Leah Feldman, "Toward an Ethno-Futurist Poetics"

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UA MENAS Colloquium Series

Filmed on 11/3/17

www.cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium

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"Toward an Ethno-Futurist Poetics: The Queer Temporalities of Late Soviet Internationalism in the Caucasus and Central Asia"

Leah Feldman, University of Chicago

How do we write about the literature and visual culture of the Caucasus and Central Asia, while caught between the disciplines of Slavic and Near Eastern Studies, the turn away from the linguistic turn, and the returns of historical poetics? This talk proposes a critical approach to framing discourses of Soviet and post-Soviet nationalities, nationalisms and internationalism in relationship to global south and queer theory. In so doing, I highlight the centrality of poetics and philological work more broadly as a corrective to comparative methodologies in crisis.

Perhaps one of the most cliché slogans of Soviet multi-nationalism and internationalism, the friendship of nations, highlighted the centrality of friendship and love to a utopian socialist humanist project. This talk proposes an ethno-futurist poetics of love in the avant-garde visual culture of the Caucasus and Central Asia as a challenge to visions of Soviet hegemony and post-Soviet nationalisms. In particular, I focus on neo-avant-garde film and theatre, including Georgian-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov's Ashik Kerib (1988) and Sayat Nova (1968), as well as the Tashkent-based Ilkhom theatre's production of White White Black Stork (1998). Tracing these works' disruption of patriarchal colonial and nationalist discourses, through their engagement with Soviet orientalist writings of the 1920s and 1930s to the formation of (post)Soviet nationalisms, I reframe the historically grounded utterance in relation to performances of gender and ethnic identity in the late Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia.

Sponsored by the Arizona Center for Turkish Studies, the Nazarbayev University School of Humanities and Social Science, Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Persian & Iranian Studies, the UA Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UA College of Humanities Teaching & Outreach Grant, the UA Department of Russian & Slavic Studies, and the UA School of Middle Eastern & North African Studies.

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