The self in the other: Aleksandr Griboedov’s Orient

While scholars of Russian orientalism have diverged somewhat in their interpretation of Aleksandr Griboedov, they have in the main viewed him as a supporter of Russian expansion and seen in his works a justification of Russia’s conquests in the East. This essay seeks to complicate that view. By taking a comprehensive look at Griboedov’s Eastern-themed works (including his poems “There, Where Flows the Alazani”, “Kal'ianchi”, and “Predators on the Chegem”, the play Georgian Night and a series of editorials, letters, and travel notes written from the Caucasus and Persia) and situating them in the context of contemporary literary and political debates, the author argues that Griboedov undercuts rather than supports the orientalist conception of the East’s alterity. By portraying “Eastern” ways as possibilities latent within all humans and by pointing out the Russian past in the Persian present, Griboedov is able to question Russia’s role in the Caucasus and to explore the costs of Russia’s progress towards European-style civilization.     

The moral evolution of the Russian–Yiddish–English writer Abraham Cahan

One of the ways in which Cahan remained culturally Russian was his devotion to the kind of literary realism that embodies a clear system of values. This article examines the kind of values Cahan promoted, looking specifically at how this writer of educative but realist fiction dealt with the disconnect between socialist ideals and immigrant life. It follows the evolution of Cahan’s literary formula from the transparency of the early stories to the cynicism of The Rise of David Levinsky, seeing the seeds for transformation in the “Bintel Brief” advice column of the Forverts, which was executed and possibly written under Cahan’s direction. The moral vision of Levinsky is compared to that of two predecessors with which Cahan was familiar: William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Pyotr Boborykin’s 1881 Russian novel Kitaigorod.     

The ethics of urban and epic Russian fantasy

Moral paradigms are fundamental to most works of fantasy fiction. Two moral standpoints dominate recent Russian fantasy fiction and film: individualism and collectivism. Individualism believes in the superior value of personal experience, whereas collectivism prioritizes the benefit to the group. This article contrasts Sergei Luk'ianenko’s novella “Destiny” (Svoia sud'ba) with Timur Bekmambetov’s film adaptation Night Watch (Nochnoi dozor) to demonstrate that the moral paradigms of individualism and collectivism can be tied respectively to urban and epic subgenres of fantasy fiction. The author demonstrates that an inclination toward individualism in the urban “Destiny” and toward collectivism in the epic Night Watch leads to contrasting representations of alterity in the works. Individualist and collectivist orientations affect how the works comment on the human tendency to discriminate between oneself and others. The author uses examples from “Destiny” and Night Watch to argue that the narrative strategies associated with urban fantasy promote inclusive paradigms of alterity, whereas those associated with epic fantasy tend to advance confrontational mentalities.     

Katabasis,adult betrayals and liminal identities in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life

In Child Soldier, China Keitetsi recounts her experiences as a child and a soldier during Yoweri Museveni’s guerrilla war against then Ugandan president, Milton Obote. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of katabasis, this paper examines Keitetsi’s portrait of adult betrayal and parental abuse of children at home, and as child soldiers. I argue that Child Soldier is a text that lends itself to a katabatic analysis, and that Keitetsi is a katabasist who frames her experiences as a child and a soldier “within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and return” . I argue that “hellish” elements in the memoir are more than just incidental: they point to a world where tenderness and love have long given way to cruelty and cynicism, and where madness and violence and despair are the order of the day. I also draw on Sigmund Freud and Homi Bhabha’s notions of the unhomely, to suggest that the memoir introduces interesting parallels between the unhomeliness in the home and that brought on by the civil war. Subconsciously, then, examining the memoir under the tropes of katabasis and the unhomely allows us to view her life as floating in-between the child she wishes she should have been and the abused and rejected young woman she becomes.     

Spatial Form and Character Revelations: Korolenko’s Siberian Stories

Arguably, few popular films during the last decade have caused so much debate, and been more frequently quoted as film The Matrix (1999), written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. This paper analyzes allusions to the film in four works of contemporary Russian prose fiction. These works exploit, to various degrees, The Matrix in order to evoke visual representations from the film, and to draw on structural concepts and similarities. Further, I argue that references to The Matrix are made in order to benefit from the film’s eclectic mythological concepts and transpose them to the literary realm. This kind of cross-fertilization could be seen as a growing trend where the borders between different media are becoming more fluid, and where they benefit from each other, be they novels, films, or computer games.     

Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

On Get Out and the Problem of Racialized Aliveness

In this short article, I explore Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out as a compelling illustration of racialization as an attack on human “aliveness.” I argue that Peele’s film, a new kind of zombie narrative, urges psychosocial transformation not only through the radically inventive acts of its creatively resurrected protagonist, Chris, but also through its own subversive collaboration with the spectator.     

Notes from underground: fugitive ecology and the ethics of place

Abstract

In this essay, I argue for “fugitive gardening” as a form of “poaching” or “resignifying,” a radical appropriation of hegemonic spaces and practices that both deconstructs the logics of mastery and hygienic possessiveness that underpin colonial culture, and articulates what we might call a fugitive ecology: a dispossession of self in relation to the environment, a refusal to conceive of land, soil or planet in terms of property. Fugitive gardening sets itself in opposition to the prisons, camps and forts that index South African political history, restorying place, environment, and the self as grounds for community formation, dialogue and cooperation. Through readings of Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and other examples of literary and material gardening, I show how such cultivation represents a gesture of belonging in a context where such claims are revolutionary, even treasonous; but unlike farm, fort or prison, fugitive gardening stakes a claim to belonging without possession, home without property and ecological care without an investment in the future. As such, gardening entails a very different understanding of self in relation to place, to nature and to future generations, and a reconceptualisation of narrative and language as representational modes.     

Language,Class, and Nation in a Soviet Ukrainian Blockbuster Comedy: Chasing Two Hares (1961)

Abstract

The subject of this article is one of the most popular comedy films of the late Soviet period, Za dvoma zaitsiamy [Chasing Two Hares]. Made at the Kyiv Film Studio in 1961, it was originally a Ukrainian-language film based on Mykhailo Staryts'kyi’s eponymous 1883 play that satirized pretentious upstarts eager to assimilate into Russian culture. However, the completed film was dubbed into Russian and released throughout the Soviet Union in the Russian version. The change of language reversed the meaning of the film’s satire, turning the movie into a harmless folkloric comedy that reinforced imperial cultural hierarchies rather than undermining them.     

The post-Soviet “Orient” in stories by Vladimir Makanin and Liudmila Petrushevskaia

This article analyzes a paradoxical feature in post-Soviet Russian literature and film, where an anti-imperial message coexists with colonial tropes. It focuses on two short stories: “Slabye kosti” (“Weak Bones,” 1988) by Liudmila Petrushevskaia and “Kavkazskii plennyi” (“Prisoner of the Caucasus,” 1995) by Vladimir Makanin. Set respectively in Central Asia and the Caucasus, these stories reflect on the troubled Russian and Soviet relationship with these regions. Despite their artistic complexity and anti-imperial messages, these works are trapped by the literary tropes and cultural stereotypes of the past. These stories relate to a broader cultural trend characteristic of post-Soviet Russian culture. On the one hand, Russian culture has remained unreceptive to post-colonial discourses adopted by Western intellectuals. On the other hand, the resurgence of imperial preoccupations in contemporary Russia, as well as the anxiety surrounding Russia’s territorial integrity, preclude the development of Russia’s own discourses on ethnically distinct peripheries and identities. As a result of this discursive silence, even nuanced writers, such as Makanin and Petrushevskaia, rely on the traditional models of representing the Caucasus and Central Asia.     

Wall Street Scandals: The Myth of Individual Greed1

There is rarely an introductory text in sociology that does not begin with C. Wright Mills’s (1967) distinction between personal troubles and structural or public issues. To lack sociological imagination is to confuse between these two levels of analysis in trying to explain public issues in terms of personal troubles, or history in terms of the individual’s biography. “Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life” ( Mills, 1967:8 ). Issues are generated in response to the dynamics of the social system and unfold within the larger structural and historical contexts where the character of the individual takes shape. Yet, the most popular explanation of the contemporary financial crisis with its disastrous social and economic consequences is personal greed. It is the greedy investment bankers, corrupt politicians, and unscrupulous lobbyists who are to take the brunt of the current economic meltdown in the United States. A few bad apples on Wall Street have created havoc on Main Street. Here, one may argue that greed that—if not kept in check—which seems to afflict almost everyone, transcending social class and status boundaries, may be a public issue—a structural problem—rather than a problem within the character of the individual. Not to be greedy within the contemporary social and economic system may be considered pathological, an instance of personal trouble.     

