Deadline: November 7, 2022
Organizers: Edyta Bojanowska and Claire Roosien, Yale University
Conference at Yale University, May 1-2, 2023 (New Haven, Connecticut)
The familiar icon of Russian imperial expansion is the violent nineteenth-century conquest of the exotic mountainous region of the Caucasus. The imperial pen – of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and others – has eagerly followed the imperial bayonet to the Caucasus. Yet the imperial plow was no less a tool of conquest than the pen or the bayonet. This conference aims to shift scholarly attention away from the high drama of military conquest to the understudied processes of settler colonization and to their cultural echoes in the Russian and Soviet empires. More than anything else, it is the activities of the Russian and Soviet agricultural settler that ultimately bound various non-Russian peripheral regions to the social and cultural imaginaries of “Russia” and established enduring forms of imperial control. The idea of settler colonization came to be viewed as Russia’s manifest destiny: its mission to settle “empty” spaces, binding them to the Russian core in the process. The Slavic settler became the key Kulturträger of Russia’s civilizing mission, especially in the east and south.
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