Scholarly Zeit Guest is the first video podcast about emerging trends in Slavic Studies co-hosted by Prof. Mark Lipovetsky and Dr. Tatiana Efremova. In this podcast series, Lipovetsky and Efremova explore the spirit of the contemporary moment together with leading scholars and thinkers in the Slavic field.
The first episode features a conversation with Serguei Oushakine, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton. We discuss the relationship between post-socialism and post-coloniality, the social landscape of the present war, nostalgia, cultural recycling, and the creative impulse of the Soviet avant-garde.
The podcast is produced with the technical support of IMATS & Sloate Media Center at Barnard College. We are especially grateful to Rachel James, Eva-Quenby Johnson, and the production studio team @barnard.media.center.
0:00 Teaser 0:19 Intro 1:39 How can we decolonize Slavic Studies? 6:25 Diversifying the Slavic field 7:28 Do we need more ethnography? 9:11 How to transform Slavic Studies institutionally? 15:07 How is the war changing the understandings of ethnicity and class in Russia? 17:40 The colonial boomerang in Chechnya 20:53 Deprived people do not rebel; they ask for symbolic compensation 23:08 Oxxxymiron* and cultural protest 27:15 The end of post-Soviet nostalgia 29:17 Why focus on the avant-garde in 2022? 31:21 One thing we can learn from Shklovsky
*on October 7th, 2022, weeks after we recorded the podcast, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation included the rapper Oxxxymiron into the roster of foreign agents