Amherst College Workshop: Archives of World Socialism

Please note this event occurred in the past.
April 20, 2024 10:30 am - 5:30 pm ET
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202 Webster Hall, Amherst College Center for Russian Culture 

Specialists on the art and literature of Central Asia, India, Mozambique, Korea, Mexico, and more will speak about the Pioneer Valley's collections and resources related to socialist internationalism. All are welcome!

Object lessons from the Pioneer Valley archives by Douglas Gabriel (Seoul National University); Sandeep Banerjee (McGill University); Yi Gu (University of Toronto); Michele Hardesty (Hampshire College); Sam Hodgkin (Yale University); Christine I. Ho (UMass Amherst); Dominick Lawton (Stanford University); Sohl Lee (Stonybrook University); Kevin Platt (University of Pennsylvania); Thomas Roberts (Smith College); Polly Savage (SOAS); and Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Amsterdam).

For more information, visit the event page at Amherst College's website.
 

April 20, 2024, 10:30 AM-5:30 PM 

Amherst College Center for Russian Culture 

202 Webster Hall 

The nation-based archives of socialist states bely the world-making ambitions of socialist culture.  Despite widespread recognition of the scalar complexity of socialist internationalism and the reciprocity of exchange between its manifold forms of culture across geographies, socialist culture's claims to internationalism are still typically siloed within national contexts. This workshop brings together the Cultures of World Socialism working group to examine, share, and compare the documents and objects of socialist art and literature to gain a multipolar view of the socialist world between the multinational USSR, PRC, Soviet satellite states, and other communist and socialist countries. In considering the art and literature of socialism as a single interconnected corpus, this workshop recognizes the imperative for scholarly collaboration across borders, linguistic competencies, and disciplinary fields. Moving away from the authority of the national archive, the workshop seeks to reframe the diverse art and literature of socialism as an alternative archive, one that registers and envisions multiple modes of internationalism. Lastly, by attending to specific objects (manuscripts, printed books and ephemera, works of art and designed everyday objects), the planned symposium will serve the workshop’s movement from the history of artistic and literary institutions into the domains of materiality, aesthetics, and poetics. 

Sponsored by the Amherst College Center for Russian Culture, Five Colleges Symposium Fund, UMass Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Smith College Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.