Russia and the Idea of "the West." Call For Panel.

[Vladimir Bilenkin]

Dear Colleagues!

I would like to organize a panel for the AAASS conference in Toronto
(20-23 November)
under the provisional title "Russia and the Idea of 'the West.'"  The
purpose of this panel will be to explore
some of the ways in which Russia has contributed to the emergence and
the evolution of  "the West" as
a concept or cultural and geopolitical "identity," which today pervades
and overflows the sublunary world.

This is a pure stuff of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural inquiry.
Below are several excerpts from my paper (still in progress), which I
would like to present in Toronto and which may give you a better sense
of how I see the subject matter of the panel to be proposed.
-----------------
Edward Said's work on Orientalism as a set discursive practices (with
colonialism behind them) and ideological institutions through which
European elites construed their own "imagined community" provides the
inspiration but not the model of what I have in mind.  After all, it
appears that in the case of  "Europe" vs "Orient" we have a
representational "one-way street", so to speak.    It was "Europe" who
represented  "Orient", not the other way around.  Hence, Said's
(mis)appropriation of Marx's "they cannot represent themselves; they
must be represented" as the epigraph for his book.

In contrast, the emergence of "the West" and the approaching "Decline of
Europe,"  which can be traced to the hey days of British imperialism,
came in the wake of a  hectic and productive half a century of
literary-ideological debates in Russia (from Chaadaev to Slavophiles and
Westernizers, Herzen, the Nihilists, the Populists, Turgenev and
Dostoevsky,  to name just those on my mind at the moment). Those debates
were one way or another centered around the conflicting or perhaps
complementing representations of "Europe" soon to become "the West."
And that was only the beginning.  So in the case of the representational
relations between "Europe" and "Russia," let alone "the West" and
"Russia," we are dealing with a two-way street.

Indeed, risking to bring upon myself charges in Great-Russian
chauvinism, I dare to suggest that--with occasional and short lived
exceptions--up until the post-war period and the epoch of national
liberation struggles in the "Third World," Russia/Soviet Union  had
remained the only national entity outside of what today is called "the
West" that developed its own discourse of  "Europe" and then "the West"
plus the institutions of knowledge designed to study them, and that
these practices and institutions (backed by the supra-discursive things
like Russian emancipatory movement, the Big Game, revolutionary
terrorism, 1905, October Revolution,  III International, five-year
plans, and the Red Army) kept challenging the elites (including writers
and professors) west to the Kingdom of Poland in a variety of ways that
somehow influenced the metamorphoses of their "imagined community" from
"Europe" or perhaps "Europes" to the sequence of "the Wests."

In short, from Karamzin's Letters to the Institute of USA and Canada,
"Europe"/"the West" became the object rather than the sovereign subject
in the game of the national-racial-cultural who is who.  It were Russian
writers, ideologues, scholars, and propagandists, radicals and
conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries who, having borrowed
and (in)digested European knowledge or what they thought it were,
gradually broke Europe's long lasting monopoly to represent other
nations and races and began representing the Representer. How did these
representations affect the Represented One; how did It respond to them
and how might It have changed in the process (say, from "Europe" to "the
West")?  This is approximately the line of inquiry I would like this
panel to pursue.

I am looking for 2-3 papers.  In case more scholars turn out to be
interested in this topic I'd rather propose a round table, or even both.

Thank you for considering this call.

Vladimir Bilenkin,
Associate Professor of Russian,
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
Box 8106
North Carolina State University,
Raleigh, NC, 27695-8106
Tel. 919-515-9316
E-mail: achekhov at unity.ncsu.edu

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