Academic articles by Ksenia Robbe
Continuum, 2024
The media discourse on Russia’s war in Ukraine heavily focuses on geopolitical and military expla... more The media discourse on Russia’s war in Ukraine heavily focuses on geopolitical and military explanations of this conflict, with Ukraine often serving as a metaphor for preserving European values. However, a discussion of what these values mean and how ‘Europeanness’ is experienced from the perspectives of everyday life on the war-torn territories is rare. This article addresses these questions through a reading of the Wartime Diary which Yevgenia Belorusets, a Ukrainian photographer and writer, started keeping on 24 February 2022. We focus on the private/public form of this diary which, while staging the author’s intimate dialogue with herself, was published in ‘foreign’ languages (German and English), and incorporates both personal and other people’s testimonies. Drawing on the diary and its remediations as installations, we suggest that these works create a ‘chronotope of immediacy’ by mediating the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. As such, they do not only enable readers/viewers from outside of Ukraine to follow the daily rhythms of life during war but also implicate each individual (and particularly each European, given the place of the publications and exhibitions) into the events. Thus producing ‘implicated publics’, these works can help to rethink ‘Europeanness’ in the context of the war.
Remembering Transitions, 2023
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Ksenia Robbe, 2023
This volume probes the ambiguous meanings of the 1970-1990s political 'transitions' across postso... more This volume probes the ambiguous meanings of the 1970-1990s political 'transitions' across postsocialist, postapartheid, and postdictatorship contexts. I begin the introduction to this collection by discussing two poemsone by South African poet Tumelo Khoza and the other by Russian/Ukrainian poet Galina Rymbu. Although they may seem an unlikely pair, these poems represent the entangled desires to forget, to recover, and to question the solidified or ignored meanings of the historical turning point of transition and the evolution of these meanings over time.
Regions of Memory: Transnational Formations, 2022
The histories of Southern African postcolonies which experienced decolonization and political tra... more The histories of Southern African postcolonies which experienced decolonization and political transition during the 1980s and early 1990s are deeply entangled, creating the potential for transnational regional remembrance. However, memories of these periods that celebrate liberation
(Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique, 2021
Memory is key to understanding the temporal-spatial coordinates of producing 'crisis' and acting ... more Memory is key to understanding the temporal-spatial coordinates of producing 'crisis' and acting in it. By reshaping infrastructures of past, present, and future, and interlinking places and spaces of crisis, memory often appears to be instrumental for proclaiming, experiencing, and responding to states of emergency. This chapter scrutinizes the varied workings of memory in/of crises by examining mnemonic chronotopes and exploring their potential as conceptual figures. Thinking about crises through chronotopes of memory, that is, temporal-spatial frameworks of recall involved in imagining and narrating, can reveal the mechanisms behind cycles of oppression (spaces marked as sites of perpetual crises; times of dispossession conceived as eternal) as well as ways of breaking these cycles, creating openings within them. Drawing on various situated cases, the chapter reflects on the local and global dimensions of contemporary crises-of responses to migrants from the Middle East in the Greek borderlands and their ramifications within European politics; of post-truth politics in Russia in times of the war in Ukraine; of deepening structural inequalities and protest in South Africa; and of the ways in which post-transitional dystopian imaginations in the Global South and Eastern Europe are produced as well as countered through memory practices. Keywords: Memory chronotope-Memory route-Time loop-Porous time-Crisis of utopia/dystopia-Looking sideways
European Journal of Life Writing, 2021
Remembering late socialism through child perspectives in (auto)fictional writing has been a promi... more Remembering late socialism through child perspectives in (auto)fictional writing has been a prominent practice in contemporary Russian literature. In particular, the early 1980s focalized by young protagonists have become the subject of three recent novels, by Alexei Ivanov, Shamil' Idiatullin and Alexander Arkhangelsky. This article closely examines one of these novels, Alexei Ivanov's Pischeblok [The Food Unit] published in 2016, asking how it articulates the generation that was coming of age during the 1980s and considering the ethical implications of this articulation.
Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis , 2021
The chapter enquires into the aethstics of resilience developed by the younger generation of cont... more The chapter enquires into the aethstics of resilience developed by the younger generation of contemporary Russian artists and particularly its recall of the survival techniques that were used by artists during the 1970s and 1980s. It explores transformations of the late Soviet practices of outsideness and examines the conspicuous presence of trickster and zombie metaphors in contemporary activist art, considering them as intersecting tropes of imagining and invoking resilience. As examples, the chapter juxtaposes the artistic recalling of two moments of radical upheaval that frame the Soviet period, the October revolution (in the "Palace Square. 100 Years After" video of the Chto Delat collective) and the perestroika (in Kirill Savchenkov's installation "The Horizon Community Memorial Centre" at the Garage Museum), and identifies similarities between their imaginations of resistance against (post-)Soviet and globalized forms of biopolitical control. This reading shows that while traversing different paths-of performing critical accommodation and radical rebellion-the trickster and zombie tropes in these artworks coincide in their search for 'the common' or the intersubjectively shared and in their elaboration of collectivities. Keywords: Russian activist art, zombie metaphor, tricksterism, Chto Delat, Kirill Savchenkov This chapter enquires into the complex conditions in which critically thinking artists find themselves in contemporary Russia, and the ways in which they carve out spaces for activist aesthetics, within their local situation as well as the global environment of uncertainty-the regime of what is nowadays called 'post-truth.' The strategies and tactics employed by the younger generation 1 of Russian artists seeking to maintain artistic freedom and dignity in the context of pervasive nationalism, state-supported neo-traditionalism and aggressive market economy recall some of the survival techniques that were used by artists who lived and worked during the late Soviet period. This recall, however, involves creative rethinking since the situation of increasing state control
Laboratorium, 2020
Бойм, Светлана. Будущее ностальгии. М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2019. 680 с. ISBN 978-5-444... more Бойм, Светлана. Будущее ностальгии. М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2019. 680 с. ISBN 978-5-4448-1130-6. Ксения Роббе, Университет Гронингена (Нидерланды). Адрес для переписки: Faculty of Arts, Chair of European Literature and Culture, Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Groningen, The Netherlands. [email protected].
Forays into Contemporary South African Theatre Devising New Stage Idioms, 2019
Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire's Legacies, 2019
Despite the growing currency of migrant experiences among African women and the prominence of mot... more Despite the growing currency of migrant experiences among African women and the prominence of motherhood in reflections on African womanhood, literature and the performing arts have rarely addressed the challenges of mothering and migration together. Engaging with responses to these challenges in South African theatre, this article discusses representations of motherhood and mother-daughter relations in Yaёl Farber's A Woman in Waiting and Magnet Theatre's Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking. It examines how these plays relate experiences of work and forced migration and how they create nuanced portrayals of motherhood-in-migration by staging dialogues between the mothers' and daughters' experiences and subjectivities, which mediate both intimacy and conflict. By tracing these dialogues within the context of plotlines and performative techniques, this article identifies the ways in which the plays convey the sociality of gendered suffering, foregrounding its particularity as well as structural features.
African studies in South Africa is currently at a crossroadsof making choices in the process of e... more African studies in South Africa is currently at a crossroadsof making choices in the process of establishing itself institutionally and reconstituting itself as a discursive and epistemological field, including an interrogation of its histories and a decolonisation of its scholarly legacies. But being at a crossroads does not imply being at a loss; on the contrary, for African studies it means realising its potential of being a hub of critical thinking and a catalyst in the transformation of the humanities and the social sciences in the country and, possibly, internationally. Proceeding from this assumption, I will ask: what are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of African studies in South Africa as a space of transdisciplinary debate, one that is driven by a commitment to socially relevant issues and within which critical standpoints to be voiced by public intellectuals can crystallise? Some approaches critical for the development of such a field are present in South African scholarship, butas it often happens in hierarchical academic structuresthey are scattered across different disciplines or areas of expertise. Further, one of the main problems of African studies scholarship internationallylying at the core of power inequalities of scholarship in Africa and the Westis the artificial split between "theory" and "(empirical) material" and the question of who is expected to produce what. This article starts with a discussion of the recent debates provoked by a restructuring of African studies and related disciplines at the University of Cape Town. To understand the resonance of these debates, beyond the context of one university and country, they will be placed, firstly, in the international context of African studies and, secondly, in the national context of debating the function and place of the humanities and the social sciences in South Africa. Both contexts highlight the importance of producing critical theory (instead of applying theory produced in the West). Hence, the following three subsections of this article will examine works by South African scholars that, produced within various disciplines (history, sociology and cultural studies), interrelate the insights of these disciplines and, in so doing, initiate new theoretical approaches. Using its crossroads position, African studies in South Africa can become a "laboratory" in which new critical approaches can be interrelated and debated. Opened up to dialogue with African studies in Africa and worldwide, it can become a theoretically invigorating space, nationally and internationally.
Books by Ksenia Robbe
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Academic articles by Ksenia Robbe
Books by Ksenia Robbe
Keynote speakers: Rebecca Bryant, Nick Nesbitt, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Oxana Timofeeva
Plenary talks on the first day: open to the public!
Robbe K and Zavadski A (2024/2023) ‘C’mon, turn Swan Lake on’: Memories of the 1990s at the Belarusian protests of 2020. Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 22: 115–141. https://digitalicons.org/issue22/cmon-turn-swan-lake-on-memories-of-the-1990s-at-the-belarusian-protests-of-2020/
A Special Issue of the Journal Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice