Americans experience Russia : encountering the enigma, 1917 to the present
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Bibliographic Information
Americans experience Russia : encountering the enigma, 1917 to the present
（Routledge studies in cultural history, 19）
Routledge, 2017, c2013
- : pbk
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Note
First published in hardback, 2013
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, experienced, and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic, economic, and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found, none has yet examined how Americans' encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet 'other' and its relationship with an American 'west.'
The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their 'Russian experience,' the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers' profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union's fall.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Choi Chatterjee, Beth Holmgren 1. Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor: American Scholars and Late Imperial Russia David C. Engerman Part I: Inside Stories: Utopia, Bohemia, Crucible 2. Hallie Flanagan and the Soviet Union: New Heaven, New Earth, New Theater Lynn Mally 3. Kennan Encounters Russia, 1933-37 Frank Costigliola 4. Constructing a Cold War Epic: Harrison Salisbury and the Siege of Leningrad Lisa A. Kirschenbaum Part II: Our Popular Russian Romance 5. The Russian Romance in American Popular Culture, 1890-1939 Choi Chatterjee 6. Russia on Their Mind: How Hollywood Pictured the Soviet Front Beth Holmgren Part III: Conspicuous Consumers: Ambassadors and Donors 7. Another Mission to Moscow: Ida Rosenthal and Consumer Dreams Emily S. Rosenberg 8. The Moscow Correspondents, Soviet Human Rights Activists, and the Problem of the Western Gift Barbara Walker Part IV: Americans in the Russian Mirror 9. Interviewing Village Mothers--With Help from My Friends David L. Ransel 10. Fear, Affluence, and the Great Plutonium Extravaganza Kate Brown Part V: Living Across Cultures 11. An Interview with Marina Goldovskaya, a "Russian-American" Filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya with Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren 12. The Search for What Might be True: Thoughts from Inside an Era of Change John Freedman Notes Notes on Contributors Index
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