Description:

The CENTER FOR GLOBAL CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION,
An interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University School of Communication,

Presents:

DISTANT THUNDER: POLITICS AND POETICS OF A RECEDING OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Harris Hall, Room 108

Northwestern University

With

\ YEVGENIY FIKS (Artist)

\ JONATHAN FLATLEY (English, Wayne State University)

\ DAYO GORE (Ethnic Studies, University of California at San Diego)

\ NINA GOURIANOVA (Slavic Studies, Northwestern University)

\ STEVEN LEE (English, University of California, Berkeley)

\ BILL V. MULLEN (English and American Studies, Purdue University)

\ MARIA RATANOVA (Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar, Harriman Institute, Columbia University)

\ JULIA VAINGURT (Slavic Department, University of Illinois at Chicago)

\ ELENA YUSHKOVA (Art History, Vologda Branch of Moscow Academy for Humanities)

Convener

\ KATE BALDWIN (Rhetoric and Public Culture & American Studies, Northwestern University)

The year 1917 was momentous for many intellectuals, activists, artists, writers, and citizen comrades in Russia and around the globe. The revolutionary zeitgeist captured in what John Reed described as “Ten Days that Shook the World” has had long-lasting reverberations and has been scrutinized by scholars in years since. Nonetheless, 2017 has seen a relative paucity of scholarly interest in the centennial of the Russian revolution as a pivotal historical and intellectual moment. This paucity is nowhere greater evidenced than in the former Soviet Union, where markers of the anniversary have been muted at best. This colloquium approaches the revolution here, at its awkward juncture between memory, deferral, and utopian impulse.

We hope to open conversations that address what includes, but is not limited to, the following: the revolution as an expression of hope (including interactions between writers' & artists' organizations, the Comintern, national and international parties, peripheral modernities); historical re-iterations of the revolution (social, cultural, sexual, Black Power, technological, etc.); state and non-state sponsored memories of the revolution; revolution and aesthetics (socialist realism, social realism, avant-garde, modernism, neo-realism); revolution deferred (Trotsky, Eisenstein, Wright, Jones, Rivera); utopia and the declining interest in revolution (Mandelstam, Blok, Mayakovsky, Reed, Hughes, Boggs).