We are a working group on the literature and arts of the socialist world. The group considers the art and literature produced in the multinational USSR and the PRC, in Soviet satellite states and other communist and socialist countries, and by writers, artists, and institutions affiliated with the international communist movement in one or another of its variants. Our group is made up of scholars whose collective range of expertise allows us think about   world art and literature as a richly diverse object of study, and it operates in the context of a crop of recent monographs, edited volumes, and symposia that have solidified conversations in Slavic, East Asian, and Global South studies that stake a claim for the role of international communism in creating the institutions of world literature and art as we know them today. It is to these institutions and the actors behind them that we want to turn our attention, but also to the literary and artistic production that occurred in their ambit.

For the foreseeable future, the group meets online three times per semester. Participation is by invitation. However, it is our intention, in due course, to convert our group into an institute, to be housed at one of our home universities, which will hold symposia and talk series, organize group publications, and provide a directory of interested scholars.

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“Chernobyl and its Witnesses: The End of the World and the Socialist Anthropocene ‘”

FRIDAY, May 8, 12:30pm-2pm EST on Zoom

Co-conveners: Nergis Ertürk, Amelia Glaser, and Kevin Platt

This session explores visual, philosophical, and literary responses to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, with particular attention to the problem of “ends.” We will begin with two presentations: Amelia Glaser on Natalia Beltchenko’s Chernobyl poems, followed by Nergis Ertürk on the Turkish communist émigré artist Abidin Dino’s paintings of Chernobyl and his related writings on the end of communism. Sven Spieker will serve as respondent.

In the second half, participants will discuss the readings by Michael Marder, Adriana Petryna, and Maja and Reuben Fowkes. Questions to be discussed may include: when and where does the Chernobyl nuclear disaster begin and end, and how should its spatiotemporal boundaries be understood? Who counts as Chernobyl’s human and more-than-human witnesses, and what ethical reorientation follows when witnessing is extended to irradiated film equipment and footage (as in Susan Schuppli’s reading ofVolodymyr Shevchenko’s documentary) and to the Exclusion Zone’s soil, plants, and animals? How do the linguistic terms used to represent Chernobyl in English, Russian, Ukranian, and Belarusian–such as “the exclusion zone [zona otchuzhdeniya in Russian],” “sarcophagus [Obyekt “Ukrytie” in Russian],” “exposure,” and “liquidator,” among others–expose the limits of epistemological, ontological, and political categories inherited from both western European and Soviet enlightenment projects? What comes after Chernobyl, and what are the implications of returning to it for contemporary debates about the socialist Anthropocene?

Readings

Recommended

  • (if you’re not already familiar with them): Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, trans. Arch Tait and Anna Gunin (Dalkey Archive Press, 2026) (if you can’t get a hold of this edition, consult the earlier edition: Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Keith Gessen (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
  • Volodymyr Shevchenko, Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (Documentary)
  • Susan Schuppli, Ch. 3 of Material Witness: Media, Forensics, and Evidence (The MIT Press, 2020)
  • Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2013).
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