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Leah FeldmanExhausting Internationalism
Thursday, February 5, 2026, 5:00–6:30pm
Why did most ’90s eulogies to the “end of history” not see the returns of the global new right coming? Feldman’s book in-progress, Feeling Collapse, looks beyond the geopolitical analysis of the dissolution of the Soviet Union that fueled the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, to instead read the collapse through shifting attachments that shaped the dissolution of the Soviet empire and rise of ethno-nationalisms. It explores the waning of affective attachments to the idea of a Soviet “good life,” including Soviet multinationalism and socialist anticolonial internationalism, as well as attendant commitments to a socialist world cultural commons. Taking up minor emergent mediums from the late 1980s through the early 2000s—from video art to performance from the Caucasus and Central Asia—it recenters accounts of the collapse that have been marginalized by a focus on the metropolitan centers of Moscow and Leningrad.
This talk draws on Kira Muratova’s 1989 Asthenic Syndrome, one of the last films banned by Soviet authorities, alongside Sergei Parajanov’s filmic collages produced during his incarceration, to understand the exhaustion of socialist humanist internationalism as it bears on our authoritarian present. Retracing the collapse of the Soviet Union today does more than simply expose the new right’s ascent—an echo to Fukuyama that resounds as the “ends of liberalism.” While often marked by failure, exhaustion, stasis, and death, these works also attempted to reorganize rhythms of desire to explore alternative senses of being together in time amid this transitional moment.
Leah Feldman is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Theater and Performance Studies at University of Chicago. Her research, teaching, and art collaborations focus on the formation and collapse of the Soviet empire from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018, winner of the CESS Book Prize) exposes how the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. She coedited the special issue Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right with Aamir Mufti (boundary 2, 2023), which focuses on the New Right’s attachment to crisis and catastrophe to justify its calls to return to “traditional” social and political structures that form the basis of a global white supremacist movement. She is currently coediting an anthology of anticolonial documents with Peter Kalliney and Harris Feinsod called Anticolonial Thought: An Anthology of Manifestos and Other Primary Documents. Her monograph in progress, Feeling Collapse, traces the political afterlives of internationalist feelings following the collapse of the Soviet multinational empire and how performance and video art staged alternative politics and publics.
Her art collaborations include Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anticolonial ABCs, a co-authored book with collective Slavs and Tatars that explores the queer relations between phonemes and their alphabetic graphemes through the history of language and writing in the Soviet empire. She is also working on a collaborative curatorial project Costumes and Collapse about costumes and wearables in times of political and social transition with Slavs and Tatars and Hoda El Shakry.
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
