Ksenia Robbe
Research project
Political transitions of the late 1980-early 1990s were among the most important global events of the 20th century, ending the Cold War and inaugurating the current stage of globalisation. In a similar way to other crucial historical conjunctures, remembrance of the transitions is highly contested at national, regional and global levels. While more distant periods are often widely commemorated, debate about transitions in public and academic discourse remains limited. However, signs of multivocal and critical remembrance are appearing in a range of media – from novels to political protests, films to heritage debates, theatre performances to online activism - countering official appropriations of memory.
This project will focus on two very different yet entangled contexts of transition, post-Soviet Russian and post-apartheid South African. Apart from the more familiar differences, this comparison will seek to elicit some of the knots and overlaps between the workings of varied authoritarian practices, complicity and resistance. Interested particularly in present-day predicaments of transformation and dissent, the project will concentrate on the politics of remembering everyday resistance and practices of acting and imagining across cultural boundaries during the 1980-early 1990s.
Considering the emergence and circulation of these memories within global memoryscapes is crucial for tracing the genealogy and functioning of national and local remembrance of transitional periods. Yet, public and academic discussions of the transitions largely remain compartmentalised, reflecting old Cold War dichotomies and Eurocentric biases. Responding to the need of developing a much more nuanced framework for considering post-1989 developments and their recollection globally, this project comparatively investigates repertoires of alternative memory of transition, while also comparing official discourses.
The study analyses a range of creative and critical practices in contemporary literature, film, theatre, visual art and curatorial projects in Russia and South Africa. By identifying and comparing memory modes and practices, the project will explore the agency of creative producers and their impact on public discourse about transitions in national and global contexts.
Biography
Ksenia Robbe is an Assistant Professor (UD) at the Centre for the Arts in Society, University of Leiden. She holds a PhD in English and American Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Giessen.
Ksenia Robbe works in the fields of African, Russian and Comparative literature. Her current research focuses on practices of memory in post-soviet and post-apartheid literature, theatre, film and art. She is approaching contemporary expressions of disillusionment, dissatisfaction and resentment in these post-repressive societies through the lens of nostalgia as a practice of resisting narratives of transition. This research considers the potentials and drawbacks of memory practices to reinvigorate transnational linkages against the backdrop of persisting Cold-War imaginaries and reinforced social inequalities.
Selected publications
Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies, with O. Boele & B. Noordenbos (eds), Routledge, London, 2019. [forthcoming]
'Confronting Disillusionment: On the Rediscovery of Socialist Archives in Recent South African Cultural Production', Safundi, 2018, pp. 398-415.
''Anything is Possible': Rethinking the Politics of Transition through a Poetics of Failure in the Works of William Kentridge and Dmitry Gutov', Third Text, 2017, pp. 403-419.
'Shaping 'Common Places': Post-Soviet Narratives beyond Anti-Utopia in Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory and Igor Saveljev’s Tereshkova is Flying to Mars', in E. Peeren, H. Stuit & A. van Weyenberg (eds), Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Space, Mobility, Aesthetics, vol. 31, Brill-Rodopi, Leiden-Boston, 2016, pp. 222-240.
Conversations of Motherhood: South African Women's Writing Across Traditions, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2015.
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