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Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies ARTES

Transnational Cultures and Sociality amidst Conflict

This group has as its focus transnational cultural flows amidst conflict, with the Soviet Union and now Russia as pivot. A burgeoning field within popular geopolitics studies, this group invites members who consider interpersonal and transcultural ties, movements and practices as an important site for the performance of geopolitical identities and affinities. The 20th century was a period of practices of solidarity and alliances, and not only animosities and conflict, particularly when taking into account the East bloc’s relations with the Global South. Literature, music, cinema, the performance of ideological solidarities and the cultivation of friendships fall under this rubric of transnational cultural flows and socialities. Contemporary practices of sociality, engendered by media and migration, are also a focus of research.

Transnational flows of culture, ideas and objects between the Soviet Union and the Global South during the Cold War have been an enduring focus within Rajagopalan’s historical research. Her work in the past has engaged with the popularity of Indian cinema among Soviet audiences in the Cold War years, using movie reception as a prism to understand how the Soviet state responded to popular taste and how audiences’ preferences found public expression in a deideologised space. At a meta level, this ethnohistorical study of Soviet movie reception was also a pioneering work on Soviet internationalism in the Global South and cultural flows between the USSR and India.  In a recent project, she has also researched Soviet material culture in Cuba and India, using oral history methods to excavate the meaning of old Soviet objects, and through this - the memory of the Cold War as lived experience. This work will be published in Routledge’s new Cultures of the Global Cold Wars series.

Currently, Rajagopalan is starting a new project that will continue this engagement with culture and geosociality. Her new work will look at cultural imaginings of peace, using social media sites and employing an ethnographic approach to understand how the everyday ‘quiet politics’ of inter-personal interactions mitigates the tensions of geopolitical conflict. The former Soviet space will be one component in this new project’s transnational focus. The project is at this moment in a stage of conceptualisation and will be worked out in the following months.

Research internship

Isabel Ekua-Thompson and Lucia Holcáková, Masters students in East European Studies, are pursuing a research internship under the aegis of this group. Their research project has as its theme, food, diaspora and multiculturalism as lived experience in Amsterdam. Based on active fieldwork in the city, their project dovetails neatly with the larger theme of transnational cultures and sociality that underpins Rajagopalan’s research.

Events

  • In June 2022, we held an international workshop on Spaces of Transnational Solidarities during the Cold War, funded by the ACES. Co-organisers were Tal Zalmanovich (University of Haifa) and Dina Fainberg (City University, London).
  • In January 2023, we will hold an event on ‘Soviet-Global South Solidarity’, at which Dr. Damaris Puñales-Alpizar (CWRU, USA) will speak on the geopolitics of translation, looking at Soviet literature in Cuba.