We warmly invite you to attend the Slavonic Studies/CamCCEEES joint 2024-25 Speaker Series, which is dedicated to the subject of 'Translation'. In conceptualising this lecture series, we conceived of 'translation' in the broadest of terms. That is, not just as the translation of words or texts from one language into another, but also as the much wider process of moving or conveying cultural material or information from one context or medium into another. Translation thus serves here as a general term for various forms of intercultural communication.
The next talk in the series will be Translating Postcoloniality in Post-Soviet Literature and Culture:
Thursday 13 February, 17:30
Mong Hall, Sidney Sussex College
Kevin M. F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania): Russian-Speaking Latvians and the Aporias of the Post-Soviet Post-Colony
In December 1989, in officially recognizing the authenticity of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s secret protocol, the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies evinced the hope that the globally divided historical consciousness of the Cold War would be replaced with a new conception of the past, reflecting “a whole and mutually interdependent world and increasing mutual understanding.” While there was cause for hope in the immediate post-Soviet years that such a “flat earth” of shared accounts of history—the foundation for a world of shared political values—would emerge, subsequent decades led to renewed, often weaponized fragmentation of historical vision across political borders, and especially at the border separating Europe from the Russian Federation. However, in distinction from the Cold War opposition of ideologically differentiated accounts of history, current standoffs relate to the application of the most basic terms—empire, nation, fascist, genocide, socialist, liberal—which are applied on both sides of borders and conflict zones, yet with opposed significance. In such geographies, we confront the ontological challenges of thinking simultaneously in both post-socialist and post-colonial terms.In his presentation, Prof. Platt will examine the etiology of this “border condition,” as it emerges from the experience and cultural life of a population that has been located since the end of the Cold War in the interstitial zone at the edge of Europe: Russian-speaking Latvians. Their world, riven by contradiction, offers a vantage, as through a keyhole, toward globally shared conditions of historical and political incoherence and conflict at the start of the twenty-first century.
Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work focuses on Russian and East European culture, history, poetry, and fiction. He is author or editor of a number of scholarly books, among them Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell, 2011), Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin, 2019), and, most recently, Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders (Cornell/NIUP, 2024). His translations of Russian and Latvian poetry have appeared in World Literature Today, Jacket2, Fence, and other journals. He is the founder and organizer of the poetry translation symposium Your Language My Ear. His current project is entitled “Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds.”
Tamar Koplatadze (University of Oxford): Postcolonial Literature from the Caucasus and Central Asia: key thematic, stylistic and theoretical patterns
Decoloniality has emerged as one of the most prominent subjects of public and academic debates of our time, bringing to the fore the post-colonial perspectives of previously underrepresented groups. This talk will explore the key thematic, stylistic and theoretical patterns of postcolonial literatures from the Caucasus and Central Asia, which are yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Authors such as Bibish (Uzbekistan), Mariam Petrosyan (Armenia), Nana Ekvtimishvili (Georgia), Lilya Kalaus (Kazakhstan), and Syinat Sultanalieva (Kyrgyzstan), will be placed in dialogue with each other to establish how they respond to the post-Soviet transition and negotiate their identities in their fiction. I will focus on four key themes around the question of identity: memory and trauma, immigration, NGOs and utopias. In doing so, the talk will examine how scholars in Slavic Studies can build on or problematise the theoretical tools of postcolonial studies, and how local writers, activists and thinkers themselves do so. I argue that despite its imperfect translatability to the post-Soviet context, post-colonial theory is crucial for understanding the current cultural developments in the Caucasus and Central Asia, whose literatures are in many respects postcolonial on the level of the writers’ identity configurations and modes of representation.
Tamar Koplatadze is Associate Professor of Postsocialist Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. She specialises in Russian Postcolonial Studies and Russophone literature and culture. Dr Koplatadze is author of the forthcoming monograph Postcolonial Identities in Central Asian and Caucasian Literature (OUP), and a number of articles, including the prize-winning ‘Theorising Russian Postcolonial Studies’. She enjoys sharing research on non-academic platforms also, such as film festivals and BBC radio. Her current project, ‘Post-Soviet Ecopoetics’, is a large-scale study of ecocritical literature and film from the former post-Soviet space, including Siberia and Central Asia.
