Angela Harutyunyan ~ Contemporary Romantic Anachronisms versus Revolutionary Contemporaneity
"In this talk, I would like to focus on a short polemical text from 1923 by Soviet Armenian historian Ashot Hovhannissyan where he addresses his contemporary critiques that the Bolshevik Revolution was an outside invasion in a context that was not ready for it because of its underdevelopment. Entitled "Revolution or Invasion”, in the article he claims that it is the underdevelopment that precisely necessitated the revolution, and from the perspective of the socialist horizon of overcoming national self-determination, what looks like an outside invasion, is actually the only guarantor for political self-determination. Why this text?
Through it I want to confront perverse ideological distortions that identify the Bolshevik project with colonialism and imperialism. I want to argue that today, a temporal dialectic that comes to terms with the contradictions of the Soviet construction of non-capitalist modernity is not only precluded from the post-Soviet present but it is also actively disavowed by forces that seem antagonistic and inimical to each other; an imperial politics that restores pre-Soviet anachronistic forms, and its critique that performs a similar operation. If the first is embodied in the present-day Russian state politics, the second is performed by those critics who adopt a decolonial cultural framework of analysis to conceive of the Soviet experience as an undifferentiated colonial project of domination. They too rely on anachronisms by excavating cultural forms, epistemes and aesthetics that are seemingly untainted by the violence of modernity synonymous with colonialism in order to recover the pure precolonial subject underneath the supposedly solid crust of modernity. In other words, they posit anachronistic premodern cultural forms as resistant or defiant to seemingly totalistic and totalizing temporality of Soviet modernity identified with coloniality.
Instead, I want to ask, how do we inherit the burden of a historical experience that saw itself as the future of capitalist modernity rather than its past? What are the cultural forms generated through the subsumption of a post-capitalist temporality as residual and anachronistic in late capitalism? Are there sparks of this temporality that still flare, within the protracted crisis of time in the long post-soviet condition?"
About: Angela Harutyunyan
Contemporary Romantic Anachronisms versus Revolutionary Contemporaneity will be presented on the 4th of
October in the context of
APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle
