Russian Orientalism in a Global Context

This volume features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire. It also explores the extent to which cultural practitioners participated in the discursive matrices that advanced Russia's colonial machinery on the one hand and critiqued and challenged it on the other, especially in territories that were themselves on the fault lines between the east and the west.

‘An ambitious volume that advances at an urgent moment our understanding of the imperial matrices within which Orientalist art emerged.’
Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Review

‘The volume demonstrates the importance of Russian and Slavic studies to postcolonial approaches to art history.’
Kamran Karimullah, The Muslim World Book Review

Maria Taroutina is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art and Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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