Ann Komaromi’s paper will focus on the efforts of Jewish activists in the 1960s-1980s in the USSR to document the history of Jewish life in the region and efforts to assert legal rights and build Jewish culture in their present. Documenting both past and current life repressed by the Soviet regime constituted an important part of the unofficial activities of various dissident groups. This paper will consider how community repositories in Russia, Israel and beyond expand the historical record concerning the Jewish population of Russia and the Soviet Union. The reach of these community archives has been expanded today with the use of digital tools. Komaromi will speak about the community-based collections with which she has worked and which she has helped publicize through her Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat website at the University of Toronto.
Komaromi will also engage reflection by both Jewish activists and nonconforming artists (among the most self-reflective of unofficial groups) to explore the role of documentation in constituting communal life and identity. These reflections can help us appreciate the ways dissident archiving contributed in the Soviet context to the creation of alternative social spaces where people could contemplate their shared past and imagine alternative futures.
Lauren Parker’s paper draws on archival materials in the Database of the History of Chinese Political Movements, the Hoover Institute, and the party newspaper People’s Daily, focusing on the centrality of confessional writing to the socio-political practices of the Mao Cult. Under Mao self-criticism, speak-bitterness meetings, and mass denunciations all engaged in a process of confrontation, purging, and performative self-reformulation in order to “rectify” the individual’s place in the communal whole, bringing one into alignment with the revolutionary ethos. Confession became a process of ritual transformation through which the historical progress of the nation was dialectically tied to the transformation of individual consciousness, Maoist Thought interpreting the Marxist telos of progressive history as being brought about by the remaking of each individual into a purified revolutionary citizen.
Thus, in the People's Republic of China, the act of self-criticism was an act of purging that both ritually pledged allegiance to the revolutionary ideal and, most critically, rooted out counter-revolutionary thought by illuminating the bodies in which it was housed. Within the context of both the Cold War and the Sino-Soviet Split, the ultra-nationalistic rhetoric of confession writing – the claim that to betray the Chinese Revolution is to betray global socialism – provides a grassroots perspective the practices of self-criticism as method for conditioning, policing and expanding the boundaries of the Maoist state.
Corinn Gerber’s paper will introduce the GrauZone (GreyZone) archive, hosted by the Havemann-Society in Berlin, Germany, which contains the private collections of over 90 women involved in the many women’s groups that sprung up across East Germany during the 1980s. Each of these collections contains materials resulting from the activities of these groups. The GrauZone archive was launched in 1990, the year of German political and monetary union, during which the politics of these groups clashed with the rights-oriented subjectivity put forth by liberal democracy.
GrauZone’s materials are organized around the people and groups who donated to the archive, to whom archival requests are to this day submitted for approval. The paper suggests that GrauZone’s schemes of organization and circulation do not exclusively serve the act of securing copyright permissions. The classification levels of the GrauZone archive are not defined by activities, topics, or areas, but people and groups of people. GrauZone as a node of relations delineates distinct ways of being an individual or collective person, that is political subjectivity. Connecting researchers to the donors of the archive, GrauZone generates relations among women between Germany’s East and West, across generations. These relations cannot be subsumed into the existing societal orders or classification levels, and the forms of personhood that these levels admit: Ossis and Wessis, which with reunification get dominated by this unity’s hierarchies. In this way, the relations generated by GrauZone open up and maintain a grey zone, in which it becomes possible to negotiate personhood.
Lilla Balint, our moderator, will introduce each presenter, and ensure presentations are a maximum of eighteen minutes, leaving at least twenty minutes for questions from the audience. We intend to encourage discussion of the archives from which our panelists draw their material, in order to provide a forum for our broader field of research.