Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders

by Kevin M. F. Platt

Overview

Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe: Russian speakers living in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe as well as a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and an illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how members of this population have defined themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music—and how others have sought to define them.

At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies globally could agree on the meaning of past history and a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the contradictions pertaining to terms like empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve a consensus. In refocusing the examination of state socialism's aftermath around questions of empire and postcolonialism, Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501773716
Publisher:	Northern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2024
Series:	NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	342
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on history and memory in Russia and Eastern Europe, global Russophone and global socialist culture, and contemporary Russian-language

Table of Contents

1. Border Conditions
2. Empire and the Gift of Culture
3. Hegemonies with(out) Dominance
4. Nostalgia, Retro, and Trauma
5. Performative Translation and Lyric Cosmopolitanism
Afterword: Borderlines

What People are Saying About This

Ronald Grigor Suny

This is a unique, original, and brilliant study of Russian Latvians. The study is theoretically sophisticated, sensitive to the nuances of its subjects' lives, and takes what could be a narrow study of half a million people to illuminate broader issues of postcolonialism and post-socialism.

Catriona Kelly

Kevin Platt's book is a pioneering in-depth examination of a politically and culturally important group and its context in broader post-Soviet geopolitics. Above all, it suggests the creative energy and flexible thinking of groups whose stance is radically opposed to the "Russian World" evoked in empire-building propaganda.