. Specifically, we identify visual culture as witness of generous transnational flows across historiographical divides and explore film, electronic literature and theory that frustrates its own designation as "center" or "periphery."

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Michael Tobias Lerner, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Regional Varieties of Stalinist Epistemology - Jan Mervart, Inst of Philosophy CAS (Czech Republic); Jiří Růžička, Inst of Philosophy CAS (Czech Republic)

• The Post-Soviet Technical Elite and the Making of Subject Position - Yoonmin Kim, Yale U

• Memories of Utopia: The Strange Afterlife of the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic in East Asia - Sasha Karsavina, Yale U

• The Nuuccha Within: Sakha Cinema and the Inextricable Other in the Postcolonial Imagination - Anna Nieman, Independent Scholar

Discussant

• Una Blagojevic, Babeș-Bolyai U (Romania)