Towards a Full-Frontal History of Imperial Russia:
Recycling Political Pornography at the Franklin Humanities Institute
by Dr. Ernest Zitser
April 9th 2008, 5:00pm, Room 240 John Hope Franklin Center

Ernest Zitser
Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies + Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies + 2007-08 Library Fellow, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University

Presented with the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies

About the Lecture: This presentation will seek to contribute to the theme of this year’s FHI Recycle Seminar by tracing the life-cycle of a rare artifact of Russian visual culture – namely, a series of five erotic, hand-colored watercolor drawings, depicting 18th-century Imperial rulers and their favorites (of both sexes) in flagrante delicto – from its origins as clandestine political pornography in the nineteenth-century to its public unveiling as an historical artifact in the twenty-first. In narrating the social biography of this object, Zitser asks: What is Russian political pornography? What is “Russian” or “pornographic” about it? Whose politics does it represent? And what role do such respectable American institutions as the New York Public Library and the Franklin Humanities Institute have to play in its cultural recycling, and, more broadly, in the re-circulation of (objects of) desire over time, within and across different segments of society, and between societies? The presentation will propose that in this particular case, recycling (or res-cycling) refers to a historically-informed methodological approach of looking at the entire life-cycle of an object (Lat. res), not merely individual phases in its public life; and of paying attention to the way the salvage operations, re-appropriations, and transformations performed by various actors under different regimes of the circulation of things effect the value of both objects and the political communities (publics) that re-collect such items (res publicae).

About the Speaker: Ernest (“Erik”) Zitser received his Ph.D. in Russian History from Columbia University and worked consecutively as a post-doctoral Fellow, Center Associate, and Librarian of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2004 book, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press; Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, forthcoming 2008), and has published a number of articles in both historical and library journals on a wide variety of topics, including sober drunkenness at the early modern Russian court, post-war Soviet photo-propaganda, and Russian nationalism in post-Soviet cinema.

http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi/events/lectures/index.php#zitser