IntroductionBanerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella; Banerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella
2023 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-10334477
This special issue provokes a radical reconsideration of the pasts and futures of world literature thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, accompanied by triumphalist declarations of the end of history. Conceived in the wake of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 and completed amid the invasion of Ukraine in 2022—two events with global reverberations that decisively punctured the illusions of a post-imperial, post-socialist, and post-racial world order homogenized by the unfettered spread of neoliberal capitalism—the articles collected here return to the prehistories and afterlives of a distinct body of transnational, transregional, and transmedian works that emerged from a shared desire to think beyond racial capitalism and socialism conceived within narrow ethnocentric and geopolitical frameworks. Looking backward and forward from the turn of the twentieth century to the present and beyond, they present new theoretical approaches and critical toolkits for what we call the literature of socialist anti-racisms. The connected histories of socialist anti-racist literature, however, were far from unadulterated dreamworlds of solidarity and emancipation; its inherent contradictions, visible on the very surfaces of the texts and contexts examined by our authors, assume particularly nightmarish contours from the vantage point of our shared, violent present.
Civilizational Myth and Class PoliticsLenin on China and Racial RevolutionChu, Jinyi; Banerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella
2023 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-10334490
What is the connection between class and race? Socialist revolutionaries in early twentieth-century Russia engaged with this question in their political essays. The imperial partition of China and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway made the China question one of the most topical issues in Russia. This article examines Lenin’s essays on China in which he criticizes racist ideas popular in Russia and Europe. By comparing his essays with other Russian political commentaries on China, this article argues that Lenin views racism as a matter of political economy and global class politics. On the one hand, the myth of racial rivalry and clash of civilizations veils class struggle. On the other, racial and ethnic issues complicate class politics. Lenin’s critique of racism elaborated in the discussion of wars and revolutions in China is not a dogmatic extension of Marx, but directly addresses the transnational migration, geopolitical tension, and intellectual network.
Intimate Foreign RelationsRacist Inclusion in the Soviet Dormitory NovelLitvin, Margaret; Banerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella
2023 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-10334503
Visualizing Soviet internationalism as a student dormitory, this essay identifies a new transnational subgenre, the Soviet dormitory novel, and analyzes four examples: Nazim Hikmet’s Life’s Good, Brother (Turkish, 1964); Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods (Albanian, 1978); Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice (Arabic, 2011); and Yurii Andrukhovych’s Moscoviad (Ukrainian, 2000). These works each depict a different decade and come from different locations on the concentric map of Soviet influence: the Afro-Asian world, Eastern Europe, and the non-Russian USSR. Together, they reveal some shared formal features of the dormitory novel and some unintended consequences of Soviet internationalism, including the various racisms it rejected but helped perpetuate.
That Anti-racist FeelingThe Underground Sensorium of Waning Soviet InternationalismFeldman, Leah; Banerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella
2023 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-10334516
This article traces the devolution of Soviet anti-racism and the emergence of ethnonationalist violence amid the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through an analysis of Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov’s novel Mbobo/The Underground (2009), it explores the contradictions of Soviet anti-racism at the interface of flesh and place, metaphor and materiality, ecology and affect—contradictions manifested in the ways in which Brown and Black bodies were mapped onto the triumphalist architecture of socialist internationalism. Attending to built infrastructures—metro stations, sports arenas, concert halls, and conference venues—and the bodies of visibly marked internal and international others who constructed, inhabited and moved through these spaces, it discusses how these bodies were conscripted in the material manifestation of socialist internationalism and then made the targets of racialized violence in the waning days of the Soviet Union.
Ethnoracial Utopianism and Speculative Aesthetics after the End of HistoryVint, Sherryl; Banerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella
2023 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-10334529
Using a reading of Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill to frame our contemporary political moment, this article asks what techniques of cultural critique are available to the Left today when the strategies of imaginary worldbuilding have become so central to the ethnonationalist politics of the Right. It argues that the end of the Cold War prompted a reconfiguration of political identities and public discourse in both the West and the former Soviet territories—through distinct but interrelated logics—that highlighted the failures of liberalism in ways that set the stage for the mainstream return of fascist politics of white supremacy. In this context of alternative histories taken as fact, of conspiracy rhetoric seemingly impervious to reason, this article asks how we can respond in intellectually robust ways that will help us to ground an inclusive culture and build a better future, practices the author situates in the broad field of Marxist-informed utopian studies.
“Mine from ’33; Yours from ’41”Poetic Reinventions in Post-Maidan UkraineGlaser, Amelia M.; Banerjee, Anindita; Safran, Gabriella
2023 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-10334542
At many points in modern history, Ukrainian identity has been bound up with the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian forms of Christianity, and specific collective experiences of trauma as Ukrainians. This sense of national identity was particularly felt in the immediate post-Soviet period; for although Soviet nationalities policy attempted to eradicate dangerous forms of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, these policies often had the reverse effect, creating a heightened sense of competition between individual ethnic groups, which persisted into the post-1991 reconstruction of East European borders. In the wake of the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests, poets in Ukraine have sought to correct the failures of both Soviet nationalities policy and post-Soviet Ukrainian national-identity formation by weaving Jewish, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar histories of collective trauma into their writing. This article focuses on the recent work of the poet Marianna Kiyanovska, whose attempt to bridge seemingly irreconcilable histories can be read as part of what scholars have identified as a recent shift from viewing Ukrainian identity as an ethnic category to a civic one. Reading Kiyanovska in the context of other recent Ukrainian poems and songs, the author argues that this “civic turn” in Ukrainian identity formation is both a direct response to conversations taking place about the meaning of the Maidan, and part of a global conversation about privilege, erasure, and culpability.