Deterritorialized Asiatics, In and Against the Ukraine War

The Moynihan Insititutes’ Center for European Studies and the Russian Department will host a talk by Steven Lee Ph.D., from the University of California, Berkeley.

Asians have played a strangely conspicuous part in the current war. After Russian forces withdrew from Bucha in 2022, it became clear that at least some were from national minority regions near the Mongolian border. More recently, on the front lines of Kursk, North Korean soldiers are participating in active combat for the first time since the Korean War. This talk presents the “Asiatic” aspects of the war as echoes of:

1) Russian-émigré Eurasianism, which in the 1920s and 30s held that a restored, spiritual Russia would counter a decaying, materialist Europe; and

2) visions of the Bolshevik Revolution as a decolonizing revolution that, by the late 1920s, increasingly focused on East Asia. 

The talk bridges the early 20th century to the present, first by discussing contemporary interpretations of Eurasianism by such figures as Alexander Dugin; and second by highlighting a flexible, ironic approach to minority identity from the late-Soviet period that attached unexpected meanings to race and nation—what Lee has elsewhere conceptualized as “deterritorialized nationality.”

This flexibility, Lee argues, enables the cynical reworking of early decolonizing discourses now on display in Putin’s Russia. However, deterritorialized nationality also opens alternatives to such cynicism, as evidenced through a brief, concluding discussion of Soviet Korean rock star Viktor Tsoi.

Steven Lee Ph.D. is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include American literature, comparative ethnic studies, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, and Northeast Asia during the interwar years. He is the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (Columbia UP, 2015), co-winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, and co-editor (with Amelia Glaser) of Comintern Aesthetics (University of Toronto Press, 2020), winner of the ACLA’s René Wellek Prize.