Professor Dace Dzenovska will give a Boas lecture on: "Emptiness and Dreams of Empire in the Latvian Russian Borderlands". A light reception will follow in 465 Schermerhorn Extension.
In Latvia’s borderlands near Russia, there is a deindustrialized settlement that survives on scraps of socialism and capitalism. A discarded and ailing multi-ethnic working-class lives on social wages paid by the Latvian state based on salaries they earned in the Soviet Union. They never privatized the apartments they live in, which have been transformed from coveted socialist “living space” into unwanted municipal housing stock assigned to surplus people. They describe themselves as “a community of pensioners, alcoholics and criminals.” They rely on Alesha, a khoziain-like figure, to protect them from outsiders who might upset their hopes that “tomorrow wouldn’t be worse than today.” They fear the disciplining nation-state and despise its elites for serving masters who produce emptiness. Sometimes, they dream of a force that could revitalize their settlement and return meaning and value to their lives. They dream, I suggest, of empire. But what do they dream about when they dream about empire? And are there others like them?
Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford. She is the author of School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia (Cornell, 2018). Currently, she is working on a book on empire, migration, and sovereignty that spans a century and connects the Latvian borderlands to the East Midlands in England. She is also leading a comparative ethnographic project on "emptiness" as a key spatial coordinate of our times.
