Apologies to the list

[Nina Shevchuk]

Apparently, I have finally committed the sin of posting a personal message to the list. 
Many apologies. 

Nina Shevchuk-Murray





________________________________
From: Rossen Djagalov <rossen.djagalov at YALE.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Sent: Wednesday, January 7, 2009 1:09:05 PM
Subject: [SEELANGS] AAASS panel on socialist internationalism

Dear Colleagues,

We are looking for one final presenter to join five of us, thereby
completing two interdisciplinary panels on socialist internationalism at the
2009 AAASS conference (Boston, November 12-15, 2009). Because the term we
are working with is so vague, some explanation is in order about how we
envisage our discussion.

Marx and Engels believed that the working class, while national in
character, was capable of uniting across borders for the pursuit of common
goals, in actions such as international strikes and revolutions and through
organizations (the First or Second Internationals). In the twentieth
century, a certain territorialization of socialism occurred. Following the
Bolshevik revolution, in the eyes of many leftists wordwide, the USSR came
to function as the realization of socialism. With the gradual exhaustion of
the Soviet “revolutionary” symbolic capital by the mid-1950s, China, and in
a looser sense, the Third World project, too, laid their claims to some of
these international leftist solidarities. Competing with these major
geographical foci of the world Left, there were other transnational leftist
ideologies (say, Trotskyism) or spontaneous movement outbursts (say, 1968 in
Prague or Paris). In the 1970s, with the wordwide left decidedly disunited,
globalization decidedly replaced socialist internationalism as the most
well-articulated and visible form of transnational imaginary. While these
large-scale shifts could be easily traced, the much more challenging task of
accounting for the constantly evolving web of competing transnational and
national loyalties within the life of individual leftists remains to be done.

When real experience with foreign people or culture was lacking—as was most
often the case—representations took its place. Indeed, literature, visual
and musical culture not only record but also shape cultural consumers’
understanding of the foreign. Thus, cultural producers played an essential
role in the construction of the transnational imagined communities of the
left, not only through explicit political statements and participation but
also through the aesthetic ideologies of their works, which provided shared
texts for those communities. One of the inherent difficulties of studying
these communities is that they span cultural producers from both capitalist
and socialist regimes, sometimes in exile. The complexity of such location
multiplies the possible scenarios and spawns a series of fascinating
questions: what does it mean, for example, to be a leftist cultural
producer/consumer in Central/Eastern Europe, especially in the last decades
of state socialism? We hope that such panels would gather a group of
students of literature, film, art, music, anthropology, sociology, and
history to discuss not only concrete instances of socialist internationalism
based on their individual research but also work towards a broader and
bolder theoretization of socialist internationalism.

If interested, please, write to rossen.djagalov at yale.edu. Thank you!

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