Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 Between Moscow and the West: Constructing the Soviet Self in the American Studies in Soviet Russia and Ukraine during Late Socialism (1956-1991)

Description

Sergei Zhuk will talk about his new research project on a cultural, intellectual and social history of the American studies (Amerikanistika) in Russia and Ukraine after Stalin. Using various Soviet – Russian and Ukrainian – studies of the U.S./Canadian history, culture and politics, archival documents, personal correspondence of such Soviet Americanists like Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and Arnold Shlepakov, and more than 100 interviews as its historical sources, Sergei Zhuk will analyze how Russian and Ukrainian scholars employed different ideas of the North American civilization as the elements for (de)construction of Soviet and post-Soviet modernity in both Russia and Ukraine during the period of late socialism. Combining the methods of symbolic anthropology, oral history and historical sociology, Zhuk will focus on how the notions of the “imaginary West/imaginary America” and Soviet practices of history writing interacted with the ideological orthodoxy and centralist infrastructure of the American studies in the USSR and contributed to the intellectual opposition of the Soviet peripheries (Ukraine) to the Soviet center (Moscow) during the perestroika.