NEW YUGOSLAV STUDIES AT MLA 2023

Thursday, Jan 5 – Sunday, Jan 8
All events held in Yerba Buena Salon 1, San Fransisco Marriott Marquis

Uneven and Combined Development in Slavic and East European Culture (MLA Working group)

The theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), in its various formulations from Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky through the more contemporary work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and the Warwick Research Collective, opens a perspective on culture that grasps the world in its totality and does so because of—not despite—the irregularities manifest in its historical development. Geographers and world-systems theorists have focused on the spatial dimension of UCD to map global social relations in terms of periphery, semi-periphery, and core. No less important, however, is the temporal conception of UCD: a philosophy of history that perceives the “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” (in Ernst Bloch’s terms) in the simultaneous coexistence of “archaic” and “modern” cultural forms. Our sessions return to the part of the world in which UCD was first articulated: East Europe, the most geographically immediate periphery of Europe’s imperial core. Our goal is to consider how UCD shapes the region’s cultural forms—-national traditions, genres, individual works—-and, conversely, how artistic production gives form to the phenomenon of UCD. Rather than searching for uniquely East European modern/ist phenomena, we identify how global modernity, as such, came into being in East Europe; the truth that “revealed itself” in the so-called “destiny of the backward countries”—to use Trotsky’s own expression—had nothing to do with “destiny” or “backwardness,” and was instead directed precisely against historical inevitability, cultural particularism, and the core leading the periphery.

Fri, Jan 6: Methodology (10:15am)

• Andrej Grubačić, “The Balkan Multiverse: Svetozar Markovic and the Plurality of Historical Times”
• Branislav Jakovljević, “The Spirit of Parochialism and Imperial Teleophilia”

Sat, Jan 7: Temporality (8:30am)

• Dominick Lawton, “Dialectics of Development and the Shklovsky-Trotsky Exchange” 
• Zach Hicks, “The Negation of the Negation: Art, Value and Belatedness in the work of the Chto Delat? Group”
• Tamara Vukov, “Semiperipheral Refractions and the Erasure of Labor in Serbia”

Sun, Jan 8: Visibility (10:15am)

• Katja Perat, “Powerlessness and Control: Translation Theory from the Semiperiphery”
• Kārlis Vērdiņš, “Weak State and Weak Modernism: Queering the Interwar Baltic Literature”
• Lilla Balint and Djordje Popović, “‘The most powerful magician in the non-aligned states’: The Political in Saša Stanišić’s Prose”