Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Slavic Colloquium: “Little Colonizers and Parallel Histories: seeing Alaska Through Russian Lenses”

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Slavic Colloquium presents

José Vergara, Bryn Mawr: 

“Little Colonizers and Parallel Histories: seeing Alaska Through Russian Lenses.”

Where does Alaska lie on the map of Russian art, and where does it overlap with the political geographies of the Russian and Soviet empires? Taking as its points of departure three disparate texts—songs from the colonial period, a hybrid poetry-photography project by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and a statue of merchant-governor Alexander Baranov donated to the city of Sitka in 1989—this presentation considers how Alaska fits into the Russian cultural imagination and examines the echoes of colonialism that persist in the former “Russian America.”