Hybridity's Failures: Lessons From the Soviet Empire

Abstract

Responding to Choi Chatterjee's "Manifesto," Leah Feldman contemplates influences that have formed her own ideas about transnationality and hybridity: as a graduate student, she believed in the resilient figure of the public intellectual; the Soviet eastern White Sun of the Desert, which she watched multiple times – once through the lens of Edward Said's Orientalism, another time as a trained comparative literature scholar, and yet another time as a curious observer of post-Soviet life in Moscow. Feldman's study of revolution through Russian and Azeri literary encounters in the Caucasus prompted her to reflect on the limitations of postcolonial approaches to account for Soviet and post-Soviet ideological visions. She concludes that Soviet internationalism in the "Third World" as well as Soviet internal orientalism framed the geopolitics of orientalism, only without Said's robust critique, which is so lacking in post-Soviet Russia. As a comparative literary scholar, Feldman traces Soviet and post-Soviet transnational and hybrid discourses (such as Eurasianism) across linguistic, ethnographic, and literary genres, Turkic and Russian languages, as well as diachronically, from the Revolution to the present. The final part of the essay describes the author's impressions based on travels between post-Soviet Central Asia, Chicago's South Side, and the University of Chicago's white ghetto-like campus. She reflects on the history of the Ilhom theater in Soviet and post-Soviet Tashkent and its joint performance with African American musicians in the United States.