#  Davis Center: Affective Dualities: Aleksandr Rozenbaum as a Russian Jewish Artist 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 26, 2016** 

 04:15PM - 06:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, S153**  



 

 



 

   ![mihailovicalexandar.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum4421/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/history/files/mihailovicalexandar.jpg?itok=TgvoM9aR) 

 

Aleksandr Rozenbaum is one of the most prominent practitioners in Russia of a musical genre known as chanson. Russian chanson finesses sympathy for the criminal outsider with an eclectic nationalism that fuses present-day patriotism with nostalgia for certain aspects of life in the Soviet Union. Rozenbaum stands out as a performer who challenges a wide range of assumptions about cultural belonging. His music and public persona are rich with startling juxtapositions: of lyrical ballads about both Cossacks and the mythic world of the Jewish criminal underworld in Odessa; of spirited defenses of current Russian military and foreign policy, as well as blistering critiques of the legacy of Stalinism; of bluntly nationalistic statements and anthems on the one hand, and sympathetic treatments of the possibilities for a genuinely hybrid Russian Jewish identity on the other. The presentation examines Rozenbaum’s evolving career in light of the negotiation of his Jewishness within the networks of Soviet and post-Soviet artistic labor.[Alexandar Mihailovic](http://bennington.academia.edu/AlexandarMihailovic) is Professor Emeritus of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University, and currently teaches in the Literature program at Bennington College. He writes reviews for the online journal*Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema*, and has published articles on religious studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and Ukrainian literature, and cultural relations during the Cold War. He is the author of *Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse* and the editor of the volume*Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries*. With Helga Druxes and Karolin Machtans, he co-edited *Navid Kermani* (2016), a volume of articles about the contemporary Iranian German essayist and novelist. His next book, *The Mit’ki and the Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia*, is under contract at University of Wisconsin Press.

Speaker(s): [**Alexandar Mihailovic**](http://bennington.academia.edu/AlexandarMihailovic), Visiting Professor of Literature, Bennington College; Professor Emeritus of Russian and Comparative Literature, Hofstra University

Sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

For more information, please call 617-495-4037.



 

 



 

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