Deadline: August 15, 2021
Soliciting papers for the panel stream on Uneven and Combined Development for the upcoming AATSEEL conference. Deadline for abstracts is August 15th (please indicate interest in joining our stream when you submit here.)
Here is the description for the stream: The theory of Uneven and Combined Development(UCD) was famously formulated by Lev Trotsky to explain the Russian Revolutions of 1917. More broadly, UCD has reemerged in recent years as both a theoretical problem and a scholarly methodology in fields such as history and international relations. This stream is interested in UCD as a concept in cultural analysis. If, as some have argued, Pyotr Chaadaev’s diagnosis of Russia’s unique position with respect to world culture anticipates the idea of UCD, then how can UCD help locate the particularity of Slavic and East European cultures through their historical development, rather than a timeless essence? How does UCD give shape to specific cultural (artistic, literary, cinematic, etc.) forms, whether of specific works or genres and national traditions? In turn, how might cultural production give form to the experience of UCD? How might UCD allow fora reframing of familiar tropes like cultural “belatedness”? What kinds of “unevenness” or multiple zones can be observed within our region’s engagement with the rest of the world (for example, the non-aligned movement during the Cold War alongside Soviet involvement in anti-colonial movements)? How does UCD shed light on dynamics of translation and reception of imported cultural forms? We invite abstracts dealing with any period and area of REEES considered through the lens of UCD. We are also open to related fields of inquiry such as Ernst Bloch’s “non-synchronicity”, World-Systems Theory, and Dependency Theory.