This conference explores shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity through the transition from the Russian to the Soviet empires. It proposes an approach to race and ethnicity as discursive formations that emerge in a broad archive of ethnographic, linguistic, geographic, and popular media, which furnished both hegemonic discourses of scientific modernity and Russian/Eurasian exceptionalism. Exposing this interdisciplinary notion of “race sciences” and its intersections with related scientific, aesthetic, and political regimes, this conference will examine how race science came to be grounded in both the practical imagination and Imperial Russian and Soviet policies, which served in the ordering and management of the colonial population through diversity mandates, nation-building and border redistricting, as well as restructuring aesthetic and affective regimes of seeing and feeling. We will trace how conceptions of race and ethnicity shifted over the revolutionary transition and responded to specific local and global geopolitics. Working across the disciplines of history, history of science, anthropology, literature, as well as visual media and performing arts, this workshop will expose the ways in which shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity influenced the development of new scientific paradigms and contributed to the restructuring of the social, political and artistic imagination amidst the process of imperial expansion.

Thursday, March 5

University Of Illinois at Chicago

Institute for the Humanities, Stevenson Hall — Lower Level

701 S. Morgan Street

OPENING ROUNDTABLE: “RACE — A USEFUL CATEGORY…”

4:00 – 6:00 pm

Moderators: Leah Feldman, Marina Mogilner

Is race a useful category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet Studies? Does Eurasia have a space in Critical Race Theory? How are race, gender, and sexuality addressed in Slavic and Eurasian studies more broadly? Why do we encounter resistance in scholarly discussions of race in the former Russian empire and Soviet Union? This roundtable also invites reflections on the climate of Eurasian studies.

Presenters: Anna Elena Torres, Faith Hillis, Anindita Banerjee, Eugene Avrutin, Adrienne Edgar, Nariman Skakov, Leah Feldman,

Marina Mogilner

Reception 6:00 – 7:30pm

PERFORMANCE BY PSOY KOROLENKO:

SONGS IN A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE

7:30 pm

UIC Theatre

Room L285 Recital Hall

1044 West Harrison

Translations, songs in non-native languages, macaronic songs, artistic functions of “other” and “othered” languages and various cases of inter- and multilingualism in the genre of song will be the theme of lecture-blended concert presented by the “avant-bard” and “wandering scholar” Psoy Korolenko.

Friday, March 6

University Of Illinois at Chicago

Institute for the Humanities, Stevenson Hall — Lower Level

701 S. Morgan Street

Breakfast and Coffee 9:00 am

PANEL 1: UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE THROUGH THE POLITICS OF RACE

9:30 -11:15 am

Chair: Faith Hillis, University of Chicago

Sergey Glebov, Smith College/Amherst College

“Goods and Bodies: Nationalizing Empire, Race, and the Invention of Chinese Commerce in the Imperial Far East”

Eugene Avrutin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Racial politics in Imperial Russia’s Borderlands”

David Rainbow, University of Houston

“Siberian Self-Racialization: the Case of the Regionalists”

Discussants:

Laura Hostetler, University of Illinois at Chicago

Charles Steinwedel, Northeastern Illinois University

Coffee break 11:15 -11:30 am

PANEL 2: RACIALIZING RUSSIAN JEWS: RACIAL SELF AND

RACIAL OTHER

11:30 am – 1:15 pm

Chair: Matthew Kendall, University of Illinois at Chicago

Semion Goldin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

““Race” and the “national body” in the late imperial nationalist imagination: Russian, Polish and Jewish cases”

Marina Mogilner, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Lev Shternberg: connecting Jewish race and Soviet etnos”

Amelia Glaser, University of California San Diego

“From the Yangtze to the Black Sea: Yiddish Poets Rethink Ethnicity in Soviet Crimea”

Discussants:

Na’ama Rokem, University of Chicago

Karen Underhill, University of Illinois at Chicago

Lunch 1:30 – 2:30 pm

PANEL 3: RACE IN “REVOLUTIONARY DREAMS”

2:30 – 4:15 pm

Chair: Leah Feldman, University of Chicago

Michael Kunichika, Amherst College

“Specters of Empire: Early Soviet Cinema and the Representation of Race”

Nariman Skakov, Stanford University

“Eisenstein in Ferghana: Framing National Form”

Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University

“Race-ing to the Fabled Land of Ind: The Journey of the Russian Columbus from Victorian England to Soviet Bollywood”

Discussants:

Julia Vaingurt, University of Illinois at Chicago

Saturday, March 7

University of Chicago

Classics Building, Room 110

1010 E. 59th Street

Breakfast and Coffee 9:30 am

PANEL 4: RETHINKING RACE AND GENDER IN THE SOVIET UNION

10:00 am – 11:45 am

Chair: Marina Mogilner, University of Illinois at Chicago

Dmitry Shumsky, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“Stalin’s Nationalities Policies and Jewish Assimilation: A Reappraisal”

Brigid O’Keeffe, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

“Racializing Roma in the Stalin-era Soviet Union”

Adrienne Edgar, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Rethinking Race and Gender in the Soviet Union through the Lens of Intermarriage”

Discussants:

Ilya Gerasimov, Ab Imperio quarterly

Lunch 12:00 – 1:00 pm

PANEL 5: “RACE” AS AN INTERNATIONAL CONVERSATION

1:00 – 2:45 pm

Chair: Jonathan Daly, University of Illinois at Chicago

Benjamin Balthaser, Indiana University

“From Lapwai to Leningrad: Archie Phinney and the Making of

Indigenous Marxism”

Steven Lee, University of California, Berkeley

“Beyond Interference: Soviet and Russian Lessons for American

Multiculturalism”

Leah Feldman, University of Chicago

“Embodied Philology: Translating Race in Theater from Tashkent to Chicago”

Discussants:

Sonali Thakkar, University of Chicago

Anna Elena Torres, University of Chicago

Coffee break 2:45 – 3:00 pm

PANEL 6: RACE AND “CANON”: REVISITING KEY TEXTS,

SCHOLARS AND ACADEMIC SCHOOLS

3:00 – 4:45 pm

Chair: William Nickell, University of Chicago

Valeria Sobol, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

““New People” as Others: Race and Empire in “What is to Be Done?””

Vera Tolz, The University of Manchester

“Re-negotiating Cultural Diversity: The Rise and Endurance of Nationality, National Religion and Race in Modern Russia and Its Empire”

Jonathan Daly, University Of Illinois at Chicago

“Richard Pipes, the Race Question, and the Accusation of Russophobia”

Discussants:

Faith Hillis, University of Chicago

Rama Mantena, University of Illinois at Chicago

PANEL 7: ROUNDTABLE WITH THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS OF THE WAYLAND RUDD COLLECTION

5:00 – 6:00 pm

Yevgeniy Fiks, Jonathan Flatley, Christina Kiaer

The African-American actor Wayland Rudd (1900-1952) worked in the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1952, appearing in numerous Soviet films and serving as a model for paintings and propaganda posters. Using Rudd’s story as a springboard, The Wayland Rudd Collection (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) combines over 200 Soviet images (paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, etc.) of Africans and African-Americans produced between 1920 and 1980 curated by the conceptual artist Fiks, alongside responses from contemporary artists, writers, and scholars.

Reception 6:00 pm