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From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature & Cinema Between the 2nd & the 3rd World

Event time: 
Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: 
Online See map
Speaker/Performer: 
Rossen Djagalov, Assistant Professor of Russian, New York University
Event description: 

The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program (REEES) and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures present Rossen Djagalov, Assistant Professor of Russian, New York University.
Register to attend virtual talk: http://bit.ly/REEES-Slavic_RossenDjagalov
Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990. In From Internationalism to Postcolonialism Professor Rossen Djagalov addresses this historical blind spot by recounting the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema: the Afro-Asian Writers Association (1958-1991) and the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Film (1968-1988). The inclusion of writers and filmmakers from the Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia and extensive Soviet support aligned these organizations with Soviet internationalism. While these cultural alliances between the Second and Third World never achieved their stated aim – the literary and cinematic independence of the literatures and cinemas of these societies from the West – they did forge what Ngugi wa Thiong’o called “the links that bind us,” along which now-canonical postcolonial authors, texts, and films could circulate across the non-Western world until the end of the Cold War. In the process of this historical reconstruction, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism inverts the traditional relationship between Soviet and postcolonial studies: rather than studying the (post-)Soviet experience through the lens of postcolonial theory, it documents the multiple ways in which that theory and its attendant literary and cinematic production have been shaped by the Soviet experience.
His interests lie in socialist culture globally and, more specifically, in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. His forthcoming manuscript, “Premature Postcolonialists: Soviet-Third-World Literary and Cinematic Encounters in the Age of Three Worlds” reconstructs the Soviet genealogy of postcolonial literature, film, and ultimately, theory. His second book project, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism,” examines the relationship between the political left and the different media (proletarian novel, singer-songwriter performance, political documentary film) that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally. Before coming to NYU, he taught at Koc University, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum and a tutor at Harvard’s History and Literature program. He is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast.

Admission: 
Free but register in advance