Americans Experience Russia

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars journalists and artists envisioned experienced and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic economic and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found none has yet examined how Americansâ encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet âotherâ and its relationship with an American âwest. â The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity regarding each other as other-than-European equals sometime cultural role models temporary allies and political antagonists. In examining the fiction film journalism treatises and histories Americans produced out of their âRussian experienceâ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts locate them in their sociopolitical context and gauge how their producersâ profession politics gender class and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Unionâs fall. . Language: English