International Committee-Sponsored Talkshop: Race, Place, and Radicalism Across Russian and American Empires

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Since the Russian Federation’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2020, many outlets across the US media and cultural landscape have recast Russia in its Cold War era role as the archrival of both the United States and a stable, world democratic order. However, Donald Trump’s second term in the US presidency troubles this renewed image of Russia as the singular or unambiguous threat to US and/or global democracy. Trump’s repeated, public expressions of tolerance and admiration toward Russia’s autocratic president, Vladimir Putin, along with his proposed administration’s disturbingly open ambitions of enshrining anti-democratic practices into the fabric of US governance underscore long-present parallels between US and Russian empires before, during, and after the Cold War era, including their long-entwined histories of racial injustices, settler colonial violence, and dispossession. Our present moment, then, is not one of reawakened US and Russian antipathy alone, but of disturbingly renewed alignment between US and Russian imperialism(s) and fascism(s).

To address these present circumstances, our talkshop panel, chaired by Kristin Moriah and sponsored by the International Committee, will discuss transnational approaches to studying Russian and American empire, including both nation-states’ overlapping histories of global imperialism, settler-colonialism, racialization, and radicalism. Moving chronologically, Samuel Jacob will first discuss the geographic imaginaries informing early nineteenth-century American authors’ depictions of Russia and the United States’ intertwined imperial and settler-colonial enterprises, paying attention to alternative imaginaries of Russian and American imperial geography emerging from works of antebellum black autobiography. Jesse Schwartz will then discuss the emergence, consolidation, and Anglophone press circulation of the largely overlooked Russian discourse of Eurasianism, its influence on Western theories of race, and impact upon American receptions of radical political formations from the late nineteenth century to the Great Depression, with a particular focus on the conflation between US receptions of international socialism and its imaginaries around Asiatic racial formation. Mae Miller-Likhethe will then explore proposals written by communist organizers from the United States, Southern Africa, and Russia during the Interwar Period to show how maritime labor, solidarities, and imaginaries were integral to Black internationalist movement-building. Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies and labor histories “from below,” Miller-Likhethe’s comments will shed light on processes of political education and spatial practices of resistance as it draws attention to lesser-known sites of revolutionary struggle. Zifeng Liu will then explore African American leftist women’s participation in the Soviet-led international peace movement in the early 1950s by attempting a feminist and queer reconsideration of their use of maternalist and familialist strategies in efforts at internationalist mobilization against American militarism in East Asia. Finally, Aaron Nyerges will consider the travel writings of Langston Hughes as a path of anti-colonial inquiry that reconstellates the imperial geographies of Russia and the United States. Detailing Hughes’s experiences in the USSR and Cuba, Nyerges will explore how Hughes’s sympathies for the Soviet Union and his critique of US imperialism in the Caribbean were mutually imbricated, and how the archipelagic turn in American studies facilitates converging critical understandings of US and Russian empires.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Kristin Moriah, Queen's University

Panelists

• Samuel Jacob, University of Virginia

• Jesse W. Schwartz, CUNY LaGuardia Community College

• Maegan A Miller Likhethe

• Zifeng Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Aaron Nyerges, University of Sydney

Biographical Information

Kristin Moriah (panel chair) is an Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She earned her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the most recent recipient of the Marie Tremaine Fellowship from the Bibliographic Society of Canada. Moriah was the 2022 recipient of the American Studies Associations Yasuo Sakakibara Prize. She was a 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Black Digital Research. From 2021-2023 she was the co-director of the Black Studies Summer Institute, a joint initiative between Queen’s University and the University of Toronto which sought to advance Black Studies in Canada at the graduate level. She is the editor of Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first collection of scholarly essays about radical Black feminist editor and activist Mary Ann Shadd Cary (forthcoming with Pennsylvania Press). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center. Her research and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, TDR, PAJ, Early American Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Performance Matters and Sounding Out.

Samuel Jacob is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Virginia. His research and academic interests largely lie in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, paying particular interest to American and Russian literatures within transnational, eco-materialist, and geographic frameworks. His dissertation project, provisionally titled Nearer Neighbors Than We Imagined: Russian American Literary Relations and the Geography of Nineteenth-Century Empire, proposes an alternative history of nineteenth-century American literature based on the under-examined geographic, historical, and imaginative space of Russian America, or the globe-spanning geographies and literary texts entangling Russia, the United States, and their respective spheres of settler-colonial and imperial entanglement throughout the nineteenth century. His scholarship has appeared both at academic conferences and in peer-reviewed publications such as Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modern Fiction Studies, and Religion and Literature (forthcoming).

Jesse W. Schwartz is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and a member of the Faculty Committee at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the co-editor, with Daniel Worden, of the essay collection, New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture, and his work can be found there as well as in the journals Nineteenth-Century Literature, English Language Notes, and Radical Teacher, where he is also a member of the editorial board. His current project, America’s Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, US Print Culture, and the Concept of Eurasia, 1881-1929, traces American cultural responses to transnational socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the intersections of racial formation and radical politics, with a particular focus on representations of the Bolshevik Revolution within US print cultures.

Mae Miller-Likhethe is an interdisciplinary scholar, curator, and public educator whose work explores Black internationalism, cultural histories of empire, and maritime labor in the early twentieth century. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and received her Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography) from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current book project traces a history of African and African diaspora women radicals’ engagements with China in the age of Bandung. He received his PhD in Africana Studies from Cornell University, and he is currently Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Sydney and a BA in Creative Writing from the State University of New York. His work focuses on the relationship between literature, media and geography. His first book, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.