Talk by Mollie Arbuthnot, Jesus College & Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge  on ‘Red East: Propaganda Posters for Soviet Uzbekistan’

Cambridge Central Asia Forum in collaboration with the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge invites you to a talk by

Mollie Arbuthnot, Jesus College & Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge 

on

‘Red East: Propaganda Posters for Soviet Uzbekistan’

Date: 10 June 2022

Time: 11am-1pm

Venue: Room S2 (Alison Richard Building)

Online: Zoom Registration  https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwtce6sqzopG9xqTCDqCgdTdPz9n6P6g-Rp

Abstract: The Soviet Union was the world’s first self-proclaimed anti-imperial state. Visual images seemed to offer unparalleled opportunities for communicating political ideas across linguistic and cultural borders, and propaganda imagery re-imagined the former colonies of the Russian Empire as liberated, modernising utopias. Propaganda theorists and poster artists struggled to reconcile these emancipatory visions with Eurocentric and Orientalist strands of Soviet visual culture, and the contradictory demands both to foster national cultures and to forge a pan-Soviet identity. This lecture, based on my current book project, will examine propaganda posters produced for the newly-formed Soviet republic of Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s, examining what they can tell us about the entanglements of visual culture and stereotype, empire, nation-building, and modernity.

Biography: Mollie Arbuthnot is a Junior Research Fellow in history and Slavonic studies at Jesus College, Cambridge, specialising in Soviet visual and material culture. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester, and taught at Durham University, before joining Cambridge in 2021.

Everyone is welcome.

For more information please go to https://centralasia.group.cam.ac.uk/