Panel Idea for the 2005 AAASS Conference

[Russell Valentino]

Hello, Adrian (I am responding to the list in case others want to take up
parts of the thread below).

Great panel idea. It reminds me of a quip I heard at a conference to the
effect that the finest 20th-century Russian and American writers were one
and the same person: Vladimir Nabokov. Add to your list of exemplary
contemporary figures Predrag Matvejevic, first in France, now in Italy.
There are many more, I think.

But there is a different angle to consider as well, though perhaps not in
your panel, which includes all those Russian-educated writers who used to
be part of the Soviet publishing space but who now live in countries where
they are less likely to be published as Russian-language authors. They send
their works to Moscow and are often seen as foreign, which of course they
are (now). They try their local, national publishing venues and are treated
as, well, foreign. True again, sort of. Neither of these factors makes them
unpublishable, but they often have a harder time of it. I can't help but
think that it is precisely because they are difficult to categorize, as you
put it, in terms of national identity, and this is in regions that are
currently hyper-senstive to questions of national definition.

"The AAASS region" (singluar)? From Kamchatka to Albania, Samarkand to
Tallinn? Are we "orientalists"? Hasn't the organizing committee answered
the question posed in the first half of the stated conference theme by
calling it a single region?

At 11:46 AM 12/8/2004, you wrote:
>Dear Colleagues,
>I am thinking of organizing a panel on contemporary "translingual"
>Russian (or Slavic) authors for next year's AAASS Conference in Salt
>Lake City. Several younger Russian writers have been quite successful
>lately in writing in a language different from their mother tongue,
>e.g., Andrei  Makine in France, Wladimir Kaminer in Germany, Gary
>Shteyngart in the US.  No doubt there are more examples (e.g., in
>Israel?).  How are we supposed to categorize these writers in terms
>of national identity?
>It seems to me that this topic would blend in well with the
>conference theme for next year, which is "One area or parts of
>several? Political, economic, and cultural boundaries of the AAASS
>region in the 21st Century."
>Best,
>Adrian Wanner

Russell Valentino
Associate Professor
Program in Russian
Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature
University of Iowa
Tel. (319) 353-2193
Fax (319) 353-2524

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