“The Antipopulist Turn of the Late- and Post-Socialist Intelligentsia”
The nineteenth-century Russian and Eastern European intelligentsias emerged as a social estate famously defined by its relationship with the oppressed “people,” whom it represented before the oppressive state. The twenty-first century finds this estate in a distinctly antipopulist mood and heavily engaged in Bourdieusian strategies of distinction with respect to “the dark masses.” This talk will seek to explain the transformation by juxtaposing representations of “the people” in literature, film, and other cultural forms with a selective history of the intelligentsia under state socialism and post-1990 neoliberal capitalism.
Date: Thursday, 17 April 2014, at 16.45 in G-160.
Presenter: Rossen Djagalov is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University. He received his PhD from the Comparative Literature department at Yale University in 2011 on the basis of a dissertation entitled The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism and was a lecturer at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania before assuming his present position.