Kalendarium
Högre seminarium16 feb 2016 kl. 15:15 – 17:00
Lokal: Centrum för Rysslandsstudier, Gamla Torget 3
Margaret Litvin (Boston University)
Arabs and Other Foreigners in Moscow Dorms: Echoes in Literature and International Relations
“They sent a rocket to the moon, but they can’t or won’t produce a decent shaving razor,” says the exasperated protagonist of Ice, Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s 2011 novel, which takes place in a 1970s student obshezhytie in Moscow. Like Ibrahim (who studied film), hundreds of Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, and other Arab intellectuals received scholarships to Soviet institutes or universities between 1965 and 1990. (So did many other Muslim internationals, both from the USSR's majority-Muslim republics and from satellite states such as Albania.) Their memoirs, travelogues, and fictional accounts record a pattern of illusion and disillusionment: the USSR first appears as a worthy alternative to the West, then serves up a series of social, literary, sexual and ideological disappointments. Yet although these study-abroad encounters largely failed to cement an image of Soviet superiority, they did succeed in fostering international solidarities. Obshiaga life put Arabs in close contact with other students: from their own and other Arab countries, other Afro-Asian countries, Russia, other Soviet republics, and Eastern Europe. Some unique friendships (and enmities) resulted. Following the literary traces of several Arab writers’ dorm experiences, this paper will propose the student dormitory as a microcosm revealing the contingencies and ironies of the USSR’s tiered cultural policy toward the “domestic abroad,” Eastern Europe, and the Afro-Asian world. Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University and the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011). In 2015-2016 she is an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala and a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.