Searching for the "Red Orient": Central Asia, Photography, and the Idea of a Soviet Orientalism

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Lovisa Andén, Associate Professor at the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø,
and Researcher at Åbo Akademi

Speaker: Lovisa Andén, Associate Professor at the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, and Researcher at Åbo Akademi

Discussant: Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies, CBEES, Södertörn University

Abstract: How are we to understand the historiographical role of belated testimonies of Soviet deportation? Those testimonies bear witness to two forms of repression: (1) the forced deportations as a form of Soviet repression, and (2) the silencing of the stories about the deportations. In historiographical discussions, undertaken by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Nora, history is defined by its relation to memory. Furthermore, Nora describes a true memory, one that opposes both our historical uses of the past and our deliberate acts of memory. Our true memory inhabits our unspoken traditions, it is “who we are” in a way that is both manifest and not consciously displayed. In this paper drawing on Nora’s notion of true memory, I argue that it presupposes a transgenerational legacy which, as such, is interrupted by the silencing of Gulag memories. We need, instead, other categories to understand the historiographical role of belated Gulag testimonies. Drawing on Jan Patočka’s phenomenology of afterlife, the paper proposes a new understanding of the reciprocity of historiographical processes, and of the existential dimensions of transgenerational memories.

Lovisa Andén, is senior lecturer (førstelektor) at the University in Tromsø- The Arctic University of Norway. Since 2022, she is also researcher in philosophy at Åbo Akademi University. In the research project, Muted Memories and Silenced Stories: Memoirs by Women of the Gulag Archipelago, she explores questions of historicity, truth and experience in testimonies from the Gulag Archipelago, using a phenomenological framework.