In the two decades after the turn of the millennium, Vladimir Putin's control over Russian politics and society grew at a steady pace. As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender, Putin's Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie A. Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin's leadership. However, while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin's first two decades in power.
Political conflict in many parts of the world has been shaped by notions of who rightfully belongs to a place. The concept of autochthony--that a true, original people are born of a land and belong to it above all others--has animated struggles across postcolonial Africa. But is this sense of rootedness from time immemorial necessary to assertions of original being and thus political supremacy? Belonging, Identity, and Conflict in the Central African Republic examines how political conflict unfolds when the language of autochthony is detached from historical land claims. Focusing on violent struggles in the Central African Republic between 2012 and 2019, Gino Vlavonou explores the social practices, discursive strategies, and government policies that emerged in the relentless project of African state building. Conflict pitted Christian-animist communities, loosely organized as vigilante groups under the name anti-Balaka, against Muslim rebels known as the Séléka. Fighters of the anti-Balaka claimed that they were autochthonous, the "true Central Africans," reframing their Muslim neighbors as foreigners to be expelled. While the country had previously witnessed episodes of violence, both peoples had lived together relatively peacefully and intermarried. The speed and ferocity with which identity was weaponized puzzled many observers. To understand this phenomenon, Vlavonou probes autochthony as a category of identity that differs from ethnicity in important ways. He argues that elites and ordinary citizens alike mobilize the language of original belonging as "identity capital," a resource to be deployed. The value of that capital is lodged in what people say and do every day to give meaning to their identity, and its content changes across time and space.
In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows, after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project. Khazanov's careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class. Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a "lost Russia," Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladamir Putin) successfully steered Russia into oligarchy and increasing autocracy. The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition.
Spanning more than 100 years of Swedish American local history in the Midwest and the West, Jennifer Eastman Attebery's thorough examination of nearly 300 historical legends explores how Swedish Americans employ these narratives in creating, debating, and maintaining group identity. She demonstrates that historical legends can help us better understand how immigrant groups in general, and Swedish Americans in particular, construct and perpetuate a sense of ethnicity as broader notions of nationality, race, and heritage shift over time. The legends Swedish Americans tell about their past are both similar to and distinct from those of others who migrated westward; they participated in settler colonialism while maintaining a sense of their specific, Swedish ethnicity. Unlike racial minority groups, Swedish Americans could claim membership in a majority white community without abandoning their cultural heritage. Their legends and local histories reflect that positioning. Attebery reveals how Swedish American legends are embedded within local history writing, how ostension and rhetoric operate in historical legends, and how vernacular local history writing works in tandem with historical legends to create a common message about a communal past. This impeccably researched study points to ways in which legends about the past possess qualities unique to their subgenre yet can also operate similarly to contemporary legends in their social impact.
Transnational solidarity movements often play an important role in reshaping structures of global power. However, there remains a significant gap in the historical literature on collaboration between parties located in the Global South. Facing increasing repression, the Latin American left in the 1960s and 1970s found connection in transnational exchange, organizing with distant activists in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. By exploring the particularities of South-South solidarity, this volume begins new conversations about what makes these movements unique, how they shaped political identities, and their lasting influence. Jessica Stites Mor looks at four in-depth case studies: the use of legal reform to accomplish the goals of solidarity embedded in Mexico's revolutionary constitution, visual and print media circulated by Cuba and its influence on the agenda of the Afro-Asian block at the United Nations, organizing on behalf of Palestinian nationalism in reshaping Argentina's socialist left, and the role of Latin American Catholic activists in challenging the South African apartheid state. These examples serve as a much-needed road map to navigate our current political climate and show us how solidarity movements might approach future struggles.
During World War II, some two million Jewish refugees relocated from the western regions of the USSR to the Soviet interior. Citizens in the Central Asian territories were at best indifferent--and at worst openly hostile--toward these migrants. Unpopular policies dictated that residents house refugees and share their limited food and essentials with these unwelcome strangers. When the local population began targeting the newcomers, Soviet authorities saw the antisemitic violence as discontentment with the political system itself and came down hard against it. Local authorities, however, were less concerned with the discrimination, focusing instead on absorbing large numbers of displaced people while also managing regional resentment during the most difficult years of the war. Despite the lack of harmonious integration, party officials spread the myth that they had successfully assimilated over ten million evacuees. Albert Kaganovitch reconstructs the conditions that gave rise to this upsurge in antisemitic sentiment and provides new statistical data on the number of Jewish refugees who lived in the Urals, Siberia, and Middle Volga areas. The book's insights into the regional distribution and concentration of these émigrés offer a behind-the-scenes look at the largest and most intensive Jewish migration in history.
