Hyphenated Histories: Articulations of Central European Bildung and Slavic Studies in the Contemporary Academy

226 Pages·2007·1.33 MB·English

by  Gow

Hyphenated Histories
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Hyphenated Histories
Articulations of Central European Bildung and
Slavic Studies in the Contemporary Academy
Edited By
Andrew Colin Gow
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress
Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material
used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher
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edgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.

ISBN 978 90 04 16256 3
Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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CONTENTS
Introduction ............................................................................... vii
Andrew Gow, University of Alberta
Part One
Current Institutional Realities:
Local, Global, Educational
Chapter One The Future of the Humanities and
Humanities-History in the Automatic University ................. 3
Andrew Gow, University of Alberta
Chapter Two Beyond Bildung: The “Disciplinarity and
Dissent” of Cultural Studies in the Global Managerial
Academy ................................................................................ 19
Markus Reisenleitner, Lingnan University ( Hong Kong )
Chapter Three Of Ruinous and Wasted Idylls:
The Modesty of a Once-and-Future Literary History ........ 43
Susan Ingram, York University
Part Two
Hyphenated Histories: Slavic Studies and
the Historical Mode
Chapter Four Of Crescents and Essence,
Or: Why Migrants’ History Matters to the Question of
‘Central European Colonialism’ ............................................ 61
Wladimir Fischer, University of Vienna
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vi contents
Chapter Five Robinson Crusoes, Prostitutes, Heroes?
Constructing the ‘Ukrainian Labour Emigrant’ in
Ukraine .................................................................................. 103
Natalia Khanenko Friesen, University of Saskatchewan
Chapter Six The Politics of Language and Popular Culture
in Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” .................. 121
Andriy Zayarnyuk, Monash University
Chapter Seven Inverted Perspective and Serbian Peasants:
Antiquities and the Byzantine Revival in Serbia .................. 141
Marko (cid:2)ivkovi(cid:3), University of Alberta
Chapter Eight Spectacles of Pain: Susan Sontag and Russian
World War II Photography ................................................... 167
Elena Siemens, University of Alberta
Chapter Nine Imagining a Soviet Nation: Cultural
Representations of the Ukrainian Past at the Twilight of
the Stalin Era ......................................................................... 185
Serhy Yekelchyk, University of Victoria
Index .......................................................................................... 209
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INTRODUCTION
The last decades of the 20th century saw major shifts in the academic
landscape. These shifts have had profound effects upon both the
organization of higher learning and the way scholars working in the
humanities understand their disciplines, their mission and their tasks.
Interdisciplinary forms of knowledge creation, the incorporation of the
issues and concerns of social movements into curricula and academic
debates, and, following the linguistic and cultural turns, the emergence
of “theory” as a common language across and between disciplines have
opened up humanities studies and research, once the keepers of tradi-
tional values, to contemporary social issues, public culture and political
engagement, given access to formerly excluded and disenfranchised
groups, and rede(cid:2) ned culture as a contested territory, rather than the
shared values of a community imagined as a nation. Spearheaded by
the (itself highly contested) intellectual practice of Cultural Studies, new
interdisciplinary studies and post-disciplinary formations have become
growth industries in the English-speaking academy and elsewhere, often
at the expense of the traditional philological and historical disciplines.
A theoretical vocabulary derived from poststructuralist philosophy and
semiotics has developed into a lingua franca of intellectual tools applied
throughout the globalised English-speaking academy. At the same time,
this (often insightful, but sometimes glib and super(cid:2) cial) emphasis
on theory has rendered many traditional, time-consuming forms of
humanities training, studies and research all but obsolete: (cid:2) eld work,
language training, archival research and comparative studies have been
forced into a retreating battle under the double jeopardy of account-
ability frenzies in corporate university restructurings (which render them
unaffordable) and paradigm changes (which seem to sublate them).
The goal we set for the “Hyphenated Histories” conference held
at the University of Alberta in May 2005,1 upon which all but one
of the papers collected here are based, was to explore and respond
to these paradigmatic shifts in humanities scholarship by trying to
locate key moments of interaction and connection between theory and
1 Organised by Andrew Gow, Srdja Pavlovi(cid:2) and Andriy Zayarnyuk.
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viii introduction
particular forms of practising history. While history as a hegemonic
academic discipline—one disciplined academically—might always have
