Leah Feldman

Bio

Leah Feldman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Theater and Performance Studies at University of Chicago working on empire, nationalism, and critical approaches to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. She is the author of On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018), the coauthor with artist collective Slavs and Tatars of Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anticolonial ABCs (König 2024), and is currently coediting an anthology of anticolonial thought and working on a monograph, Feeling Collapse, which explores how performance art, film, and theatre in the Caucasus and Central Asia shaped alternative politics and publics amidst Soviet collapse.

Contributions

Goatibexization: A Modernist Satire of Collectivization

Peer Reviewed

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It is a historic irony that the Bolsheviks, who had demolished the decrepit empire, were the only force able to reconstruct it. In order to survive, the empire needed a new sign by which to justify the new energy of its unificatory yoke. [1] The contemporary return to authoritarian politics and neo-imperial conquest in the twenty years since Soviet collapse has generated an urgent call to attend to what Abkhazian novelist Fazil Iskander described as the “new sign” of the Soviet Union’s...

Tags:

satire soviet union