Charlottengrad examines the Russian émigré and exile community that found itself in Berlin during the first wave of emigration after the 1917 Revolution brought the tsarist government of Russia crashing down. Roman Utkin shows that the idea of a community aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the new Soviet government is far too simplistic. By closely studying the intellectual output of some of the hundreds of thousands of Russian émigrés ensconced in Berlin's Charlottenburg neighborhood, Utkin reveals a picture of some of the world's first "stateless" peoples struggling to understand their new identity as emigrants and exiles, balancing their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern, bustling Western city, and navigating their political and personal positionality toward a homeland that was no longer home.
"The American Civil War has been thoroughly researched and documented by historians over many decades, but it is the individual accounts from those who lived it that personalize this tumultuous time in our nation's history. Lucius S. Moseley's letters to his family in Beloit, Wisconsin, during his three years of service in the 22nd Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment, provide a uniquely candid view from an infantry soldier, through periods of waiting and watching, battle, capture, imprisonment and parole. His writings invite us into scenes of camp life, exhausting drilling and marching, the fall of Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea, so many "terrible happenings of war." He freely shares his hopes, complaints, fears and frustrations, alternating between attempts to soothe his parents' worries ("Now I beg you, don't feel the least uneasy about me") to admitting his concerns for survival ("I hope I will be spared but young men as anxious to live as I have to fall.") While "Lute" frequently apologizes for his poor letters, they are filled with vivid details and honest reflections. His march of days - many tedious, some terrorizing - becomes a journey toward greater compassion. Through it all, letters to and from family are a lifeline, for writer and recipient alike. Lute speaks of his sympathy for the black soldiers who cannot read or write and have no way to stay in touch with their own families. He cannot imagine enduring the war without that communication. On April 17, 1864, he writes, "I didn't know until I came into the army how precious everything at home is." By the time the battles are over, an estimated 750,000 men have lost their lives in this brutal war. The scale of suffering, by civilians as well as soldiers, is immeasurable. Lucius Moseley is one of the lucky ones. When he is mustered out in June, 1865, he returns to a peaceful life of farming, family and community. At the age of twenty-two, he has seen more loss and tragedy than most people can know in a lifetime. He also carries a sense of pride for having helped to preserve the union and bring an end to chattel slavery. The boy has become a man"--
Anton Chekhov is justly famous as an author and a playwright, with his work continuing to appear on stages around the world more than a century after his death. However, he is rarely studied for his intellectual and philosophical theories. His disinterest in developing a "unified idea"--in vogue for Russian intellectuals of his time--and his aversion to the maximalism characteristic of contemporary Russian culture and society set him apart from his fellow writers. As a result, Chekhov's contribution to intellectual and philosophical discourse was obscured both by his contemporaries and by subsequent scholars. Svetlana Evdokimova tackles this gap in Chekhov scholarship, examining the profound connections between his unstated philosophy and his artistic production. Arguing that Chekhov's four major plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, The Seagull, and Uncle Vanya) constitute a kind of cycle, Staging Existence offers a major reappraisal of this critical playwright in Russian intellectual history. Evdokimova's deep, careful research into Chekhov's engagement with contemporary philosophy provides insight into both Chekhov's oeuvre and the writer himself.
Although understudied in the West, Iurii Trifonov was a canonical Soviet author whose lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the USSR's history and who embodied many of its contradictions. The son of a Bolshevik murdered on Stalin's orders, he wrote his first novel in praise of the dictator's policies. A lifelong Muscovite, he often set his prose in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR's empire. A subtle critic of the communist regime, he nonetheless benefited from privileges doled out by a censorious state. Scholars have both neglected Trifonov in recent years and focused their limited attention on the author's most famous works, produced in the 1960s through 1980s. Yet almost half of his output was written before then. In Empire of Objects, Benjamin Sutcliffe takes care to consider the author's entire oeuvre. Trifonov's work reflects the paradoxes of a culture that could neither honestly confront the past nor create a viable future, one that alternated between trying to address and attempting to obscure the trauma of Stalinism. He became increasingly incensed by what he perceived as the erosion of sincerity in public and private life, by the impact of technology, and by the state's tacit support of greed and materialism. Trifonov's work, though fictional, offers a compelling window into Soviet culture.
Originally published under the title Jean-Luc Godard: De permanente Revolutionèar, Ã2020 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag Ges.m.b.H., Wien.
Originally published by H. Aschehoug & Co. under the title Fars Krig, copyright Ã2008 by H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard), Oslo.
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