been susceptible to the dangers of co-optation into the triumphalist
narratives of nations coming into their own (be it in the form of a
cultural history of the German Kulturnation, the British model of Whig
history or the American tradition of exceptionalism) and might thus
very ef(cid:2) ciently have prepared the grounds for its own demise (the end
of history in global capitalism), history understood as a guideline for
humanities practices has consistently resisted disciplining and totalizing
by shifting, extending and destabilizing its own terrain. Art history, liter-
ary history, (cid:2) lm history, social history, micro-history, economic history,
women’s history, postcolonial history, and other hyphenated histories
have introduced elements of discontinuity, rupture and plurality into
hegemonic historical narratives by initiating interdisciplinary encounters
that have not only rede(cid:2) ned and rewritten debates over the terrain of
the past, but have shared a common problematic with, and thus have
left indelible traces in, the global syntax of theory itself. Thus, rather
than ritualistically invoking the mutual need of history and theory, the
conference explored speci(cid:2) c instances of humanities research that dis-
locate the history/theory dichotomy, and recover history within theory
as a site of knowledge and as a practice of intellectual or institutional
resistance. We were willing to accept that our results might not sound
or look as grand as those of most conversations focused on ‘Grand
Theory’, but there is also method in (intellectual) modesty.
The location of the conference—Edmonton, Alberta—was not
accidental. While it is not immediately evident from the list, all the
contributors to this volume, who held academic positions from Lvyv
(Ukraine) to Hong Kong, either are or have at one point been closely
associated with the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, and
especially with what are now the Departments of History and Clas-
sics, of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and what was once
Comparative Literature either as faculty members, research fellows,
visiting scholars or graduate students. What is it about the institutional
setting of the University of Alberta that has allowed for the speci(cid:2) c
synergy that the contributions collected here demonstrate in resisting
the global trends in the academy referred to above? Like most cities,
Edmonton marks a crossroads of a distinctive kind. Sometimes called
“The Gateway to the North,” this river city has welcomed streams of
immigrants from far and near since its founding as a Hudson’s Bay
Company trading post in 1795 (it was named the new capital of the
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introduction ix
new province in 1905). The combination of Edmonton’s new status as
the seat of government and a vision of education as a ladder to success
helped to establish the university in 1908, and helped the university to
begin a tradition of strong programs in the humanities. Its Bachelor
of Arts in Comparative Literature degree, for example, is the oldest
undergraduate program of its kind in Canada.
“Redmonton” has long been a liberal blot on the federal and provin-
cial electoral maps of predominately conservative Alberta, which has
been governed by two very similar conservative-populist parties since
1935: (cid:2) rst by the Social Credit Party and since 1971, the Progressive
Conservatives. The presence of the University of Alberta as well as a
thriving cultural scene has in no small measure contributed to central
Edmonton’s political dissonance with both its surrounding rural hin-
terland and its oil-fuelled suburban sprawl. That Edmonton has been
understood as out-of-step with the rest of the province by successive
populist Conservative governments was particularly evident in the 1990s,
when the Humanities at the University of Alberta were the main targets
of a series of brutal funding cutbacks (in Canada’s federalist system,
education is, in the (cid:2) rst instance, among the provinces’ responsibili-
ties), which led to a dizzying series of departmental recon(cid:2) gurations.
The Vice-President Academic at the time is said to have mooted the
outright closure of Religious Studies and the (cid:2) ring of its distinguished
faculty, as it was supposedly an irrelevant discipline (this was, of course,
before September 11th, 2001). In less than a decade, both Comparative
Literature and Religious Studies experienced numerous departmental
recon(cid:2) gurations and were reduced from departments to programs.
History was to welcome faculty members (and some programs) from
Classics and Religious Studies due to the many disciplinary af(cid:2) nities
they share. While the siege mentality rapidly reversed itself into a
Siegermentalität (victors’ mentality) as the price of oil shot up with the
invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the provincial funding tap was suddenly
turned back on, the previous dislocations are not so easily dispelled or
forgotten. Particularly for scholars who understood their disciplines as
hyphenated, this oasis of prosperity seems to provide an appropriate
moment to re(cid:3) ect on these institutional vicissitudes and to understand
historically how and why those disciplines proved malleable enough
to withstand the neo-liberal onslaught. The University of Alberta’s
generous funding of the “Hyphenated Histories” conference, which we
gratefully acknowledge, might be taken as evidence of the changing
tides that the papers in this volume re(cid:3) ect.
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