Alaina Lemon

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

She is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist who works in Russia and the Former Soviet Union. Her theoretical concerns lie mainly with ways to understand struggles over aesthetic techniques and communicative forms in relation to struggles over political change and social hierarchies. She has conducted research in theaters, on film sets, in government bureaus, street markets, and kitchens, as well as in archives and with media.

Surrealism of the Peoples: Juxtaposed Worlds and Imperial Extensions

In 1925, the French surrealists declared their opposition to Empire, dedicating their discovery of the powers of aesthetic juxtaposition to the liberatory movements of anticolonialism (Negritude, for example). And yet, competitions among European empires for world hegemony had long been accompanied by methods to juxtapose worlds. Fantastical genres of exploration arose alongside ethnographic ones (both running parallel with images of discoveries extending into the “unconscious”). The alignments of ethnographic social science with various colonial rules, or later of science fiction with Cold War geopolitics, for instance, are well-documented. This paper (itself an ethnographic project) will explore the ways in which current, everyday tropes of juxtaposition continue to extend the sentimental, if not all the structural, lines of “expansion” so crucial to imperial imagination. As a key example, it will attend to how people project a sense of moral connection when they come into conflict over the reality show Bitva Ekstrasensov, itself an interesting, almost surreal, juxtaposition of “Friendship of the Peoples” with the “Space Race.”