Haunting images: stereotypes of Jewishness among Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany

Glancing at the Jewish spaces in contemporary Germany, an occasional observer would probably be startled. Since the Russian Jewish migration of the 1990s, Germany's Jewish community has come to be the third-largest in Europe. Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and Jewish cultural events have burgeoned. There is even talk about a “Jewish renaissance” in Germany. However, many immigrants claim that the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany is “only a myth,” “an illusion.” This paper is part of a project exploring the processes of the reconstruction of Jewish identities and Jewish communal life by Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany. The focus of this paper is on the stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness evident in immigrants' perceptions and imaginings of their physical gathering spaces – the Jewish community centres (Gemeinden). Focusing on the images that haunt a particular place, I seek to shed light upon the difficulties of re/creating Jewish identity and life among the Russian Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany.     

Narrative Hesitation in The Gambler

My article contends that Dostoevsky’s short novel, The Gambler, is marked by a fundamental conflict of temporalities. While the novel seems to embrace bourgeois optimism and the hopeful narrative temporality that serves as its most resourceful literary embodiment, it also seems to adhere to a strikingly anti-teleological and circular narrative structure. This affirmation and denial of temporality as linear, purposive movement is the appropriate narrative emblem of the peculiar world of Roulettenburg and its inhabitants, a world where beginning and end continually risk equivalence and where the parameters of structure have therefore begun to dissolve. What emerges is an acceptance of inevitable boredom, of permanent failure to resolve conflict, that is both constricting and liberating. As an artistic principle of form, this failure declares a “poetics” of hesitation whose temporal dimensions brilliantly reflect the fundamentally ambivalent eros of the gambler, the latter’s inability to accept or escape from a debilitating presentness. In creating this kind of narrative conflict, Dostoevsky reverses the characteristic romantic obsession with the allure of pregnant immediacy that is an illusion of god-like vision to which only a most ungod-like being could succumb.     

Policy Research and the Future: An Exemplar for a Critical Symbolic Interactionism

Abstract

Policy research is inquiry that seeks to inform organizational decisions. As such, it is embroiled in the construction of whatever futures these effectuate. Symbolic Interactionism has untapped resources for the conduct of policy research in its basic assumption that human nature and its situations are human creations. Within that tradition, it is always possible to compare what has been produced with some “future,” and to do so “critically.” The most relevant contemporary exemplar for such a comparison may be found in the work of Hugh Duncan. His analysis of the sociodramas that individuals perform, and his examination of comedy and tragedy as competing forms of social order is discussed. Finally, his attempt to exhibit the comedic as the humane form of social order is presented as a “formal” exemplar for the conduct of policy research which entertains a variety of futures in the investigation of present situations.     

The “baboon boy” of the Eastern Cape and the making of the human in South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the early twentieth century story of Lucas, the so-called “baboon boy” of the Eastern Cape, in order to unpack some of the mechanisms (social, ideological, racial and physical) that underlie the shaping of the idea of the human in a local context. By exhuming the material details in Lucas’s story, I aim to establish a form of relation between past and present that enables a deeper understanding of the tensions underscoring contemporary public discourse around the formation of the human in South Africa. First, I draw on Agamben’s notion of the anthropological machine to contextualise my thoughts on the mechanics of ideation that underpin the creation of legitimate forms of the human. Then I situate my argument according to Baucom’s articulation of the conflict in postcolonial and ecocritical thought between the historical need for redress and the universalising demands of the Anthropocene. After considering Lucas’s story, I close by referring to the recent public opinion fracas surrounding the discovery of the fossilised remains of a new subspecies of human, Homo naledi, in order to demonstrate the continued relevance for contemporary social thought of the stuff that lies submerged in the story of the “baboon boy.”