Remediating Protest

Transgressive Aesthetics in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

While the strengthening of the authoritarian regime in Russia under Putin has rendered political protest exceedingly dangerous, it has not immobilized the cultural forms of dissent. From a feminist performance in a church to satirical documentary and whimsical trial speeches, contemporary artists, journalists, and activists have been shaping the language of protest essential to understanding post-Soviet space. Why does protest in contemporary Russia take these specific aesthetic forms? Taking our point of departure from Rancière’s idea of resistance – signifying both firm persistence and a practice yielding change – we will explore how contemporary post-Soviet protest genres rely on the communication strategies that return to Soviet parody, poetic form, underground art, and dissident practices of cultural distribution. Looking at laughter as a transgressive communicative device, we will 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. We will focus on mimesis as a tool of resistance in Soviet underground art and contemporary performative practices. Exploring the aesthetics of testimony rooted in Soviet show trials, we will examine how Soviet journalistic prose and, later, contemporary theater reclaimed its devices. We will study the persistence of bodily tropes and language of violence in women’s prose, drama, contemporary feminist poetry and performance. Finally, we will discuss how dissident practices of samizdat and tamizdat helped create cultural networks in Soviet Russia and beyond as we reflect on the use of new media platforms and technologies of digital activism in 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. Students will learn to annotate images and videos online, write blog posts and carry out an independent research project in consultation with the instructor. At the end of the course they have a choice of presenting the project in the form of a paper or a multimedia digital piece. All primary and secondary readings are in English or have subtitles.

DIGITAL COMPONENT  

This class will be using the open-source platform Scalar as a digital support platform. The platform is great for annotating images and videos and allows for including multimedia content within the body of the published text. Scalar also has a straightforward interface that facilitates transforming a series  of blog posts into a hypertextually linked collection of work on a topic. In the beginning of the course, the students will set up an account with Scalar and familiarize themselves with the platform by submitting four blog posts (one for each section). Towards the end of the course, they will be given a choice of either producing a traditional final paper on a topic related to the course or a project involving analysis and annotation of multimedia content published on Scalar.