Moving Radical Identities: Patriotic Performance in the Post-Communist Eurasia
Anna Novikov
Sunday
12:00 - 12:30
Aquairum
Short Presentation
In the last decade, due to the development of media and socio-political changes, a transnational revival of patriotic attire linked to patriotic performance becomes fashionable and gathers momentum in Eurasia can be observed. My paper examines visual and ideological links between politics, media and the current development of this neo-nationalist/regionalist patriotic body, fashion and performance in these areas. It focuses comparatively on the visual, performative and political dynamics of this phenomenon and on its historical roots. I analyze the reasons for its appearance and its perception within the context of gender, ethnic group, region and globalization.
Thus, the Ukrainian Vyshyvanka appeared at Fashion Week in Paris. Combat trousers, T-shirts with “cursed soldiers” and neo-folk dances are now popular in Poland. During their yearly assemblies, Hungarian right-wing activists wear Mongolian inspired attire. Kazakh female pop singers dress up as the Mongolian-Turk nomadic amazons and Russian ladies wear dresses with portraits of Putin. Dress and performance is commonly used in order to emphasize a political statement and is inherent within neo-nationalist and the supra-nationalist groups there, such as the Pan Slavists, Pan Turkists, “Slavic-Turk” Eurasianists and Neo-pagan Rodnovers. Re-invented attire in patriotic performances, visualizes their ideology.
Dr. Anna Novikov is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Greifswald at the cluster “New Nationalisms” and works on her research project dedicated to the revival of new nationalist patriotic fashion and performance in Eurasia. Her research focuses on the cultural and visual transnational contemporary East-Central European/Eurasian and Jewish history. She analyzes political strategies and dynamics of nationalism, ideology and identity through the prism of body reception, dress and performance. She received her doctoral degree in at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2014. During her PhD studies she was a junior visiting and research fellow at Oxford University and at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig.
In 2013-2015 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute, Warsaw. Her book Shades of a Nation: The Dynamics of Belonging among the Silesian and Jewish Populations in Eastern Upper Silesia (1922-1934), Fibre Verlag: Osnabrück, was published in 2015. She was a co-editor of a monograph From Premodern to Postmodern Central Europe. Upper Silesia in the Age /of Nationalisms, which was published in Routledge in 2016. In 2016-2017 Anna Novikov was a visiting fellow at the Principles of Cultural Dynamics program at the FU in Berlin and a research fellow at the Cologne-Bonn Centre for Central and Eastern Europe. In 2017-2019 she was a fellow and a coordinator at Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.