Transgressive Impulse and Digital Revolutions in the (post)-Soviet Space
Focusing on cultural remediation, this course explores how contemporary protest genres (such as performance, rap, stand-up, or digital activism) rely on the communication strategies that go back to Soviet parody, poetic form, underground art, and dissident practices of cultural distribution. The trajectory of the course includes three distinct sections. Looking at laughter as a transgressive communicative device we will first search for the reverberations of Soviet satire in Russian and Belorussian stand-up, as well as in less obvious genres, such as the recent documentary work by Alexey Navalny. Exploring the power of the poetic word to yield performative potential, we will read Osip Mandelstam against the rap musician Oxxxymiron, think about postmemory of the war in Vladimir Vysotsky’s music and contemporary memorial practices (e.g. the Immortal Regiment) and examine how Dmitri Prigov’s literary work informs radical performance art by Pussy Riot. Finally, we will look at how dissident practices of samizdat and tamizdat helped create cultural networks in Soviet Russia and beyond as we reflect on the use of the new media platforms and technologies of digital activism in the post-Soviet space. Rather than searching for instances of direct influence between cultural producers, we will examine how protest strategies are shaped and remediated while activating multiple layers of cultural memory. Our focus on digital media will be both theoretical and practical: students will learn to annotate images and videos online, write blogposts, and also have a choice of presenting the final project in the form of a paper or a multimedia digital piece.