On the eve of the 2016 herbst conference, Slavs and Tatars' lecture performance questions orientalism in the orient.
What does it mean for one east to look to and at another one? Can the romanticised romanticise? From Poles in the service of the Tsar to Persian Presbyterians, the lecture performance “I Utter Other” looks at the curious case of Slavic Orientalism in the Russian Empire and early USSR as well as its German origins. Offering a crucial counterpoint to the received wisdom of Saidian Orientalism, the study of the “East in the East” complicates notions of identity politics, knowledge in the service of power and the secularisation of scholarship for a coherent postcolonial critique some sixty years avant la lettre.
With Slavs and Tatars