‘Petro-Trauma’ and ‘Constructing “Official” Memory in Russia’

Description

Anindita Banerjee (Cornell University, NY)
Petro-Trauma: Coloniality, Globality, and the Dystopia of Russian Oil
and
Ivan Kurilla (Volgograd State University, Russia)
Constructing “Official” Memory in Russia 
 

Anindita Banerjee. While the politics of energy dominates the public discourse of our time, little attention has been directed towards its relationship with cultural production and consumption. The presentation addresses this issue in a context whose national and global significance at the moment is wholly defined by oil. In teasing out an aesthetic of the Russian oil encounter, I aim to explore two larger questions: how technologies and networks of energy generate new economies of culture, and how cultural forms negotiate the dual connotation of material and symbolic power that animates the discourse of oil. These questions are particularly provocative in the case of petroleum because of the completely deterritorialized nature of its production and consumption – which, in turn, makes it impossible to situate the aesthetic of oil within conventional paradigms of spatial history and national identity. How, then, might one represent and theorize a uniquely Russian “petroscape”?

Open all. No registration required.

For more information about the programme and group, please visit the link on the right hand side of this page.