Is the new Cold War merging with the new culture wars?
The Oregon Humanities Center will copsonsor the campus visit of Steven S. Lee, English, UC-Berkeley, as Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies hosts his lecture, “Beyond Interference: Soviet and Russian Lessons for American Multiculturalism” on Thursday, January 16, 2020 at 7 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room.
Russian interference in the 2016 elections included the manipulation of U.S. identity politics: for instance, fake social media accounts promoted rallies both for and against the Black Lives Matter movement, apparently with the intent of exacerbating social discord. The new Cold War here merges with our new culture wars. This sorry circumstance finds a hopeful precedent from the old Cold War, when Jim Crow was a favorite topic for Soviet propaganda, which indirectly led to U.S. civil rights reform.
Building on this precedent, Lee’s talk will focus on how Soviet and Russian discourses on race, ethnicity, and nationality might open new ways of conceptualizing multiculturalism here in the U.S. He argues that in the Soviet Union, one’s identity as a minority subject could be simultaneously essential yet irrelevant, eternal yet absent—a phenomenon Lee traces back to both official nationalities policy and avant-gardist performance. The result was a layered, estranged approach to identity, one that possibly contributed to the USSR’s collapse but which also provides a useful complement to contemporary U.S. discourses of “otherness” and “intersectionality.”
As a case in point, Lee will discuss the half-Korean, half-Russian rock star Viktor Tsoi (the Kurt Cobain of late socialism), the difficulty of ascribing any fixed identity to him, and his 1990 visit to the Sundance Film Festival.
Lee is the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Literatures and World Revolution (2015), and of the coedited volume Comitern Aesthetics. His talk is free and open to the public. For more information contact susannal@uoregon.edu