The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia

The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia PDF Author: Alexandar Mihailovic
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299314901
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Explores the work of a playful, emphatically countercultural collective whose satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance in post-Soviet Russia has influenced other protest artists, such as Pussy Riot.

The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia

The Mitki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia PDF Author: Alexandar Mihailovic
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299314901
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Explores the work of a playful, emphatically countercultural collective whose satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance in post-Soviet Russia has influenced other protest artists, such as Pussy Riot.

Russian Style

Russian Style PDF Author: Julie A. Cassiday
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299346706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In the two decades after the turn of the millennium, Vladimir Putin's control over Russian politics and society grew at a steady pace. As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender, Putin's Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie A. Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin's leadership. However, while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. This smart and lively study provides critical, nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Putin's first two decades in power.

Queering Russian Media and Culture

Queering Russian Media and Culture PDF Author: Galina Miazhevich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000539164
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book explores how queerness and representations of queerness in media and culture are responding to the shifting socio-political, cultural and legal conditions in post-Soviet Russia, especially in the light of the so-called ‘antigay’ law of 2013. Based on extensive original research, the book outlines developments historically both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union and provides the background to the 2013 law. It discusses the proliferating alternative visions of gender and sexuality, which are increasingly prevalent in contemporary Russia. The book considers how these are represented in film, personal diaries, photography, theatre, protest art, fashion and creative industries, web series, news media and how they relate to the ‘traditional values’ rhetoric. Overall, the book provides a rich and detailed, yet complex insight into the developing nature of queerness in contemporary Russia.

Russia Upside Down

Russia Upside Down PDF Author: Joseph Weisberg
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A former CIA officer and the creator of the hit TV series The Americans makes the case that America's policy towards Russia is failing--and we'll never fix it until we rethink our relationship. Coming of age in America in the 1970s and 80s, Joe Weisberg was a Cold Warrior. After briefly studying Russian in Leningrad, he joined the CIA in 1990--just in time to watch the Soviet Union collapse. But less than a decade after the first Cold War ended, a new one broke out. Russia changed in many of the ways that America hoped it might--more capitalist, more religious, more open to Western ideas. But US sanctions have crippled Russia's economy; and Russia's interventions have exacerbated political problems in America. The old paradigm--America, the free capitalist good guys, fighting Russia, the repressive communist bad guys--simply doesn't apply anymore. But we've continued to act as if it does. In this bold and controversial book, Joe Weisberg interrogates these assumptions, asking hard questions about American policy and attempting to understand what Russia truly wants. Russia Upside Down makes the case against the new Cold War. It suggests that we are fighting an enemy with whom we have few if any serious conflicts of interest. It argues that we are fighting with ineffective and dangerous tools. And most of all, it aims to demonstrate that our approach is not working. With our own political system in peril and continually buffeted by Russian attacks, we need a new framework, urgently. Russia Upside Down shows the stakes and begins to lay out that new plan, at a time when it is badly needed.

Russian Performances

Russian Performances PDF Author: Julie Buckler
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299318303
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin. These twenty-seven essays encompass a diverse range of topics, from dance and classical music to live poetry and from viral video to public jubilees and political protest. As a whole they comprise an integrated, compelling intervention in Russian studies. Challenging the primacy of the written word in this field, the volume fosters a larger intellectual community informed by theories and practices of performance from anthropology, art history, dance studies, film studies, cultural and social history, literary studies, musicology, political science, theater studies, and sociology.

It Will Be Fun and Terrifying

It Will Be Fun and Terrifying PDF Author: Fabrizio Fenghi
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299324400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition. To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a “counter-intelligensia.” This volume shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture PDF Author: Mark Lipovetsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197508219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1081

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. In forty-four chapters, an international group of leading scholars introduce readers to a web of subcultures within the underground, highlight the culture achievements of the Soviet underground from the 1930s through the 1980s, emphasize the multimediality of this cultural phenomenon, and situate the study of underground literary texts and artworks into their broader theoretical, ideological, and political contexts.

Word Play

Word Play PDF Author: Ainsley Morse
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Word Play traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‐garde trends. In the more repressive environment following Stalin’s rise to power, experimental aesthetics were largely relegated to unofficial and underground literature, but unofficial writers continued to author children’s books, which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time. Word Play focuses on poetry as the primary genre for both children’s and unofficial literature throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature poets‐cum‐children’s writers—Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Grigoriev, Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Dmitri Prigov—whose unpublished work was not written for children but features lexical and formal elements, abundant humor, and childlike lyric speakers that are aspects of the childlike aesthetic. The book concludes with an exploration of the legacy of this aesthetic in Russian poetry today. Drawing on rich primary sources, Word Play joins a growing literature on Russian children’s books, connecting them to avant-garde poetics in fresh, surprising ways.

The DJ Who “Brought Down” the USSR

The DJ Who “Brought Down” the USSR PDF Author: Michelle Daniel
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644696495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Of the many Cold War radio DJs who broadcast to the USSR, Seva Novgorodsev must be near the top of the list. A masterful BBC presenter, Seva was considered a sage of rock ‘n’ roll. His programs introduced forbidden western popular music and culture into the USSR, rendering him an “enemy voice” and ideological saboteur to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Despite KGB threats and constant media pillorying, Seva remained on the air for 38 years, acquiring millions of listeners all across the breadth of the USSR and beyond. He became a cult phenomenon, dismantling the Soviet way of life in the hearts and minds of youth. This is the story of Russia’s first and best-known DJ.

Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia

Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia PDF Author: Birgit Beumers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317352637
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Alongside the Arab Spring, the 'Occupy' anti-capitalist movements in the West, and the events on the Maidan in Kiev, Russia has had its own protest movements, notably the political protests of 2011–12. As elsewhere in the world, these protests had unlikely origins, in Russia’s case spearheaded by the 'creative class'. This book examines the protest movements in Russia. It discusses the artistic traditions from which the movements arose; explores the media, including the internet, film, novels, and fashion, through which the protesters have expressed themselves; and considers the outcome of the movements, including the new forms of nationalism, intellectualism, and feminism put forward. Overall, the book shows how the Russian protest movements have suggested new directions for Russian – and global – politics.