IASPM BENELUX POP TALKS 6: F*** tha police!” á la russe

For its 6th edition, IASPM BENELUX POP TALKS meets MUSIC MATTERS at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at University of Groningen again!

We are excited to welcome Elizaveta Gaufman and Anatoly Reshetnikov, with their lecture entitled:

“F*** tha police!” á la russe: Rancière and the metamodernist turn in contemporary Russian music”

Date: December 9th, 2021

Time: 16-17:30 CET

Place: Online (Google meet)

As always, the lecture is free, but please register in advance via Google Forms via this link.

Abstract:

Politically-minded oppositional artists and musicians gained nationwide prominence in Russia at least a decade ago. Their rise has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that today one can witness a new and potentially more powerful iteration in the Russian politics of art, which brings political confrontation to a qualitatively new level. Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles. In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in the most novel, interesting, and subversive manner. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.

About the speakers:

Elizaveta Gaufman is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics in the Department of European Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research is situated at the intersection of political theory, international relations, and media and cultural studies. She is the author of Security Threats and Public Perception: Digital Russia and the Ukraine Crisis (Palgrave, 2017).

Anatoly Reshetnikov is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Webster University (Vienna, Austria). He holds a PhD in Political Science from Central European University, and also serves as Associate Editor of New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central and Eastern European Politics and International Relations. His research interests include conceptual history, discourse analysis, Russia’s international politics, and critical theory.