Thinking “Race” in the Russian and Soviet Empires

Thinking “Race” in the Russian and Soviet Empires
Sponsored by UIC and the UChicago Campuses

This conference explores shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity through the transition from the Russian to the Soviet empires. It proposes an approach to race and ethnicity as discursive formations that emerge in a broad archive of ethnographic, linguistic, geographic, and popular media, which furnished both hegemonic discourses of scientific modernity and Russian/Eurasian exceptionalism. Exposing this interdisciplinary notion of “race sciences” and its intersections with related scientific, aesthetic, and political regimes, this conference will examine how race science came to be grounded in both the practical imagination and Imperial Russian and Soviet policies, which served in the ordering and management of the colonial population through diversity mandates, nation-building and border redistricting, as well as restructuring aesthetic and affective regimes of seeing and feeling. We will trace how conceptions of race and ethnicity shifted over the revolutionary transition and responded to specific local and global geopolitics. Working across the disciplines of history, history of science, anthropology, literature, as well as visual media and performing arts, this workshop will expose the ways in which shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity influenced the development of new scientific paradigms and contributed to the restructuring of the social, political and artistic imagination amidst the process of imperial expansion.

March 5 from 4 - 6pm
Roundtable: “Race --- A Useful Category….”
Location: Institute for the Humanities

March 6 from 9:30am - 4pm
Institute for the Humanities

9 am Coffee

PANEL 1. UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE THROUGH THE POLITICS OF RACE 9:30-11.15 am
Chair Faith Hillis, UChicago
Presenters:
Sergei GLEBOV, Smith/Amherst: "Goods and Bodies: Nationalizing Empire, Race, and the Invention of Chinese Commerce in the Imperial Far East"
Eugene AVRUTIN, UICU: "Racial politics in Imperial Russia’s Borderlands"
David RAINBOW, University of Houston: "Siberian Self-Racialization: the Case of the Regionalists"

Discussants: Laura Hostetler, UIC; Charles Steinwedel, North Eastern Illinois U

Coffee break 11.15-11.30 am

PANEL 2. RACIALIZING RUSSIAN JEWS: RACIAL SELF AND RACIAL OTHER 11.30 am-1.15 pm
Chair: Matthew Kendall, UIC
Presenters
Semyon GOLDIN, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "'Race' and the 'national body' in the late imperial nationalist imagination: Russian, Polish and Jewish cases"
Marina Mogilner, UIC: "Lev Shternberg: connecting Jewish race and Soviet etnos"
Amelia Glaser, UCSD: “From the Yangtze to the Black Sea: Yiddish Poets Rethink Ethnicity in Soviet Crimea”
Discussants: Na’ama Rokem, UChicago; Karen Underhill, UIC

Lunch (catered) 1.20 -2.20 pm

PANEL 3. RACE IN “REVOLUTIONARY DREAMS” 2.20 pm – 4.05 pm
Chair: Leah Feldman, UChicago
Presenters
Michael KUNICHIKA, Amherst: "Specters of Empire: Early Soviet Cinema and the Representation of Race"
Nariman SKAKOV, Stanford: "Eisenstein in Ferghana: Framing National Form"

Anindita BANERJEE, Cornell: "Race-ing to the Fabled Land of Ind: The Journey of the Russian Columbus from Victorian England to Soviet Bollywood"
Discussants: Ghewa Hayek, UChicagol Julia Vaingrudt, UIC