Socialist World Cultures

Andrew Bivens
Literature
UC Santa Cruz

Since the early 2000s, world literature has served as the dominant paradigm for studying the global circulation of literature. In recent years, critics of world literature have turned their attention to an alternate mapping of world culture, one centered on the networks surrounding Moscow as a core location within the socialist world of the 20th century. The two-day conference “Socialist World Cultures” is devoted to this alternate mapping of world literature and culture. Hosted by the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, the event is scheduled to take place in the Winter Quarter of 2021. The conference brings together scholars and students from across the UC system to participate in discussions on the socialist versions of world literature and culture. From interwar revolutionary realism and proletarian culture to the literary and cultural production accompanying national liberation movements of the 1960s and the 70s and the trajectory of the socialist literary imagination throughout the Cold War, the symposium promises to critically examine the turn towards the world and the global within the humanities.