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