HRC Professor Craig Brandist Flyer

PUBLIC SEMINAR
The Early Soviet Critique of Indo-European Philology
and the Rise of Post-Colonial Theory
Humanities Research Centre Seminar
Tuesday 21 April 2015, 4.00 – 5.30pm
HRC Conference Room, A.D Hope Building #14, ANU
Speaker
Professor Craig Brandist, University of Sheffield, UK
HRC Conference Rm 128, A.D. Hope Building #14, Australian National University
Much contemporary postcolonial theory has constructed a mythology of its own origins based on a caricature
of the Enlightenment and of Marxism in particular, while incorporating aspects on the Eurocentric paradigms
it seeks to subvert. By focusing on the critique of Indo-European philology in the early USSR, the current
paper shows how Marxists and Orientologists in revolutionary Russia (c.1904-1930) challenged assumptions
of Western scholarship about the East, while opposing the assimilation of the same assumptions by the
nascent nationalist movements that opposed them. It shows how, in this period, engaged scholars strove to
free themselves from the positivist paradigms that dominated social science and the idealism that permeated
the humanities to develop radically new ways to understand the relationship between scholarship and
imperialism, and of the formation of social identities. We will also see how the Stalinist degeneration of the
Revolution fundamentally distorted research programmes and the political vocabulary, leading the
post-colonial critique to become detached from its conceptual moorings. This was severely to compromise the
critical capacities and political effectiveness of the critique of Eurocentrism.
Craig Brandist is Professor of Cultural Theory and Intellectual History and Director of the Bakhtin Centre at
the University of Sheffield, UK. He has published extensively on various aspects of early Soviet literature and
intellectual history, including such work as Carnival Culture and the Soviet Modernist Novel (1996), The
Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (2002) and (with Katya Chown) Politics and the Theory of
Language in the USSR 1917-1938: The Birth of Sociological Linguistics (2010). As well as numerous
publications about the so-called Bakhtin Circle and the development of the theory of language in the USSR,
based on sustained archival research, he has also published on Antonio Gramsci's engagement with debates
in the USSR in the 1920s, the most recent product of which was the monograph The Dimensions of
Hegemony: Language, Culture and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (2015). He is currently working on the
ideology critique of Western scholarship about the East developed in the USSR in the revolutionary period
and its enduring influence today.
Presented by
Enquiries
School of Literature,
Languages and Linguistics
ANU College of
Arts & Social
Sciences
Colette.Gilmour@anu.edu.au
This lecture is free and all are welcome
Please visit our website for further information:
slll.anu.edu.au/
CRICOS# 00120C