Overview
Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, experienced, and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic, economic, and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found, none has yet examined how Americans’ encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet ‘other’ and its relationship with an American ‘west.’ The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their ‘Russian experience,’ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers’ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union’s fall.
Full Product Details
Author: Choi Chatterjee (California State University, Los Angeles, USA) ,
Beth Holmgren (Duke University, USA)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.610kg
ISBN: 9780415893411
ISBN 10: 0415893410
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 28 November 2012
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Thought-provoking... This book constitutes required reading for anyone interested in Soviet-American interactions during the twentieth century, and in the complex interactions between emotional response and intellectual interpretation. - Gleb Tsipursky, Europe-Asia Studies
Author Information
Choi Chatterjee is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. She is the author of Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (2002), and co-author of the volume, The Twentieth Century: A Retrospective (2002). She is currently working on a history of American Communist women and their formative experiences in the Soviet Union. Beth Holmgren is Professor and Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University. She has recently published a cultural biography of the great nineteenth-century Polish/American actress, Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America (2012). She is currently working on a history of the interwar literary cabaret in Poland.
